I’m going to assume it’s okay. Okay. So my name is Steve Hickman.
I’m the director of the Earthquake Science Center.
And welcome to Menlo Park. And welcome to the 17th annual
USGS Northern California Earthquake Hazards Workshop.
The goal of this workshop, of course, is to share the latest work that
we’ve done related to earthquake hazards and science and monitoring
and risk mitigation activities in the northern California area,
communicate with our colleagues, so that we can develop
state-of-the-art earthquake hazard products for northern California.
This has been an eventful year, as I hardly need to tell you all.
We’ve had 6.4 magnitude and 7.1 magnitude earthquakes in Ridgecrest,
California, which you’ll be hearing about during this workshop.
We also had the 30th anniversary of the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.
It coincided with rollout of the public alerting for ShakeAlert early warning
system, which you’ll be hearing about. And now we’ve had a series of
damaging earthquakes in Puerto Rico, which are ongoing and have
consumed a lot of public concern and of course attention from
the engineering and response and scientific communities.
I do represent the Earthquake Science Center, and we have about
150 scientists, technicians, and administration people here –
Menlo Park and Moffett Field, which is just about 10 miles south of here.
We also have an office in Seattle and in Pasadena, California.
If you wander the halls around here, you’ll notice things may seem
a little bit empty. It’s because most of our staff has
already moved to our new offices at Moffett Field in Mountain View.
And, in about two to three years from now, everyone from the USGS
will be there. We will have vacated this site, and we’ll all
be down there at Moffett Field. So, in a couple years, maybe three
years, Northern California Workshop will be there as it was in 2017.
This move to Moffett has been a great thing for us.
A lot of collaborations with NASA.
Bringing all the USGS people into one building – one office – has been great.
We actually communicate. It’s surprising how hard it is to
communicate with your colleagues when they’re one building away.
I want to say the turnout for this workshop has been really nice –
spectacular. We have 150 people signed up.
We have representatives from the U.S. Geological Survey;
from a number of universities; from geologic engineering
and risk management companies; from water, power, and energy
agencies; from the Coast Guard; Department of Health and
Human Services; and also disaster and technical – disaster response
and technical organizations from the Bay Area.
So it’s really nice to have this crowd here.
I really want to thank you for showing up.
Earthquake hazards were never more important in northern California
and the Bay Area than they are now. We feel earthquakes all the time.
It reminds us we live in earthquake country. And thank you for being here.
And I’m going to turn it over to Keith Knudsen, who is the
deputy science center director and coordinator for
Northern California Earthquake Hazards Program.
[Applause]
- Is that for me?
Thanks, Steve.
So, as Steve mentioned, today I’m wearing the hat –
my hat of coordinator for northern California for the
Earthquake Hazards Program of the USGS.
And, in addition to the goal of this meeting that Steve described,
which is to get together and share our research, one of the things
I’m really focusing on – where are the holes in the research?
What are the outstanding research questions?
Part of my role as a coordinator is to guide future research,
both internally and externally. So we’re going to have discussions
along those lines tomorrow afternoon. And I hope that all of you feel free
to come up and offer your suggestions and to make comments
and ask questions during that part of the session.
So I’m going to go over a few logistics. I’ll start with a safety moment.
So I used to do this by saying, so we all feel shaking, what do we do?
But I think I’m going to change that and say,
so everyone’s phone goes off at the same time.
What do we do?
Drop, cover, and hold on. Right.
And so we’ll drop, cover, and hold on. And then, if we need to evacuate
the building, there’s a door there with stairs downstairs.
There’s a door here. I think there’s a door behind this.
And we’ll all convene in the grassy area right outside. Okay?
- [inaudible] [laughter]
- Well, you’ll just have to grab coffee on the way out.
The bathrooms are to the right around the corner.
And, if they’re full, you can go downstairs.
There’s another set of bathrooms downstairs.
We have food today, and when you registered for the meeting, we’re asking
$10 for snacks for both days, and then lunch today is pizza, I think.
And tomorrow is Mediterranean. And if you signed up –
and only if you’ve signed up and paid your $10 for lunch,
you can join us and participate in lunch.
We’ll have poster sessions and lots of time to visit and see posters,
and they’re in the room right – you go through the doors –
start down the hallway and take your first right, in the big room
on your left there. Please, if you brought posters, hang them soon.
The Menlo Park Fire Department has a fire truck parked out in front.
So, when you tweet your photo in the fire truck – with the fire truck,
please be sure to mention what a great meeting this is.
Authors, please – in order to maintain the sanity of the organizers and the
session chairs, make sure your talks are loaded well before – talks are
loaded to this computer here. We’re using this computer.
We’re not plugging in other computers. Make sure they’re loaded well
before your talk. And we’re going to – we’re hoping to – as long as the
technology works, we’re going to record these talks and post them
on our seminar website. So I’ll be hopefully remembering
to ask each presenter whether they’re okay with that.
And the last thing for authors. You should know that there
are reporters – there’s at least one reporter in the room.
Whether that changes what you say, that’s up to you.
And the last thing I’d like to do is recognize the
organizing committee for this meeting.
So, Sarah Minson, who will come up here is next, is lead.
She provides a lot of the brainpower, and especially the energy, so thanks,
Sarah. And then I’ll read the names of the rest of the people.
Susan Garcia, Shane Detweiler, Jessica Murray, Belle Philibosian,
Austin Elliott, Alex Grant, David Schwartz, Annemarie Baltay,
Tom Hanks, and Scott Haefner.
So maybe we can start by thanking all of them.
[Applause]
Okay. And, Sarah.
- Hello. And we’re only two minutes behind schedule already. Woo hoo!
Okay, so I’m just going to very quickly walk you through what you will
be seeing over the next two days. We are going to start with
a 30th anniversary of Loma Prieta. And I know what you’re thinking.
Wasn’t Loma Prieta in 1989? Wasn’t the 30th anniversary in 2019?
But we did a quantitative analysis, and we determined that October 2019
is closer to January 2020 than it is to January 2019.
So, 30th anniversary of Loma Prieta, followed by looking at the Ridgecrest
sequence, which Steve was talking about as one of the many exciting
things that happened this year. Especially asking what we –
what the implications are of such a complex faulting sequence
for earthquake hazards in northern California.
We’ll do lightning talks and posters.
And another one of the very exciting things that happened this year is
ShakeAlert, the earthquake early warning system, went live in California.
Woo hoo! So we are also going to look at the rollout and what exciting
developments are happening in earthquake early warning.
That will take us to the end of the day. Everyone go home. Sleep. Come back.
Then tomorrow morning, we are going to talk about liquefaction, which is
a very important hazard in northern California, which has not been
discussed for a few years in this workshop, so we’re going to
try and bring that back. And then, sadly, this year
we lost Paul Spudich, so we’re going to have a little get-together
celebrating his life and career. And then finally, we are going to
have a mini-workshop inside the workshop.
It is the Russian nesting doll approach to workshop design.
We’re going to be looking at the known unknowns of earthquake hazards,
broken down into what we don’t know about seismic sources, what we
don’t know about shaking, and what we don’t know about risk.
And, by talking at five times normal speed, I have gotten us
back to almost the right time to start. Woo hoo!
[Applause]
So, let’s get things started with the 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta
earthquake, and our moderator is going to be Carol Prentice. Woo hoo!