City of Angels or Edge City?

Although this book focuses on societal response to earthquake disasters, many common threads can be found in societal response to other types of disasters. Some regions seem especially prone to disasters of all shapes and sizes, perhaps none more so than southern California, which can be star-studded and star-crossed in equal measure. This chapter steps away from the specific responses of societies to one type of disaster to instead consider the response of one society to myriad disasters. In southern California, disasters sometimes seem to pile up like, well, cars on a southern California freeway. During one memorably miserable week in October 2003, for example, firestorms laid waste to almost 700,000 acres in the region—2,000 homes, 24 lives, and a staggering $2 billion in property damage. It was a little like an earthquake in slow motion. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake had claimed about three times more lives (63) and total property damage ($6 billion), but the number of homes rendered uninhabitable by that powerful temblor was lower (1,450) than the number destroyed by the firestorms of 2003. That the disaster played out slowly, over the span of several days rather than several tens of seconds, was a curse as well as a blessing. Advance warning kept the death toll from climbing higher; it also generated high anxiety among tens of thousands who would not lose their homes as well as the few thousand who would. Fires are less kind than earthquakes in another critical respect as well: they can reduce an entire house and its contents to ash, whereas much can often be salvaged from even a severely earthquake-ravaged home. Fires can even have their own aftershocks, after a fashion: heavy Christmas Day rains turned parts of two burn areas into torrents of fast-moving debris that swept through two campgrounds and claimed 16 lives, most of them children. Even heavier rains in early 2005 caused a more massive landslide in the coastal community of La Conchita.

Tecumseh’s Legacy: The Enduring Enigma of the New Madrid Earthquakes

Like any proper mystery, the tale of the New Madrid earthquakes begins on a note of intrigue. According to legend, the earthquakes were predicted—even prophesied—by the great Shawnee leader and statesman Tecumseh. Concerned over continued encroachment of white settlers onto Indian lands in the mid continent, Tecumseh traveled widely throughout the central United States in the early 1800s, striving to unite diverse tribes to stand against further land cessions. According to legend, Tecumseh told his mostly Creek followers at Tuckabatchee, Alabama, that he had proof of the Great Spirit’s wrath. The sign blazed across the heavens for all to see—the great comet of 1811, a dazzling and mysterious sight. As if to emphasize Tecumseh’s words, the comet grew in brilliance through October, dimming in the night time sky in November just as Tecumseh left Tuckabatchee for points northward. Also according to legend, Tecumseh’s speech at Tuckabatchee told of an even more dramatic sign yet to come. In an oration delivered to hundreds of listeners, the leader reportedly told the crowd, “You do not believe the Great Spirit has sent me. You shall know. I leave Tuckabatchee directly, and shall go straight to Detroit. When I arrive there, I will stamp on the ground with my foot and shake down every house in Tuckabatchee.” The Creeks counted the days until the one calculated to mark Tecumseh’s return, and on that day— December 16, 1811—the first of the great New Madrid earthquakes struck, destroying all of the houses in Tuckabatchee. Tecumseh’s Prophecy, as it has come to be known, strikes a chord with those inclined to see Spirit and earth as intertwined. But it can also capture the imagination of those who see phenomena such as earthquakes as the exclusive purview of science. What if Tecumseh’s Prophecy was born not of communication with the Great Spirit, but instead of an ability to recognize signs from the earth itself? According to the renowned English geologist Sir Charles Lyell, Native American oral traditions told of devastating earthquakes in the New Madrid region prior to 1811.

Earthquakes and Ancient Cities: Armageddon—Not the End of the World

The reduction of an entire city to a pile of rubble poses a special problem for the survivors. Roads are blocked, underground pipes are broken, and disease accompanies the decay of incompletely buried bodies. Fresh water and sewage no longer flow, food becomes scarce, and the absence of shelter from extremes of temperature can make life miserable. In the cities of the ancient world a very real practical problem followed in the months and years after the destruction of a city—a cleanup operation beyond the wildest dreams of the survivors. Although steam shovels had been used for moving heavy materials in building the Suez and Panama canals in 1869 and 1910, respectively, it was not until 1923 that the bulldozer was invented. The even more useful backhoe followed 25 years later. Thus, clearing debris was a daunting task as recently as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In his book The City That Is: The Story of the Rebuilding of San Francisco in Three Years, Rufus Steele wrote of the rebuilding effort: . . . First the ground had to be cleared. The task would have baffled Hercules— cleaning out the Augean stables was the trick of a child compared to clearing for the new city. This is a step in the rebuilding which fails entirely to impress the visitor of today. He can form no conception of the waste which had to be reduced to bits and then lifted and carted away to the dumping grounds. The cost of removing it was more than twenty million dollars. . . . Lacking what we would now consider modern machinery to move large volumes of debris, the rebuilders of San Francisco extended railway lines across town, brought in steam and electric cranes, and relied heavily on teams of horses that suddenly found themselves in enormous demand. According to Steele, “Huge mechanical devices for shoveling and loading were invented and set to work.” Formidable as the task may have been, San Francisco tapped into several critical resources in its Herculean efforts: trains, cranes, and, perhaps most important, large numbers of survivors following an earthquake that killed a very small fraction of the local population.

Hazards of the Caribbean

The Caribbean is a place of romance. Idyllic beaches, buoyant cultures, lush tropical flora; even the Caribbean pirates of yore often find themselves romanticized in modern eyes, and on modern movie screens. Yet it requires barely a moment’s reflection to appreciate the enormous resilience that must exist in a place that is so routinely battered by storms of enormous ferocity. News stories tend to focus on large storms that reach the United States, but many large hurricanes arrive in the United States by way of the Caribbean. Before it slammed into South Carolina in 1989, Hurricane Hugo brushed the Caribbean islands, skimming Puerto Rico and devastating many small islands to its east. Other hurricanes have hit the islands more directly. These include Inez, which claimed some 1,500 lives in 1966, and the powerful Luis, which caused $2.5 billion in property damage and 17 deaths when it pummeled the Leeward Islands and parts of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in 1995. Hurricanes also figure prominently in the pre-20th-century history of the Caribbean—storms that had no names, the sometimes lethal fury of which arrived unheralded by modern forecasts. Most people know that the Caribbean is hurricane country; probably few realize that it is earthquake country as well. After all, the western edge of North America is the active plate boundary; earthquakes occur in the more staid midcontinent and Atlantic seaboard, but far less commonly. What can be overlooked, however, is North America’s other active plate boundary. To understand the general framework of this other boundary, it is useful to return briefly to basic tenets of plate tectonics theory. As discussed in earlier chapters, the eastern edge of North America is known as a passive margin. Because the North American continent is not moving relative to the adjacent Atlantic oceanic crust, in plate tectonics terms, scientists do not differentiate between the North American continent and the western half of the Atlantic ocean.

The 1923 Kanto Earthquake: Surviving Doomsday

Citizens of Yokohama and Tokyo were just sitting down to their Saturday noonday meal on the morning of September 1, 1923, when the great Kanto earthquake struck. The time, 11:58:44, was precisely documented by seismometers, which were by this time commonplace. In 1923, Tokyo was already a bustling urban center and port city, home to over 2 million people. Yokohama was an important port and industrial center as well, with a population of more than 400,000. As had been the case in Charleston, observers gave differing descriptions of the initial shaking; some witnesses described the same gradual onset that residents of Somerville, South Carolina, had experienced. In Yokohama, however, Otis Manchester Poole wrote that, in contrast to other temblors that allowed time for contemplative speculation (“How bad is this one going to be?”), . . . This time . . . there was never more than a few moment’s doubt; after the first seven seconds of subterranean thunder and creaking spasms, we shot right over the border line. The ground could scarcely be said to shake; it heaved, tossed and leapt under one. The walls bulged as if made of cardboard and the din became awful. . . . For perhaps half a minute the fabric of our surroundings held; then came disintegration. Slabs of plaster left the ceilings and fell about our ears, filling the air with a blinding, smothering fog of dust. Walls bulged, spread and sagged, pictures danced on their wires, flew out and crashed to splinters. Desks slid about, cabinets, safes and furniture toppled, spun a moment and fell on their sides. It felt as if the floor were rising and falling beneath one’s feet in billows knee high. . . . Poole could not gauge how much time elapsed during the tumult but cited an official record of four minutes. Although the earthquake damaged all of the seismographs operated by the seismological station at Tokyo University, Professor Akitsune Imamura and his staff were at work within minutes of the earthquake, analyzing the seismograms.

The 1886 Charleston, South Carolina, Earthquake

By 1886 the population of the United States had grown to over 50 million people. Both the East Coast and the Midwest were by this time well populated with bustling towns and cities. Railroads had sprung up as well, greatly facilitating land travel, which in turn helped spark further migration and trade. The tide of westward expansion had long since steamrolled over whatever reservations the New Madrid earthquakes might have caused. By 1886 the gold rush was already several decades old, and San Francisco had grown into a lively urban center with a population of 35,000—about 5,000 more than the population of Chicago. A number of notable earthquakes had occurred in California by the end of the 19th century. While the massive Fort Tejon earthquake of 1857 occurred too early in the state’s history to leave a lasting impression on the collective psyche, large earthquakes along the eastern Sierras in 1872 and on the Hayward fault in 1872 had begun to suggest that California might be earthquake country. Still, as of the late 1800s people had nothing approaching a modern understanding of earthquakes—neither their underlying physical processes nor their fundamental characteristics. As the 19th century drew to a close, scientists did not have any way to gauge the overall size of an earthquake, for scales had been developed only to rank the severity of shaking from a particular earthquake at a particular location. Whereas scientists today can easily rank temblors in terms of their overall size, or energy release, in earlier times people could only gauge an earthquake’s overall effects, an assessment that can sometimes prove misleading. For example, the overall reach of earthquake shaking depends on the nature of the rocks through which the waves travel. As noted in chapter 5, waves travel especially efficiently in central and eastern North America, and especially inefficiently in California. Thus an earthquake of a given magnitude will pack a disproportionately heavy punch in the former region.

Earthquakes as Urban Renewal?

Whether or not the reader finds it convincing, by now the thesis of this book is clear. At least throughout recent history, earthquakes have taken a temporarily heavy toll in some areas, devastating cities, claiming lives, and shaking faith. Yet taking a step back to consider the longer-term impact, one finds that, almost without exception in recent historic times, cities and societies rebound with elasticity to mirror the earth itself. Elastic rebound. These two words represent not only the single most fundamental tenet of earthquake theory but also the most apt metaphor to describe societal response to even the most catastrophic seismic events. As previous chapters have illustrated, mankind’s capacity for elastic rebound is largely a reflection of man’s capacity for elastic rebound. Recall the challenge to Voltaire,“Alas, times and men are like each other and will always be like each other.” These words might have been penned in the context of matters of philosophy: How do we make sense of our existence and our place in the universe? But at the end of the day, most days have not concerned themselves with philosophy, and politics is left to the politicians. At the end of the day, people are people. When a devastating earthquake strikes, perhaps the complex superstructure of society crumbles along with the buildings. When elaborate social and political facades are stripped away, perhaps the finer inclinations of the individual are not changed but rather showcased. It’s a nice thought, at any rate. Whether or not it explains the predilection for resiliency and compassion following disasters is open to debate, but a consideration of history, as outlined in the previous chapters, suggests that the predilection is real—whatever the cause. This remarkable human capacity for rebound is clearly a critical factor mitigating the overall societal impact of earthquakes and other natural disasters. But resiliency and compassion alone cannot hope to rebuild modern cities following a major loss of life and property: recovery requires resources. Having considered important individual earthquakes at some length, we now turn to a general consideration of the economics of earthquakes. Considered dispassionately, one can make the argument that earthquakes invariably become a catalyst for urban renewal.

Finding Faults in California

April 18, 1906. “At 5:15 this morning . . . I thought I heard the alarm go off. I reached over to stop it and to my great surprise it was rolling from one side of the stand to the other, & then to the floor. I looked out the window . . . in time to see a few chemnies [sic] sway around and fall. The picture & bed & dresser & chairs were dancing around the room. . . . A house caught fire about 5 blocks off. . . .Then to make matters worse, there was no water when the fire dept. arrived.” April 18. “Within moments, during this period of the city’s greatest emergency, the unusual silence of the [fire] alarm bell told its own story. The system was destroyed as was the function of the city’s 30,000 telephones.” April 18, 7:00 A.M. “The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force and all Special Police Officers have been authorized [by San Francisco Mayor E. E. Schmitz] to KILL any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.” April 19. “I have seen the most awful sights to day that I ever saw in my life! . . . It is impossible for you to conceive or in any small degree realize the terrible disaster that has befallen San Francisco. I can’t & I’ve seen it. . . .When I left this afternoon fully 2/3 of San Francisco was in ruins. The streets have great cracks in them & the Car tracks are twisted by the earthquake & heat. The flames are spreading in all directions even against a fresh north wind.” May 5, 1906.“Day and night the dead calm continued, and yet, near to the flames, the wind was often a gale, so mighty was the suck.” May 13. “We have not got our thoughts collected since the big quake—not quite—it has been 24 days since the big awful earthquake and we have had more then 24 earthquakes in them 24 days, small ones.

The Age of Construction

As the human population of our planet rises to hitherto unprecedented levels, we find ourselves wondering whether the half-century from 1990 to 2040 might be remembered not so much as the age when the oil ran out, as the age of construction. Never before have we built so many dwellings, roads, dams, and civic structures than will be constructed during the span of this half-century. A little reflection suggests that in our (allegedly) highly evolved society, with our sophisticated knowledge of the forces of nature and the strengths of materials, we would be stupid to commit the unforgivable sin of knowingly constructing buildings that will crush and maim our descendants. Yet in many parts of the world this is indeed what we are doing. Homo sapiens decided long ago to live in houses. Other animals do it, but rarely do they build such precarious structures as do humans. The nests of birds are woven to be resilient, mammals and reptiles live in caves selected for their permanence, burrows are dug by animals content with the knowledge that a little more burrowing is all that’s needed to keep the walls in place, or the driveway clear. Only humans spend at least eight hours of every turn of the planet within a dwelling assembled from a variety of materials that are often close to the point of structural failure, and often without considering the consequences of constructing permanent dwellings in regions subject to geologically extreme events. The shift from Homo the hunter-gatherer to Homo urbanensis means that many of the remaining 16 hours of each day are spent in another structure, more often than not also assembled with an eye on thrift —maximum volume for minimum cost. Even the journey to and from these different structures can expose humans to seismic risks—as is evident from the collapse of bridges and overpasses in recent earthquakes. The damage done by an earthquake is caused by shaking, either directly or indirectly (via landslides, etc.). Shaking involves accelerations: the rate at which speed changes or, in qualitative terms, what can be thought of as “jerkiness.”

Tsunami!

The 1867 tsunami described in the previous chapter was, as the world has recently witnessed, scarcely an unusual event. Nor was the scene of destruction that followed. Elsewhere in this book we emphasize how the world’s rush, since the 1950s, to expand the size of cities has been driven by an increase in global population. Like a box with flexible sides, the city expands to embrace all those who favor the convenience, bustle, and economic opportunities of urban life. When lateral expansion is no longer feasible, as in the walled holy city of Bhaktipur in Nepal, or the confined economic and cultural island powerhouse of Manhattan, the city expands upward. When both lateral and upward expansion are confined, the size of dwelling units inevitably contracts. Few citizens leave these urban black holes, and when they do, they invariably choose to swell the ranks of another city. Yet one other type of place on our planet has beckoned since ancient times—coastlines of continents, especially the earth’s temperate and tropical shores. It has been estimated that 400 million people live within 20 meters of sea level and within 20 kilometers of a coast, many of them within a few kilometers of the beach. Precise numbers are difficult to pin down because census compilations rarely list a household’s height above sea level or its distance from the sea. Some idea of mankind’s curious predilection to gravitate shoreward can be obtained by viewing the earth from space on a moonless night. Seen from above, the coastlines of continents and islands are illuminated festively by electric light bulbs. The attraction here is not so much the views nor even the fish: coastlines are trade routes and, being the termini for the world’s rivers, streams, and subsurface aquifers, are nearly always endowed with a bountiful supply of freshwater for agriculture, as well as for thirsty populations and industries. This, of course, is why many of the world’s largest cities are seaports: London, New York, Karachi, Calcutta, Hong Kong.