Americans who have been shocked by the devastation in Haiti may be surprised to know that a similar catastrophe is coming soon to America--and virtually nothing is being done about it.
Nearly two million people lived near Port-au-Prince. Nearly seven and a half million people live within a few miles of the Hayward fault, which runs the length of the San Francisco East Bay hills. The Haiti earthquake, which killed perhaps as many as 200,000 people, was a 7.0 on the moment magnitude scale (the familiar Richter scale is not used for large quakes). The earthquake anticipated on the Hayward fault will exceed 6.7 on the moment magnitude scale. In both Haiti and the Bay Area, large populations live on dangerous faults.
The location of the Hayward fault is no secret. In fact, its signature is scrawled across hundreds of buildings, whose cracked foundations and offset street curbs bear silent testimony to the impending tectonic violence. The fault slices the St. Regis Retirement Center in Hayward. The fault cuts the Fairmont Hospital in San Leandro and the Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Fremont. When the fault goes, we can expect about 6 feet of offset in a few seconds.
The most infamous fault trace is exposed on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley's football stadium is neatly bisected by the fault. On its southern wall, one can clearly see the two sides of the stadium pulled apart several inches by the fault creep. The support columns underneath the stadium have also been offset and tilted, weakening their ability to hold up the southern end of the stadium.
You would think that given this situation, Berkeley would not want to continue to use such a dangerous structure--and you would be wrong. On January 19, 2010, the UC Board of Regents decided to begin an extravagant renovation of the stadium, at an estimated cost of $321 million--this in a time of unprecedented budget cuts for non-athletic programs.
As tragicomic as the stadium situation is, a more serious danger involves the homes which straddle the fault almost its entire length. You would think that if you were a potential home buyer, your real estate agent would be legally obliged to disclose to you that your home was being torn apart by an active fault--and you would be wrong.
Once, while I was leading field trip of university students to see the Hayward fault, a curious homeowner came out to ask me what we were all doing in front of his house. I told him that the cracks around his windows were not the result of the house "settling"; his house sat directly on a moving section of the Hayward fault. This homeowner, who had recently purchased this house, had received no disclosure.
You would think that given the dangerous intersection of so many people living so close to a big fault, government agencies must be doing something to prepare for this--and you would be wrong. Governments are doing so little, in fact, that only last week did the mayor of San Francisco finally begin to consider requiring building owners to retrofit vulnerable "soft story" buildings. In San Francisco, there are approximately 5700 soft story buildings, housing about 180,000 people. Without retrofitting, these buildings are unlikely to survive a major quake.
We can look to Haiti to see what people need in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake: shelter, medical care, food, and most of all, water. People can go a long time without food; without water, people will die in a matter of days. It would make sense to begin massive stockpiles of water and other essentials in strategic locations throughout the Bay Area. Given the budgetary earthquake shaking Sacramento, however, California is not about to start funding such good ideas. Some people wisely stockpile at home, but with the likely destruction of the water, sewage, electrical, and transportation infrastructure in the Bay Area, small stockpiles may not last until the tap begins to flow again.
Politicians often talk about preparedness as a matter of public information, but in this case there is no shortage of information. The excellent website of the Association of Bay Area Governments, http://quake.abag.ca.gov, shows in detail areas vulnerable to shaking, liquefaction of the soil, and flooding from ruptured dams. The USGS hosts a Google Earth map showing the exact location of the Hayward fault (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/haywardfault/).
Information only goes so far; if we are to prevent a repeat of Haiti in the United States, actual preparation is needed now.
The East Bay Express did a series of articles a few years back about the shocking lack of cooperation between the bay area cities' emergency systems. They can't communicate with each other, their equipment is inadequate for a large-scale emergency, and they don't have concrete plans on how to deal with a major quake situation. The 1989 quake was awful, but didn't affect water, power, etc. to most people in the area- so our systems weren't really tested to the max.
We also have antiquated elementary and junior high schools built not only near faults, but on creek/slide areas. We are in for major trouble WHEN (not if) the big one hits.
It's really crazy--but that's Bay Area politics. I mean, you have to ask yourself why BART did not originally go directly to SFO, and why it still doesn't connect to OAK. I mean, you go to other normal urban areas, and you can step right off the plane onto light rail, and take that rail to your hotel even if it's after midnight (BART seems to think people don't need transit after dark).
I'm glad you had a good teacher at Berkeley City. I also teach geology in the Peralta CC district, at Laney.
If the fault is moving slowly, isn't that a good thing? It's when it doesn't move we get real problems.
I'm afraid that the small creep exhibited on some parts of the fault does not nearly release enough energy to let pressure the fault. What we see on offset curbs and foundations is only a few % of the movement that would occur if the fault moved freely, without building up energy. Curbs are offset mere inches; the tension built up in the rocks represents several feet of potential movement.
How then does one prepare for these things? We are always thinking of fun and interesting things to send tickets or classes for our son and his girlfriend to enjoy while in the Bay area- my son loves learning and architecture and science- do you offer tours? Does that seems silly? The best way to get the government to take notice and allocate funds is to expose issues on a wide scale to the people. Develop the tour! Educate the people! Trust me-- I live in New England, we have some pretty popular ghoulish tours here-- so this can't be too awful to think about. You have a rather famous prison tour in San Fran. Let the general public have access to your information and change will be demanded. I would take that tour when we visit-- it would pay for itself and give your students work/study money.
Thank you for writing your article.
Thank you for your note. As far as I can tell from your description of your son's neighborhood, the Hayward fault is about 1.6 miles to the east; he's not directly on it, but close enough that an earthquake on that section of the fault can be expected to produce significant shaking. The Rockridge area in which he lives is not quite in the hills and not quite in the lower elevations, where liquefaction is expected to be more of a problem. In my experience, the house in that neighborhood seem to be wood-frame detached single-family homes, which are the best type of construction for surviving shakes.
I think the best thing in terms of preparation is to have a good supply of water on hand. Water is going to be the big thing after the quake. In addition to storing jugs of water, having a camping pump filter would expand the range of water that could be made drinkable. One always thinks of boiling water--but with no natural gas and no electricity, that's going to be hard to do. The second most important thing to have on hand is some cash. With no electricity, ATMs are not going to work, and credit cards will won't be accepted. But intact stores might still take cash for supplies.
I actually already do give tours, in a sense, in the geology classes I teach at a number of colleges in the area.
http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/contentdisplay.aspx?id=622
I don't know if we can expect 6 pointer "wake-up calls" before a major quake. The behavior of the faults suggests minor quakes (3s , 4s) punctuated by much larger quakes (7s). That being said, almost no one was living here before 1868, the last time the Hayward went in a big way, so there is not a clear historical record of its behavior. But 1868 was the time anything approaching a 7 happened.