Californians Should Be Aware of Their Faults

Saturday at Caltech, the university and the U.S. Geological Survey will throw an all-day seismic block party to mark the 10th anniversary of the Northridge earthquake -- which at magnitude 6.7 was the most destructive quake to hit Los Angeles County in recent history.

The activities at Caltech are expected to be the kind of event that doesn’t usually happen in Los Angeles, a conscious effort to link the present to the past. Consider it a commemoration, even a kind of celebration -- although that’s not a word one uses lightly when it comes to a cataclysm that killed 57 people, shook apart untold lives and caused $40 billion in damage.

Why commemorate an earthquake? Northridge may be an experience you’ve spent a decade trying to forget, but for the scientists at the USGS and Caltech, it’s an opportunity for outreach and pride.

“Just 10 years ago,” the anniversary press release declares, “Los Angeles was shaken awake by the Northridge earthquake, and seismologists at Caltech and the USGS are still shaking things up with groundbreaking research and state-of-the-art technology to better understand earthquakes and their effects.”

On Saturday, the earthquake specialists will show off their seismographs and fault rupture animations, demonstrate the way GPS satellites monitor infinitesimal movements along dozens of active faults in Southern California and remind us to keep funding them so we’re better prepared for the quakes of the future.

All that seems particularly germane right now because the Northridge anniversary comes in the wake of several large earthquakes, including a magnitude 6.5 that struck the Central Coast near San Simeon on Dec. 22 and a magnitude 6.7 in Iran on Dec. 26. The latter, which killed more than 30,000 people while leveling the ancient city of Bam, had the same magnitude as Northridge, which highlights at least one reason to be grateful 10 years later -- compared with Bam, Los Angeles remained largely intact with casualties that, given the circumstances, were miraculously low.

In fact, the differences have to do only in part with good fortune. It was, indeed, a simple twist of seismic fate that the Northridge quake pumped most of its energy north, into the Santa Susana Mountains, rather than south toward Los Angeles, sparing the city the brunt of its force. But more to the point, Los Angeles was designed to some degree for earthquake resistance. Our building codes, retrofitting attempts and emergency planning may leave plenty of room for improvement, but after a century of research, we’ve at least learned a few things about fault-line living.

Earthquake scientists, despite a clamoring public, remain far less interested in prediction than in mitigation, in minimizing the danger of seismicity in our lives. “What’s more useful?” a seismologist once asked me. “To tell you that a quake is coming in 45 minutes, or to teach you how to build a house that won’t fall down?”

What she gets, and what the rest of us don’t always want to come to grips with, is that earthquakes are California.

They are as fundamental to life here as freeways, Hollywood and recall campaigns. For all that California gets labeled as a land of fun and fantasy, it’s really a far more elemental territory in which we exist at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves.

Commemorating the Northridge earthquake, then, is an important act of collective history, the kind of ritual a city undertakes to recognize itself. It’s what San Francisco did for decades after the 1906 quake, gathering survivors at Lotta’s Fountain on Market Street every April 18 at 5:12 a.m., as if to reenact a modern creation myth. In much the same way, the anniversary activities at Caltech on Saturday suggest that the most effective strategy for coming to terms with Northridge is to honor it -- not as a way of trying to tame the experience, but rather of acknowledging its real meaning.

It’s unsettling to confront the notion that we’re balanced on the surface of a living planet, waking up each day to a landscape of constant change. At the same time, there’s something expansive about owning up to that reality, something positive, if only because it makes a place for the ineffable within our lives.

Where were you on Jan. 17, 1994?

I was huddled in my bedroom doorway, cleaved to my wife, riding out the jagged shaking, wondering when it would stop. Ten years later, I can’t forget that moment, but then I wouldn’t want to; it’s become a part of who I am.