Earthquake scenario and planning

This week I participated in EERI's very engaging Earthquake Scenario Planning Workshop. It was a fascinating mix of seismologist, engineers, planners, and a smattering of social scientists and public officials. While we were all bent on using developing earthquake scenarios, there was considerable fuzziness over what these scenarios could and should do.

Many scenarios have been developed as emergency response planning tools for massive planning exercises. The Great Southern California ShakeOut - a hybrid response exercise and public awareness campaign - is an upcoming example. For these purposes, the scenario development process seems rather straight forward, though often very labor intensive. Develop your hazard model, add in your infrastructure inventory and census data, develop fragility curves, etc. The results are typically presented as maps of shaking intensity, building damage, and calculations of death, injuries, and people displaced from their homes.

But what if the scenario is not for response planning, but for mitigation and planning? Are these outputs useful for people like city council members, majors,urban planners, and community service providers? The general assumption at the workshop was yes, but I have strong doubts. I'm not convinced that these decision makers would necessarily know what to do given maps of shaking, damage, deaths, injuries and displacement. These aren't exactly the indicators they work with on a daily basis. Nor are they, I suspect, the indicators that they consider when campaigning for re-election.

What is probably much more salient for this crowd is indicators such as poverty rate, unemployment, housing vacancy rates, and school overcrowding. If this is the case, perhaps we should challenge ourselves to further push our scenarios and models forward into the often fuzzy areas of social consequence. While it may be much more difficult, such enhanced scenarios may catch the imagination and raise concerns among planners, policy makers and service providers. These are the very groups needed to successfully develop and implement the mitigation and community resilience policies necessary to make a massive emergency response unnecessary.

It behooves us to think about the users of our scenarios. We should ask them early on what indicators they need...and what will jolt them into taking earthquake risk seriously.

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California's unsafe schools

Scott Mile's earlier post on school earthquake safety is interesting, especially in light of the many collapsed school structures in China's recent earthquake. I certainly agree with Yumei Wang that Oregon and Washington schools are in serious need of attention. However, the implicit argument that California has passed laws and has safe schools, is a fallacy. We need to look to California to see and hopefully emulate the successes, but we also need to be painfully aware that even California still has serious school safety issues to consider.

Here are just a few of the issues:

A. The Field Act, requiring higher design standards, dedicated plan reviews and continuous inspection for public school buildings does increase building resistance to shaking. However, the higher standards only bring these structures up to somewhere between "life-safe" and ready for immediate occupancy.

Many of the Field Act school buildings will still sustain moderate structural damage and perhaps, significant non-structural damage. Many will not be able to be used for emergency community centers or even as schools until repairs are made. This is certainly better than buildings in danger of collapse, but remains far below ideal.

B. Private schools are and school out buildings used for after-school care are not covered by the act.

C. Portable classrooms used throughout school districts in California and other states are a significant hazard. These account for a whopping 30% of public classrooms in California. I was not able to really visualize the threat of these portable classrooms and was emailing colleagues in California about this issue. Here was the explanation of Fred Turner, a consulting structure engineer in Sacramento:
1) If unattached classrooms move relative to their stair systems(which can be structurally separated from the classroom) doors that open outward can be prevented from opening by creation of an offset, gap or obstruction that forms between the classrooms and the stairs during the earthquake, potentially obstructing egress. Obstructed egress coupled with a post-earthquake fire threat can create casualty risks.

2) Some improperly attached classrooms are on steel or concrete supports that include steel bearing plates and height adjusters. When classroom supports dislodge from the chassis during earthquakes, the steel bearing plates and height adjusters can penetrate through the floor of the classroom unit and protrude into the floor space where occupants may be dropping, covering and holding on under furniture. Occupants may come in contact with the protruding support height adjusters and bearing plates. To date, post-earthquake images document supports protruding through floors, and no records of injuries.

D. Additionally, there are legal catch 22 situations where schools desiring to tie down portable classrooms to make them more earthquake resistant wind up having to suddenly count these portables as "permanent" structures. The school then looses capital funds needed for constructing truly permanent classrooms.

The issue of school safety is immense in China, in the Pacific Northwest and, unfortunately, even in California.

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NYT's Andrew Revkin Keeps Asking Good Questions

In this blog post:

While California, thanks to wakeup calls in 1906 and 1933, has pushed to bolster schools and other vital structures, there, too, experts say, there are gaps, particularly in poorer school districts. In Oregon, the gaps are truly scary, according to Yumei Wang, the head of the state’s geohazards team. When the anticipated earthquake there comes, it could well be an 9.0-magnitude event.

If hundreds of the 1,300 Oregon schools estimated to be inadequately reinforced fall, will that be seen as a cruel twist of fate or somebody’s fault?

And if it’s somebody’s fault, who is the somebody? The person in office? The voters who don’t clamor for safe schools before a disaster strikes? State agencies that perhaps didn’t catch a contractor’s shortcut? Engineers or scientists who haven’t tried hard enough to explain what this kind of threat means? The media for focusing on politicians’ gaffes and celebrities’ stunts?

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FlypMedia on Future Earthquake Disasters in the US

Definitely check this out. Not only is yours truly quoted a couple times, flypmedia.com is a rich online magazine experience with some great writers.

(Full disclosure: The author of the piece is my USGS mentor's son.)

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School Vulnerability in OR & WA

Been a bit too busy to catch lots of the good stuff in the NYT. I was reading along today and read the name of a friend, Yumei Wang, who wrote the NYT about seismic safety of school in the US and in particular Oregon. She answered this question for us:

I hope that the problem with seismically unsafe schools in the U.S. does not get overlooked. Although California has had school safety laws since 1933, other states have not. As you know, I work in Oregon. Last year, we conducted “screenings” on 3,300 public schools and emergency buildings. Our results, which are available online, indicate that 1,300 have high to very high probability of collapse. We will apply another screening “filter” to reduce that number; however, in the end, Oregon will need to mitigate about 1,000 school buildings.

And on the topic of Washington and their schools? She wrote, "They are still sleeping (except the city of Seattle has done stuff)."

Considering that Washington State's constitution states that "[i]t is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex" it would seem like seismic safety of all public schools, regardless of location, is also of "paramount duty."

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China's earthquake- damage and rescue

I've been watching the news coming out of China for a week now and it feels so much like déjà vu. from the 1999 Marmara Earthquakes in Turkey. In Turkey, as in China, development had been achieved at a break neck speed. Rural people had poured into the major industrial cities of the Marmara regions -Istanbul, Kocaeli, Izmit, Duzce, Adapazarı and others.

With such a rapid increase of population, density was achieved through reinforced concrete construction. Replacing 1 and 2 story wood and brick buildings were towering concrete apartment buildings. It house the people, but so much of it was built before a robust and transparent building inspection process could be fully enforced. This looks to be the case in China as well.

In Turkey, much of the construction from 1960-1999 was also built illegally by self-builders who neither understood what made reinforced concrete earthquake resistant, nor understood the important of construction quality. That may not be the case in China. I'm sure it will be studied in great detail over the next few years.

In the mean time, a CNN video of the minutes after the earthquake was posted to the ENDRR-L list serve hosted by Prevention Web. The video is very dramatic, but also very telling. Survivors engage in a strong self-organizing response to rescue trapped victims, treat the wounded and find needed supplies. Watching the video, I look at it and empathize with the survivors. But I also find myself making a mental note of what supplies would be helpful in that sort of aftermath. Think I'll go check what I've got in my emergency supply kit...

Also telling are the injuries people sustained from non-structural damage....damage resulting from the shifting or collapse of personal contents or things like partition walls and light fixtures. Its a reminder of the importance to secure your furniture if you live in earthquake country.

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School Vulnerability... Not In Our Backyard!?

The New York Times has a good side-bar article about the vulnerability of schools around the world. They interview disaster luminaries Brian Tucker and Ben Wisner -- probably the most knowledgeable folks out there. (Part of the email interview of Dr. Wisner is in this NYT blog post.)

(Dr. Tucker won the MacArthur Award because of work he did related to earthquake risk reduction for schools, particularly in Katmandu in association with his organization GeoHazards International. Dr. Wisner has written volumes on disaster risk reduction, most notably on this topic is this report [pdf].)

The NYT article observes that...

[e]xperts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.

Well, of course. That sounds obvious -- schools are vulnerable in places around the world that we associate with being most vulnerable. When the experts says schools are vulnerable in "the Americas," they mean Central and South America.

Right?

Yes.

Well, and North America...

... the risks are not limited to poor or emerging countries. In Vancouver, British Columbia, parents’ groups have been agitating to accelerate a decades-long program aimed at bringing schools up to modern earthquake standards.

Because of the Sichuan earthquake, the Seattle PI is reporting on building vulnerability in Seattle, citing a report for the City of Seattle [big pdf] on unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings that was published in December 2007. The report notes that some of the URMs in Seattle are schools -- not surprising given the age of construction:

Among the more notable buildings on the list are West Seattle High School, John Marshall School in the Roosevelt area, First United Methodist Church downtown, and the Merchants Cafe and the Union Gospel Mission in Pioneer Square.

To my knowledge, the State of Washington has not publicly disclosed schools in the state that are seismically vulnerable, particularly URMs. I'm not even certain if they have them inventoried. Obviously, this is a first step in mobilizing political will to retrofit or replace these schools.

Anyone know about a school seismic-safety inventory in WA?

Other states?

UPDATE

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Red Cross on the Death Toll from the Sichuan Earthquake

From the BBC.

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News on the Sichuan Earthquake

It's a bit of paradox looking for news in the immediate aftermath of any large hazard event, since the bigger the event the more difficult it will be to get reliable information quickly (or at all), but alas that's the world we live in. So far, the New York Times seems to have the most insightful coverage -- particularly the audio interview (left hand side) include with this story.

The reporter interviewed makes a very good point about the indicators of the scale of the disaster -- the heads of state went immediately to the region:

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who arrived in the earthquake region on Monday night, described the situation as a “severe disaster” and called for “calm, confidence, courage and efficient organization.”

President Hu Jintao ordered an “all out” effort to aid people in the earthquake region and soldiers were dispatched for disaster relief efforts.

The government also has released significant fatality estimates (certainly not actual counts), in contrast to the 1976 event where the Chinese government tried to cover up the more than 200,000 deaths to the world media. This is surprisingly common. I remember after the 1999 Izmet earthquake that the Turkish government was denying any major death toll while at the same time it came to light that they had ordered thousands of body bags.

It's a good lesson to remember: As consumers, maintain low expectations for news in the near aftermath, but producers should not try downplay what they already know.

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Emergency planning in our schools

Over the last week, I have been in Los Angeles talking with school administrators about emergency plans. This is in preparation for the largest earthquake drill California has ever done - the Great Southern California ShakeOut scheduled for November 13, 2008. In the process I have been inducted into some of the real-world headaches of school emergency planning.


At the Team Safe-T office, a non-profit organization helping to create education material on safety, emegency preparedness and social responsibility, I learned of the hazards of doing earthquake drills....not the hazards of a real earthquake, but the hazards of the drill.

Every time there is a fire drill or earthquake drill, the students file out of the building. In some inner city LA schools, some students go to the designated field and are accounted for. Others just disappear- and get in trouble. Following the drill, teachers cannot account for all of their students. The number of hall fights and vandalism goes up that day. Police report increased gang violence on the days schools do such drills.

Fire and earthquake drills are mandated by the state of California, yet so is keeping students in school and learning. Its a tough call and some school administrators have chosen to stop doing drills. This does not bode well for an actual emergency. Students and staff will be unprepared and unpracticed. Moreover, what is occuring in drills may very well indicate major issues that could arise in a real emergency. Following a major earthquake, staff charged with accounting for students and searching for injured and unaccounted students may be looking for students who have left the premises all together. Looting may also be an intensified issue if students take off after the shaking subsides. I also do not envy the school administrators facing anxious parents and telling them then have no idea where their kids are.

In other conversations, I heard about issues of special needs kids. Students on life-saving medication may not have extra supplies to last until their parents can re-unify with them. Nor may staff have the authority to administer needed medications, even if it was on the premises.

Finally, I read a recent new report out of Florida where post-hurricane building code improvements for schools is interfering with police radios. You can look at the article yourself here. Hurricane-resistant concrete walls are so thick they block police radios and have led to difficulties in on-premise police calling for back-up when dealing with security issues.

There are obviously a lot of questions to ask about how to better address the underlying causes of school violence and how to address the needs of disabled students. Those larger questions aside, I was reminded of the vast difference between clear-cut emergency plans on paper and the complicated reality that occurs when they are implemented.

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Some New Old News About Sumatra

I just got back from the International Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction in Taipei, Taiwan. The plenary talks were above average, focusing on climate change, disasters in developing countries, and putting research into action (though I will say that organizers should have given more time for Q&A). There were several noteworthy talks, which I hope to mention here.

The first one was given by Cal Tech Professor Kerry Sieh about longstanding work he's been doing in Sumatra, which has been covered in the news before. The upshot is that there is much more stress to be released on the fault that caused the Banda Aceh earthquake in 2004. He showed a graph of strain over the past several hundred years, illustrating that the 2004 event was likely the beginning of strain release on the fault similar to centuries past. Amazingly, the magnitude of the earthquake that would result from complete rupture of stress in the fault segment in question would be the same or greater as the 2004 event. Worst of all, the nearby cities of Pedang and Bengkulu are much larger than Banda Aceh, and equally vulnerable to tsunami. Professor Sieh sounded rather pessimistic about the ability to mitigate against another catastrophe in these areas, but clearly put the challenge out there to do so. It's certainly an opportunity to apply lessons learned about disaster risk reduction from a similar context and try to shift focus from reponse to risk reduction.

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The Role of Rentals in Recovery

Relatively speaking, recovery after the 1994 Northridge earthquake was quick and complete, though certainly unequal across space and demographics. One of the main reasons for this was the high vacancy rates for apartments and other rentals at the time of the earthquake. This made it easy to provide temporary and long-term housing for those who lost the service of their residence.

The New York Times today has a story about the severe lack of available rental units in New Orleans and possibly related effects like increased homelessness. Obviously there are many differences between Northridge and New Orleans -- a moderate earthquake and a catastrophic storm surge. But in the seemglingly national push to convert apartments to condos, I think we shouldn't forget the role of a flexible rental stock in recovery and resilience.

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Insurance: To Buy or Not To Buy?

Today Crosscut has a story about whether or not local insurance agents, geologists, and emergency managers take out earthquake insurance for their home. (The Seattle PI did a similar story a while back.) The verdict? Looks like insurnace agents and geologists tend not to buy the extra insurance:

"In general I'm [USGS geologist Joan Gomberg] not a fan of insurance," she said via e-mail. "However, I do think it's essential in the Pacific Northwest to have some sort of 'insurance' for earthquakes, and we have chosen to retrofit our house to accomplish this. We've only lived here a little over a year and just bought an old house that needs to have the structure tied to the foundation. Even though it's a major expense I feel it's a better investment than buying earthquake insurance. I want to be sure the house stands when an earthquake happens and that the damage is minimal enough to be reparable – then I'll be comfortable that our safety is insured and our investment."

While emergency managers do:

For what it's worth, local emergency management bosses apparently are more prone to take earthquake coverage. Barb Graff, the city of Seattle's emergency-management chief, said she added it to her homeowner's policy, "practicing what we preach."

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