Bay Area far from ready for the next ‘Big One’

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

SAN FRANCISCO - 1906 will happen again. And it will be worse than you can possibly imagine.

Years of work costing billions of dollars to shore up infrastructure and retrofit buildings, bridges and procedures will mitigate the impact of a “major” or “great” earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, but only a little. When the Big One finally hits, the destruction will be immense, utterly overwhelming rescue and recovery efforts, according to a review of more than a dozen recent government and academic reports and interviews with numerous experts in seismology and disaster preparedness.

Among other things, the review — assessing measures taken over about the last 20 years — found that only about a tenth of the region’s governments have shored up their municipal water systems to survive a major disaster. Disaster-response experts identify the water supply as the crucial link in the recovery chain both to fight inevitable widespread fires and to help keep survivors alive.

And while doctors say critical care in the first 72 hours is what keeps most people with major injuries in hospital beds and out of body bags, most of the region’s hospitals would be unable to provide any reliable patient care.

“California has a very commendable record of dealing with large natural disasters,” said Richard Andrews, a member of President Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, who was the state’s director of emergency services for most of the 1990s.

But large earthquakes in recent years have been small potatoes compared to the 1906 earthquake, said David McLean of Washington State University, a structural engineering expert with the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center.

Forever behind the 8-ball
Events like the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — which killed dozens of people, destroyed $6 billion of property and delayed the World Series — are not “the benchmark of what a big earthquake would be like,” McLean said.  “It’ll be much, much stronger and much different.”

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In a report timed to the 100th anniversary, Charles Kircher & Associates, an engineering firm affiliated with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, projected Monday that a repeat of the Great Earthquake of 1906 would kill 1,800 to 3,400 people, damage more than 90,000 structures and displace as many as 250,000 households. It would cause $122 billion in damage — and that doesn’t include losses from fires, which were the most destructive part of the 1906 earthquake.

In light of those numbers, many scientists and disaster experts are exasperated at what they see as a lack of urgency from government officials.

Ken Verosub, a geology professor at the University of California at Davis, was a member of the California Task Force on Earthquake Preparedness, which Gov. Jerry Brown created in 1979. The task force worked for only six years, however, before Gov. George Deukmejian disbanded it in 1985.

“The fact that it no longer exists is a telling commentary, I think, on where we are,” Verosub said.

More attention has been paid since the Loma Prieta earthquake, which hit to the south of the city, but inadequate projects to retrofit major structures and critical infrastructure for years before mean little can be done to mitigate destruction if a catastrophic earthquake were to hit in the next few years.

For example, fewer than half of the 109 local governments in the region had retrofitted or replaced even one municipal structure to withstand an earthquake, the nonprofit Earthquake Engineering Research Institute reported in 2002.

Fewer than half of all older single-family homes in the region had undergone retrofitting, the American Society of Home Inspectors found in 1998, and no more than 15 percent were projected to be habitable. In multi-family dwellings, the Association of Bay Area Governments concluded from census data, more than half a million residents in the region could be displaced.

“It’s going to cause major damage, and there’s very little that can be done in the short term to reduce that level of damage,” Andrews said.

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