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75 years ago: Long Beach earthquake | Photo by Jan Bruce, great aunt of LAist Featured Photos contributor victoriabernal
Did ABC's Eli Stone and the U.S. Geological Survey collaborate to put us all on an earthquake watch today? Last night's episode of the San Francisco based "visionary" drama, where Stone's brain aneurism causes him to see the future, was about a giant earthquake hitting the bay city causing the Golden Gate bridge to collapse in the middle.
Then today, reports of the big one hitting Los Angeles are all over the papers:
California faces an almost certain risk of being rocked by a strong earthquake by 2037, scientists said today in the first statewide temblor forecast.New calculations reveal there is a 99.7 percent chance a magnitude 6.7 quake or larger will strike in the next 30 years. The odds of such an event are higher in Southern California than Northern California, 97 percent versus 93 percent. [LA Times]
Since stakes are so high, the question is, how prepared are you?
This Saturday is annual and pretty large Santa Clarita Emergency Expo where you can experience a quake on the "Quake Walk" and free Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) classes with the fire department begin two weeks from now. At the very least, you should have some water stored up. A good practice is ten gallons per person in the household (don't forget some for the pets) switched out every six month and never stored directly on concrete (chemicals leech through the plastic and poison the water).
If you have any earthquake questions, ask below and we'll ask our emergency preparedness expert friends for you and publish it here. In the meantime, check out an interview with LAFD's Captain Stacy Gerlich of the Disaster Preparedness CERT Unit.
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my concern has always been whether or not the state or the federal government has any emergency money to put in to the state if a major quake were to strike anytime soon...
NOTHING will be like '94.
uhhhh yeah. The '94 quake was stong at 7.0, but an 8.0 is 100 times stronger. Think about that.
CERT classes are fantastic. You get to put out a fire.
At the very least, keep an old pair of sneakers under the bed (for walking over glass and rubble) and a backpack with copies of important paperwork (insurance, birth certificates) an address book, a cell-phone charger (they have ones that don't need to be plugged in), a bunch of granola bars, a whistle, a flashlight, and something sharp - like a Leatherman.
I put duct tape in my emergency pack because you can handle any emergency and rule the world with duct tape. And a disposable camera - because if the world ends in a lake of fire, I am getting pictures.
what would you use to cook food?
that's what I can't figure
I've got the 5 lb bag of rice stored but that's as far as I've gone
actually if you look up the facts our 6.9 had the force of an 8.5. At least that's hat Paul Moyer said 14 years ago and Paul Moyer does not lie.
Earthquake magnitude scales are logarithmic: Each whole number represents a 10-fold increase in the magnitude of shaking, and a roughly 31-fold increase in the total amount of energy released.
That's still a substantial difference, but it's not 100 times stronger.
And the '94 Northridge quake was mag. 6.7, not 7.0.
The one saving grace of an 8.0 quake is that quakes of that magnitude usually only occur on "great faults", like the San Andreas and the Garlock, or deep beneath the earth in subduction zones.
Since the San Andreas fault passes by LA at some distance, a mag. 8.0 quake probably won't do as much damage in LA as the Northridge quake did.
The short-period longitudinal waves that produce the most violent shaking and the most damage to small lightweight structures die off rapidly with distance. What most of LA will experience from an 8.0 quake on the San Andreas is the long-period "rolling motion" of shear waves, which travel much further.
Long-period shear waves usually have very little effect on small lightweight structures like the one- and two-story stucco buildings that make up so much of LA's housing stock.
They have a much greater effect on taller structures, with some of the worst damage occurring in side-by-side masonry-clad high-rises that have different resonant frequencies, which leads to the buildings banging into each other.
A mag. 7.0 quake on one of the local faults underlying the city could easily produce far worse damage and more fatalities than a mag. 8.0 on the San Andreas.
The Northridge quake was pretty bad, but there were a number of fortunate aspects to it that minimized damage and fatalities:
Because it occurred on a broad buried thrust fault, its duration was unusually short for a quake of that magnitude. A quake of similar magnitude but longer duration could easily cause considerably more damage.
Also, the direction and orientation of the fault resulted in the most violent energies being directed into the mostly unoccupied Santa Susanna Mountains to the north instead of the more densely-populated areas of the Valley.
In addition, the vast majority of the construction in the Valley is post-1937, and thus subject to the much stricter building codes instituted after the 1933 Long Beach quake. There's very little unreinforced masonry, the most vulnerable class of buildings, in the Valley.
And finally, the fact that the quake struck around 4 a.m. meant that most people were home and in bed - probably the safest place to be (unless you live in a highrise).
Had the quake struck during daytime hours, the fatality figures could have been far worse, since some of the really bad structural collapses like the Bullocks Northridge department store and the Kaiser Permanente facility were largely unoccupied at 4 am.
So the "big one" on the San Andreas isn't as much of a concern to LA as somewhat smaller local-fault quakes.
Of course, if the Tehachapi segment of the San Andreas rips north-to-south, I'd sure hate to be in Palmdale. :-)
Alls I know is it's been 14 years since...
does anyone know ig Earthquake lights really exist? Supposedly strange orangey lights light up the night and early morning sky an hour or two before major quakes. I think i remember these from '94 but am not quite sure.
Lovedog: Try to pack food that does not need to be cooked. Propane gas stoves could work if the gas goes out. I think of it like camping, which may or may not be realistic in the big city.
One emergency trainer was so smug, saying, "I've got an entire bag of Power Bars and all of you are going to starve" that I though to myself, "Pack weapon to rob other people of their Power Bars"
But there is also the chance that depending on the emergency (rioting, mudslides), gas and electricity will not be out, but that roads will be impassable or unsafe. So be prepared to sit tight for a few days.
As for quake preparedness, here's something I wrote recently for posting elsewhere about my own experiences in the '94 Northridge quake:
I live in earthquake country, and lived through the '94 Northridge quake in one of the very hardest-hit areas.
I'd say the most important quake supply I have is the half a tank of gas in my truck that will allow me to get to somewhere outside the quake's damage radius, where the gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, drug stores and so on are still functional.
Quakes, even the biggest ones, are very localized disasters, and a half a tank of gas will almost always get you at least as far as an operating gas station.
I never let the tank run dry. I always fill up when I'm half-empty.
In the Northridge quake, we'd very conscientiously stockpiled a box of heat-and-eat (or eat-cold) canned goods, but we hardly touched them. By day two, we were mostly eating out in restaurants outside the damage zone, or joining our neighbors for impromptu courtyard BBQs, as everyone tried desperately to use up all the thawed food from their freezers. We contributed a lot of food to those events.
We were lucky in some ways: our building wasn't sufficiently damaged that we had to immediately vacate. (Several on our block were.) We got electrical power back less than 12 hours after the quake. (Most areas had power within a day or two, though some, where supply-line towers collapsed or large distribution transformers fell over, had no power for several weeks.)
The gas never really went out, but it was turned off immediately after the quake. The apartment building's owners refused to allow it to be turned back on except by the official gas company inspectors. Those inspectors were understandably busy, so we had no gas for two weeks. That's not a problem in our current situation. Our house has an automatic seismic shutoff on the gas line, but I know how to check for leaks and safely relight everything. (Gas rarely goes out after quakes, except in rare cases where buried supply pipes rupture. But leaks in household piping due to structural damage - especially with gas fireplaces - are common. Turning the gas back on when you have a leak is really, really bad idea.)
But quakes aren't the only possible disaster scenario, so we still stock food and water supplies, and a month's worth of cat food.
We have a couple of cases of 110-hour container candles, we continually buy and use Trader Joe's hand-dipped tapers - which are not only cheap enough for everyday use, but are really fabulous candles - dripless, self-trimming, self-extinguishing, and can be used in any standard taper holder. We keep about three or four dozen of those in assorted colors hanging decoratively from hooks, and rotate fresh stock in as we use them.
We have several working oil lamps - the ones that survived the Northridge quake! - and a couple of gallons of paraffin oil stashed in the garage. We also have a Coleman lantern with several gallons of fuel, gifted us by the house's former owner, and two small backpacking-style propane stoves and a propane lantern, along with a dozen or so small disposable bottles of propane.
Our only provision for emergency heating is a wood-burning fireplace and a wood-rack with a week or two worth of firewood. That's not really reliable after a quake, since a quake can fracture or even topple a brick chimney. Building a fire in a cracked chimney is a good way to set your house on fire, something you really don't want to do in the aftermath of a quake.
But heat isn't really a big problem here, where sub-freezing temperatures are rare.
We keep plenty of drinking water on hand: one case (12x1.5-l.) in the quake supply stash, one in each of our vehicles, and one-and-a-piece as backup for routine oops-we're-out-of-water-and-don't-want-to-go-to-the-store events. (We take bottles from the opened case, and buy a new case any time we have to open the full case).
We have an assortment of radios and probably a dozen Mini-Maglite flashlights that live all over the house, so we keep a large stockpile of AA akalines, and rotate fresh stock in as we use them. We also have four or five 4-D Maglites scattered around the premises, and we keep two or three spare D-cell sets for each of them on hand.
As far as quake readiness goes, the civil authorities here urge everyone to be prepared to be self-reliant for three days. After three days, relief supplies will likely be available, but until them, you're on your own.
Here are some things I didn't have last time around, that I do now because of experience:
Caffeine tablets. No-Doz or Vivarin or the like. Sure, I have canned ground coffee and a camp stove and water, but in the immediate aftermath of a severe quake, I'll want my caffeine long before I feel like messing around with brewing coffee.
Automatic rechargeable power-failure lights: one in the bedroom, one in the living room, one in the kitchen. It's all well and good to have flashlights all over the place, but finding them in the pitch-black after a power failure, when everything you own has been flung into random piles all over the floor, can be a real challenge. (We ended up using the light of the telephone dial - which still worked even with mains power out - to find our flashlights after Northridge.)
Spare toilet paper and paper towels. Amazing how many people overlook this in their emergency supplies. You don't want to run out of TP when all the local stores are a shambles, and you're going to want a lot of paper towels to clean up the inevitable spills and messes.
Half a tank of gas in both cars. We were lucky after Northridge, as both cars happened to have near-full tanks. But having enough gas to reach a working gas station may be the most important thing after a quake.
A black-bag "solar shower": there will be plenty of non-potable water in nearby swimming pools, and a warm shower is a godsend after about day three. More a luxury than a necessity, but a really lovely luxury.
Other things people often don't think of:
A can opener for all that canned food. (You'd be amazed how many of our neighbors had stockpiled canned food, but didn't own a non-electric can opener.)
Disposable paper plates, plastic tableware, and plastic cups to eat your canned food with. Even if all your dishes aren't shattered and broken, you'll really appreciate not having to wash dishes. Your sink will probably be full of shattered crockery, anyway.
Closed-toe shoes that will allow you to walk over broken glass, kept at your bedside. There will be broken glass everywhere, and this is the wrong time to be getting serious lacerations in your feet.
Tarps to deal with rainwater leakage from structural damage. This is especially important if you have a brick fireplace, which can leave a gaping hole in your roof when it rips loose from the house framing.
We probably have way more supplies than we'll ever need - but I'd rather have them and not need them, than need them and not have them.
Oh, and for minimizing general structural risks and the like, I hugely recommend recommend Peter Yanev's Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country. It covers important topics like strapping water heaters, making sure your house is bolted to its foundation, and the like. It's the best guide I've ever seen to understanding and mitigating seismic risk. Every Californian should read this book.
Longest comment ever! But actually very useful. A tough trick to pull off. Congrats!
I don't know, ezfinn, doesn;t that dubious pleasure go to some of those "Evil Ross" Jeffries posts, before we got "Good Ross" Lincoln?
Yeah, after I posted that I realized it was rather longer than I remembered. Probably a bit excessive for a blog comment. :-)
But maybe some folks will find it useful. I sure wish someone had suggested caffeine tablets to me before the '94 quake. :-)
Once that 4 a.m. shot of adrenaline wore off, there were an awful lot of bleary-eyed zombies stumbling through the broken glass.
"my concern has always been whether or not the state or the federal government has any emergency money to put in to the state if a major quake were to strike anytime soon..."
arbouler, The good news is that after watching the FEMA's lack of response to Katrina a couple years ago, we passed a state initiative that sets aside money, supplies, and infrastructure to deal with disasters.
A good example of how prepared we are, is what happened during the wild fires this summer. We had tents, food, water, and stadium space, all ready to be deployed, and it was.
Of course a big quake will effect a lot more people than the wild fires did, so it's best to be prepared on your own as well.