Is California overdue for the Big One?

California is famously susceptible to earthquakes. There is the 800 miles San Andreas Fault and the San Jacinto, which runs roughly parallel to it for 130 miles. In the past, minor or moderate earthquakes have eased some built-up tension along those lines. But whole generations of adults who've spent their lives in California have never experienced a significant quake. And that adds up to an astonishing amount of seismic energy stored along those fault lines in 2026. Could the big one lie in the near future? From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Earthquakes are famously hard to predict, but my guest has been trying to learn what the potential is for a truly catastrophic California earthquake, which may be worse than any in the past, given just how populated the state is in the 21st century. And he's discovered that experts are baffled as to why there have been so few smaller quakes along the San Andreas for such a long time. Ron Lynn is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times based in San Francisco. Specializes in statewide earthquake safety, natural disasters, public health, and extreme weather. Among the articles he's written recently as one headlined, The San Andreas Fault has gone ominously silent. The seismic strain worries scientists. Ron, welcome to think. Hello. You remind us that some people refer to the San Andreas as the mother of all earthquake faults, not a comforting nickname. Is that just about its length or something else? Well, it's about a lot of things. So it's about a lot of things. It's not only is it about its length, but it's also about how big of an earthquake it can cause. For example, The San Andreas fault, because it's the state's longest fault, it can create earthquakes as large as magnitude 8.2 in the Los Angeles area. This was the same fault that caused San Francisco to burn down in the 1906 earthquake. And in 1857, we had an earthquake that was about a magnitude 7.9 that if it happened today, it would cause widespread destruction across Southern California, the kind of quake that hasn't been seen in modern California history. A fault line, as I understand it, is just a place where tectonic plates meet push and pole in relation to one another? Yeah, so think of what it's like. Think of California as being on the border between two giant tectonic plates. So on the side of California that has Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, you have the Pacific plate, and that's moving relatively northwest. And then on the other side of this San Andreas fault, you have places like...

Las Vegas and Bakersfield, and that's moving to the southeast. And over millions and millions of years, one side of the state is moving northwest relative to the other side. And so the thing is, is that right along the plate boundary, right along the San Andreas Fault, the land is stuck there. So over you know, once every hundred years, every 200 years or so, large earthquake strike. And that has to happen because that's the way things are. So in this piece, you remind us the San Andreas hasn't done much for an unusually long time for that fault. What would be considered more typical activity along the fault line? Yeah, so think about the San Andreas fault through Los Angeles County. We have these mountains just north of the city. And usually there are earthquakes there every 100 to 150 years based off of what we know over the past 1,000 years. But if you look at what has happened, the last big earthquake hasn't occurred in LA County on the San Andreas in the last 169 years. And so, you know, when scientists think... when they spitball and they think what earthquake fault would be one of the more likely ones to rupture in our lifetime, they think the San Andreas would be one of them. In fact, they would say that they wouldn't be surprised if a big earthquake happened on the San Andreas fault sometime soon. So just so we're clear here, and full disclosure, the only C I made in college was in geology, so I appreciate you explaining all this to me in a really clear way. Not much has happened along the San Andreas fault for a long time, but it is still a very active fault, right? I know some fault lines are considered not active. That's not the case here. Yeah, I mean, actually, the San Andreas is considered one of the fastest moving faults in California. It's one of the faults that are among the most concerning to California. In fact, if you look at satellite data and you look at, you can actually see from GPS data how parts of California are moving to the northwest and the other parts of California are moving to the southeast. In fact, some of your listeners may... be aware of the Pinnacles National Park. 23 million years ago there was this volcanic formation around Lancaster. Over these many 23 millions of years, one part of that volcanic field had moved northwest 200 miles over, you know, many earthquakes over those millions of years. And that just shows the power of the San Andreas fault. How do scientists monitor whatever pressure is building up along fault lines? What's involved? Yeah. I mean, part of it is looking at GPS data so they can see.

how the land is moving, is creeping away from each other farther away from the fault. And then they see how it's stuck right along the fault. And when you kind of look at the historical record and you see the earthquakes that have happened over the past 1,000 years, you can kind of get to see the kind of tectonic strain that builds up over that time and what you would expect to happen over the next 1,000 years. Why is it so challenging? even in the 21st century, to predict when earthquakes will happen. Like, I live in Texas. Tornadoes are a real problem here. We can sort of spot them from a distance. We know the weather patterns that are likely to spawn them. Earthquakes are not quite as easy to spot. Yeah. And I think part of the reason is that earthquakes happen all the time, right? Think of there are 2.0quakes, 3.0 quakes, 4.0 quakes. And they don't. usually generate a lot of attention. One of the problems, though, is that while we can detect earthquakes as they happen, there's no way to figure out when they'll, when they're going to be the big quakes in urban areas that are going to cause a lot of problems. And so there's no real way to predict earthquakes. I mean, we've, scientists have spent generations trying to figure it out, but there's no way to kind of... figure out if they'll develop into the big, scary quake that'll take down an entire city. Have you ever been in a big scary quake of any kind anywhere? I have been. In fact, it happened on my seventh birthday. I was... I was actually on the phone with my cousin, who was wishing me a happy birthday, and I was up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then I felt this immense shaking. And my mom said, it's an earthquake, and then we went down and helped recover. And it was the scariest thing I've ever felt. in my life. This was the magnitude 6.9 earthquake, the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. It was actually some miles away in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but this is the earthquake that collapsed part of the San Francisco Bay Bridge and collapsed a double-decker freeway in Oakland, Interstate 880. And there is nothing like the experience of just being jolted in a way. where you just don't know when the shaking's going to end. And, you know, one of the things that you think about, you feel that land is going to be solid for, you know... all the time and feeling that shaking is something that is immensely rattling. At least with tornadoes and with hurricanes, you know, usually there are, there is some amount of warning, you know, through the National Weather Service, but there's nothing like that for earthquakes other than maybe a few seconds of warning through earthquake early warning systems. Do you think your experience shaped the sort of emphasis you wanted to have in your reporting career?

Yeah, most definitely. I remember in the days after that earthquake in 1989 that I was just really fascinated by how this event could cause such destruction. And I remember listening to the TV and reading news reports about how earthquakes I remember reading about how the soft soils were a factor in how much destruction there were in certain parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. And then later on, as I became a reporter, one of the things that came about was that... you know there were also structural flaws um in the freeway that just weren't you know paid attention to enough you know back then and even though there were there were even though officials knew that um that there were structural issues, they hadn't finished all of the structural retrofits in time. And so it was incredible to me that, you know, earthquakes are one of those things where because they don't necessarily happen all the time, it's easy to kind of put them out of mind. You know, with hurricanes, because they happen so frequently, I think people have this idea that like, okay, this hurricane is coming. in a few weeks or in a few hours or a few days from now, that's enough time to get the house ready. But with earthquakes, because they may not happen in a different way in everyone's lifetime, it might be easy to put it out of sight, put it out of mind. And one of the things that I wanted to do is be able to show people that, like, well, the earthquakes are going to come. And it's not necessarily just, you don't necessarily need to only think of it as active God. And there's... no there's nothing you can do about it there actually a lot of things that you can do about it whether it be to figure out if you're building, your home, your business is at risk of collapse in an earthquake. And there are measurable steps that you can take from it. And so part of my career is trying to get people to realize that these natural disasters, you can prepare for them. There's a lot of human ingenuity that can go into preparing for these kinds of disasters. Is it your sense that a lot of Californians are pretty complacent about major earthquakes today? Oh, definitely. And in fact, one of the things, one of the most common questions that I get, you know, are, you know, will an earthquake happen? You know, there's this one of the most common tropes that you'll often hear about is, uh,

is, you know, can small quakes relieve pressure to avoid a big quake? And that's no. I mean, you know, earthquakes are such a powerful force in the state, right? Think about what makes California California. You have these mountains where we can ski and snowmored off of. You can surf in the same day. And so as you can surf in the same day as you can snowboard if you really wanted to. And so, and all of that is a factor of the same tectonic forces that create earthquakes. You know, we can credit the gold rush to the same, those same tectonic forces. Like gold was deposited from the same forces that create earthquakes. The reason why we have the Central Valley, you know, the nation's most prolific. you know, provider of our fruits and vegetables, the reason why it's there and it's so productive is, you know, essentially from the same forces that cause earthquakes. So it's part of the bargain of living in California. And it, you know, it's better for everyone to kind of realize that like earthquakes are just part of why we're here and part of what makes California special. And coming to that realization that earthquakes are, are what makes California California. I think that's a helpful tactic to take. Because, you know, there are people who will say, oh, my goodness, when they hear about the prospect of earthquakes, they might think. gosh, I should just get out of here. I should just move out. And I'm thinking, well, you could, but, you know, if humanity has enough ingenuity to get, you know, people on the moon, we actually also have the ingenuity to help make our homes, our water lines, our infrastructure much more solid to prevent a natural disaster from becoming a catastrophe. Ron, you have this sentence. The San Andreas appears to be locked, loaded, and inevitable. That is an excellent sentence for a writer. It's kind of a terrifying sentence for a human being. What sort of earthquake do researchers think will happen along the San Andreas when the fault finally slips? Yeah, so one of the things that scientists have all been waiting for is this massive, massive earthquake on the San Andreas. And it's not something that has been seen in historical times, something that hasn't been seen in a recorded history, at least since the 1857 magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Southern California. Now, at that time, Southern California wasn't, there wasn't much there, right? There wasn't much infrastructure, no scary concrete buildings, no skyscrapers. And so there wasn't much damage or deaths as a result of that earthquake. But we know that, you know, before the Civil War, there was a magnitude 7 point.

8, 7.9 earthquake. And so if it happened then, it'll, it's going to happen again soon. And so one of the earthquake scenarios that scientists have for decades been talking about and imagining what could happen is, is a magnitude 7.9 earthquake. Perhaps I might start near the Mexican border around the Salton Sea and then push northwest. So, and this is not just, you know, in a lot of earthquake maps, you might see a little dot showing the epicenter in concentric circles. And so it creates this idea that earthquakes just happen at a point and emanate from that. But in reality, it not only starts there, but then it travels on a fault. And in Southern California, it can travel for hundreds of miles. So think about the San Andreas fault in red. starting from the Salon Sea and then going through Palm Springs and San Bernardino and into the mountains north of Los Angeles County and so a quake like that um it's going to cause extreme violent shaking over in a way that hasn't been seen in modern times. So maybe five, six counties all seeing violent shaking nearly simultaneously, whereas in the quakes that we were more familiar with, like in 1994, there was a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in the San Fernando Valley, the North Earth earthquake. That only caused violent shaking in just a small part of Los Angeles County. And that allowed people from other counties to kind of help out. Los Angeles. But in such a big scenario, in a supersized quake, everyone's going to be all impacted at the same time. And so there's not going to be as much help for everybody to help everybody else. Okay, help me understand the magnitude thing. I mean, first of all, how is anybody able to estimate that that 1857 earthquake was somewhere around magnitude 7.8? There weren't really sophisticated instruments at the time, right? Yeah, and so the, so yeah, so basically what people do is they try to figure out there are, you know, you can look at the historical record in terms of at least the observations that were recorded at the time. And you can look at. damage reports. I mean, there were some towns in that area. And so that's kind of how scientists try to estimate what the magnitude was like back then. You can also look, you can also dig to see, you know, trenches, right? And you can see the fall offset. So one side of the fault is going to lurch, you know, in one direction compared to the other side. You know, a famous example of this. in the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco is a fence that is that was that straddled the San Andreas fault north of northwest of San Francisco and you know the fence was straight before the earthquake and then and then the fence was offset by you know a number of I think feet away from each other after the earthquake and so that just shows the power of that and that's kind of how you can kind of start to estimate the magnitude

And in terms of what magnitude escalation feels like, I mean, if I hear 7.8 and I hear 8.2, those don't seem too far away from one another on a number line. But how does that work with an earthquake? Yeah, so it's a logarithmic scale. So one way to kind of put it is that, you know, if there's an 8.0 quake compared to a 7.0 quake, the 8.0 quake, if you look at a seismogram, you know, the squiggly lines that you might see on TV after earthquake happens, that's an 8.0 quake would be 10 times bigger on the seismogram. But in reality, I mean, what. what me as a layperson would want to know is how much more shaking energy it provides. And that's actually much, much greater. And so the 1857 quake actually produced 63 times more shaking energy than the 94 Northridge earthquake. It's kind of hard to imagine. But it also explains why, you know, if you have a, why a magnitude 7.8, 7.9 quake could cause severe damage to six counties as opposed to just a small portion of one county that you would see in the magnitude 6.7 quake in 1994. I mentioned in my introduction, by the way, do you say San Jacinto in California or San Jacinto? We probably call it San Jacinto. Okay, San Jacinto. The San Jacinto fault runs roughly parallel to the San Andreas for like 130 miles. Could a quake along one of those fault lines trigger a quake on the other? What's the relationship between them? Yeah, so the San Andreas is the state's most famous fault. The San Jacinto fault doesn't have the same. doesn't have the same infamy, but it's the state's second longest fault. And scientists have posited that, you know, you can have an earthquake that starts on the San Jacinto and then continue on on the San Andreas. One of the things that, as it's become clear, is that, you know, we give names to these faults, but, you know, The Earth doesn't care about the names we give these faults. We now know that an earthquake can start on one fault and then go on to another fault. You write in the piece that a quake of 7.8 magnitude or greater along the southern part of the San Andreas has been estimated to potentially result in 1,800 deaths. Is the greatest danger in California from being injured by like some kind of building failure? You know, actually, one of the worst, one of the biggest threats is fire following earthquake. And in fact, I think that the, the estimate is that 900 of those deaths could be caused by fire following earthquake. You know, remember, in 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake.

water lines were smashed and there was a lot of flammable buildings everywhere. However, building collapses would be a big contributor to the death toll. And so there are a number of buildings that are at risk. So one of the deadliest types of buildings is a building type that's so hazardous that this type of construction has been banned for, you know, about a century. Yet... a lot of these buildings still exist. Some cities have dealt with them, but some haven't. And these are brick buildings. These are old brick buildings built before the 1930s. There's no reinforcement. And so when shaken during an earthquake, basically the mortar between the individual bricks, it basically turns into sand. And so the bricks can come flying down. If you have a brick building that's a few stories tall, the bricks turn into cannonballs. And so they can crash onto sidewalks, they can crash into the middle of the street. And it's a lot of force. I mean, in earthquakes that we've seen in New Zealand, for example, these earthquakes can crush whole buses. In the San Francisco earthquake in 1989, a number of people died. you know trying to get in their cars getting home and they were working just outside of a brick building these bricks came tumbling down off of the fourth floor crushed cars and a number of people died One of the things that I'm super worried about is in this area east of L.A., it's called the Inland Empire. We're talking about San Bernardino and Riverside counties. And even though these are areas right on top of the San Andreas fault and the San Antonio's fault, a number of these cities have not required the retrofit or demolition. of these vulnerable brick buildings. And so, and it's not just the people who would be inside these buildings that would be at risk. I mean, think about the pedestrians on the street or motorists, they are at risk too. There are other two types of buildings that keep me awake at night, literally. They're, they're, Actually, three. There are tall concrete buildings and buildings built, you know, maybe before the 1970s. These are, these are, you know, concrete buildings, but until the 1970s, there was a flaw that was discovered in the 1970s where there wasn't enough steel reinforcement.

And so in an earthquake, what can happen is that if without enough steel rebar, they are concrete inside these columns essentially explode. So anytime you see these horrific earthquake deaths in places like Venezuela and in Turkey in recent years, and you see these mounds of concrete and collapsed buildings, Those are these brittle concrete buildings, technically called non-ductal concrete buildings. There are a few cities in LA. There are a few cities in LA County, like the city of Los Angeles, that have required these buildings to be retrofitted. But they set a lengthy deadline to get them done. And there are a number of cities that... haven't required these buildings to be retrofitted. So that's something that we're looking at. Another type of building are, you know, across California, there are these apartment buildings with where you can park your car on the ground floor, either as a garage or in a carport. And these are called soft story buildings. These can collapse in an earthquake. There were a number of people who died in a collapse of a single apartment building in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. And then finally, there are steel moment frame buildings, a number of which, and so these include skyscrapers built before the 1990s. And it was during the 1994 Northridge earthquake that they discovered that there was a flaw in some of these buildings in which the steel skeleton, they found cracks in them. Had there been just a little bit more shaking, some of these buildings could have collapsed in that quake. And one of the concerns about those buildings is that some of these buildings in downtown LA have actually never been required to be inspected. And so if they haven't been required to be inspected, there has been no order to get them repaired or retrofitted. So again, I live in a part of the country where, you know, people are not generally crazy about regulation. It does seem surprising that people in every municipality that you mentioned aren't clamoring for these requirements just for their own safety. But I gather even a retrofit is very expensive to make buildings less susceptible to earthquake damage. Yes, but... You know, it's also true that people, that there's like, that property values are up, right? We know that one of the crises in California is the housing shortage and storing rents. But that also means that property owners, especially if they've held a property over many decades, they've seen considerable appreciation in the value of their apartments. And that gives them the equity to invest in a retrofit. And so what we've seen in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco that have required apartment buildings to be retrofitted, for example, the economics seem to be working out just fine. In fact, if you look at San Francisco,

apartment building retrofits they implemented a retrofit law 10 years about 10 years ago i think and um and compliance is now like upwards of you know is is really high they're all basically almost all done uh and from from a landlord's point of view part of it is is also the way you kind of you know Explain the risk if you explain the risk in a way to say that like an earthquake is definitely going to happen someday and By investing this you know in a typical apartment building might be a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars to retrofit If you do this investment now, that means when the earthquake happens, you're going to, A, people, your tenants are going to live. And, you know, the rent checks are going to still keep on flowing. It's actually economically very sound argument to make. But it's only an economically sound argument to make if you're convinced and you know that the earthquake is going to come someday and you have a vulnerability that needs to be addressed. Okay, Ron, I'm going to ask you to like put on your sociologist hat, which I know is not a hat that you actually possess, but what do you think accounts for the kind of earthquake denial that you might have observed in the state? What accounts for the earthquake denial? I think it has in part to do with the fact that it doesn't happen all that often. I mean, we actually haven't had a big earthquake in terms of hitting a major urban city since the 1994 Northridge earthquake. So that's more than 30 years ago. We have a whole generation of Generation Z, Generation Alpha, that have never experienced a big earthquake that has happened like in like a big city like San Francisco or Los Angeles in their whole lifetime, right? And so I think it's very easy to kind of think that this big earthquake is just not going to come. And so I think, you know, something just doesn't happen in your lifetime. It just may not feel real to you. In fact, one of the stories that I covered have been the extensive flooding that hits Texas, right? There was the hill country flooding disaster that swept away Camp Mystic. And, you know, when in time and time again, you talk to people who just would have never expected, even though the National Weather Service is saying, you know, this is a real threat. Sometimes the experience of people thinking, gosh, this has never happened in my lifetime. It's just not going to be that bad. It makes it very easy to think that it's just not going to happen. And so, and, you know, let's also look at Japan. I mean, there was that massive tsunami that killed, you know, 20,000 people in 2011. One of the problems is that an earthquake happened that was actually worse than the worst case scenario.

which is a pretty scary thing to think about. But because coming to terms with how bad a disaster can be, even if it might happen only once in 100 years or once in a thousand years, it does require you to think about it in a way that will cost money. But knowing what we know, if you don't come to terms with that now, the toll in terms of resolving that situation after the disaster, it's going to be all that much more worse than if you had dealt with it before the disaster struck. Ron, I learned so much reading your reporting, including the fact that tectonic stress is measured in these units called megapascals. Do more stored megapascals of tension typically result in like greater magnitude earthquakes when the earthquakes do happen? Yeah, I think. So there was this interesting study that came out recently and it was the first to kind of look at, okay, we know. in general, that a big earthquake is going to happen. But can we quantify it? Can we figure out... how much force, basically, how much strain is building up? Can we put a number on it? And so what they found was that along certain parts of the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, there has been, right now, we're seeing the most amount of seismic strain than we've ever seen before in the past 1,000 years. And so there's this idea that, for example, along the San Andreas fault in Los Angeles County, the current tectonic stress is 2.8 megapascals, and that surpasses the previous calculated highs of 2.7 before these big quakes around the year 1500 and around the year 1700. And so what does that mean? Well, that basically means that strain is pretty high. And if you think about having a little toothpick and trying to break it, it's... What we would all kind of imagine is that it would not be terribly surprising for that toothpick to break. And that break in that toothpick would be an earthquake. And so one of the takeaways from this calculation is that, hey, you know, it wouldn't be surprising if this big earthquake that haven't happened in 169 years for it to happen again. What are the current hypotheses about why so much unrelieved stress has built up, why there haven't been quakes along the way for some time? Yeah, it's a little bit of a mystery. And, you know, we used to talk about quakes as, you know, are we overdue for an earthquake? You know, is it like, you know, are we 10 months pregnant? It's going to happen sometimes. Right, right, right. And so lately they've been saying, well, you know, don't say that, right? Like a baby is definitely going to come, you know, at a certain point. But the thing is with earthquakes, you know, we have an average, right? So we know that in LA County there's a big earthquake on the San Andreasault every 100 to 150 years, right? But it's also not unheard of based off of what we know that there might be gaps of as long as 200 years, you know.

between big earthquakes and we're now at 169 years since the last since the last earthquake so um so it's not like unprecedented for us to be in this situation. Closer to the Mexican border, there is one possible theory. People might know of this big lake near the Mexican border called the Salton Sea. And it was most recently filled up in this in this canal flooding disaster about a century ago. But what people may not be aware of is that there was actually a much larger ancient lake called Lake Cahuilla. And over many millennia, it would fill up and then dry out and fill up and dry out. And that hasn't happened because of modern flood controlling technology. And so the theory is that when you actually go and look at the old records, Big earthquakes on the San Andreas fault usually happened when Lake Cahuilla was filling up with water. And that hasn't been happening. Now, does that mean that... if we just don't fill up the Salton Sea and have it fled to the extent that it did when it was Lake Kiwiah way back when that we can just avoid a big one on the San Andreas fault? No. The tectonic strain is still going to build up over time and it just might delay a big one from hitting the San Andreas in Southern California, but it's not going to prevent it from happening. Besides trying to get buildings up to code wherever that's possible, talk us through what effective earthquake preparation entails. Like what sort of local state and federal planning goes into this? Yeah. So cities have the primary responsibility for requiring retrofits if they choose to do it. So. you know, L.A., for example, in the 1980s, they said, hey, brick buildings are killers. You know, we're going to create a list of these buildings. And, you know, within a certain deadline, you're either going to have to retrofit them or demolish them. And if you don't do it, then we'll come at you with some kind of stick to get you to do it. And that was effective. In fact, that law is probably a major reason why no one died from a brick building collapse in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. And so you can do that with various types of buildings. But in California, the state has not, you know, it hasn't been a requirement from the state. So it's really up to cities, city councils.

and then their local building departments to enforce these rules. And so we might have a situation where a city that's very aggressive about earthquake safety and getting bad buildings to be retrofitted will do much better from a quake compared to a city that just hasn't taken that action. And a lot of it has to do with whether or not the city council, the mayor, they want to take it on. It's a thing that they don't have to do. And it's not like they're going to get any, they may not necessarily get any political benefit immediately. But in a lot of these cities that have required these retrofits, they just feel like, hey, if we're thinking about how to keep our city livable and economically viable after a big earthquake, these policies say that, hey, that's the right thing to do. President Trump has talked about downgrading the role of FEMA and directing state and local governments to take a greater role in disaster, response, and recovery with some money from the federal government. How do earthquake planning officials in California feel about that possibility? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that causes a lot of concern is our federal threats to getting rid of federal money for earthquake safety programs. I mean, there's a lot of money that can go to helping cities figure out this earthquake safety problem. Cities have applied for grants, for example, to... get um to help them get started on trying to figure out you know local laws to try to um get the their bad buildings retrofitted um and you know federal oversight has been very helpful um for getting california's uh and the west coast earthquake early warning system uh to get online this is a this is a um a system where you can download an app where it's actually automatically installed if you have an Android phone and it can give you an earthquake warning of a few seconds depending on where you are that earthquake shaking is coming in and so there's there is some anxiety among a lot of earthquake safety advocates and a lot of scientists if federal funding for earthquake safety programs is allowed to lapse What do you do with a few seconds of warning that an earthquake is coming? Are you supposed to run outside or get under a table? What do you do? So a lot. I remember the first time I got my earthquake early safety warning, I complete. panicked. My heart rate went up and it was very worrisome. But you get a little bit more of them and then it feels a little bit better. But what can you do? Well, one, you know it's an earthquake. And that's really helpful to know. And so it's not, you don't have to spare a few seconds to think, what do I do? So if you get the alert, you have this idea, oh, an earthquake might be coming. And then you can get under a desk, right, and take shelter.

It provides a lot of help if you're on a construction site, maybe on some kind of ledge. If you're in the dentist's office and the dentist is drilling into your teeth, it gives the dentist a few moments to take his or her hands out of your mouth. There's a bunch of benefits. Even in fire stations, there are some fire stations that have automatically equipped their garages to be hooked up to the earthquake early warning system. And that gives them enough time to raise up the garage doors so their fire engines don't get stuck if there's damage to the fire station in an earthquake. And I'm really curious about the recent earthquakes in Venezuela and the lessons that disaster planners in California, just residents of California might have taken from those quakes. Yeah, I think, I mean, the Venezuela quakes are really a reminder of what can happen if you just don't. If you don't take earthquakes seriously, for years, structural engineers in Venezuela have been saying, hey, there are problems with our building codes. In fact, if you built a building, concrete building to the minimum building standards, there's an 80% chance that they'll fall down. And for decades, there were specifically concerns about these concrete buildings that were hastily built up in the town of LaGuara on the coast. And lo and behold, you know, 80% of the buildings in that city came tumbling down. And so it's just a reminder that, you know, for cities that just haven't done much on earthquake safety, that the know-how is out there in terms of what to do and how to get it done. The question is if there's enough political will to get it done. One place that I worry about is San Francisco. It has a lot of these brittle concrete buildings. We've been talking about this issue for decades now, and they are making efforts to address it, but there's no law right now requiring vulnerable. concrete buildings to be retrofitted in San Francisco. And so that is something that worries me. Ron, what does earthquake preparation look like from the perspective of like an individual or a family? What are you supposed to keep on hand and do in case of emergency? Yeah, so one of the things that you can do is just look around your home, look around your apartment, look around your office. Are there bookshelves that are not bolted to the wall? You know, can you put a bungee cord around the front of a bookshelf to keep the books from falling down? These are things that you can do very...

easy, cheap things you can buy at a hardware store to keep your bookcase from tumbling over your pet or your toddler in an earthquake. Are there, you know, do you have any kind of glass frames over the bed? That's a big no-no. You know, do you have, you know, do you have a pair of shoes, you know, near your bed so that you can... you know, put your shoes or slippers on so you don't slice up your feet, you know, walking down the hallway to get to your kid. Those are just some of the... A few very simple things that you can easily accomplish in just a few hours that will make you all that more prepared so you don't have to go to the emergency room after an earthquake. The other things are making sure you have enough food and water. Do you have maybe at least have a gallon of water per person per day for maybe three days after an earthquake, ideally up to 14 days, but whatever you can do. and you know and make sure you have enough you know food medicine and water and the other thing that has also been helpful is just kind of talking to your neighbors you know thinking about um uh thinking about a plan of action to you know check in on your family members your neighbors uh because we're all going to be on our own in the first few days of a big quake You sound like a really well-adjusted guy, and there is nothing like having good, solid information to sort of set your mind at ease. But I am curious about how, you know, given your focus on earthquakes because of your job, how you live with the day-to-day possibility that, like, the big one could be 20 years from now or theoretically at any moment. Yeah, I actually think about it every day, right? When I get up to go leave the house, I more often than not, you know, bring my laptop because I'm like, what if the earthquake happens right now, you know? And so, but it is, it is something that you have to think about like all the time, right? I mean, and especially in places, and it's something to think about, you know, if you're a parent and the earthquake happens when you're at work and you have to go pick up your kid. what kind of backup plan do you have? Those are things that people really should be thinking about all the time. But it's actually good to have a little bit of stress and thinking about it because just that little bit of stress and a little bit of fear, it is a reason to get prepared and to kind of think about it. It's something where you don't want to have your head in the sand so that you just never think about it and you're completely caught flat-footed when the big one hits. Ron Lynn is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times based in San Francisco. He specializes in statewide earthquake safety, natural disasters, public health, and extreme weather. You can find his reporting at the LA Times. Ron, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us. True thing. Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. Again, I'm Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.