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Welcome back, everyone! We are still on Day 2 of the Northern California Earthquake Hazards Workshop.
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And in the field of too many earthquake anniversaries, this is the 60th anniversary of both the 1964 Great Alaska Good Friday earthquake whose tsunami was devastating to parts of northern California,
And the 1964 Christmas flood, I mean, we look back and we asked what were the important lessons that we learned from those events.
To us, one of the important ones was that we were very lucky that they happened with that much separation and in that order, because if we had had an earthquake or a tsunami while we were dealing with the aftermath of a significant flood
it would have been a very different story. But here we are in a world with climate change and thus the chances of having extreme weather when an earthquake happens may be increasing.
Perhaps it affects the recovery. Perhaps it affects the secondary hazards like landslides and liquefaction and fire following earthquake.
These are all important changes because the climate is changing and we provide science for a changing world. So let's talk about this now.
Let's start off with remembering both the '64 earthquake and tsunami and the '64 flood with magnificent talks from Lori Dengler and Michael Furniss then let's get into climate change and earthquakes with a slate of four fantastic talks and to take us on this journey we have Steve Ingebritsen and Jia Wang-Connelly.
Thank you, Sarah.
I'm Steve Ingebritsen along with Jia Wang-Connely of the Cal OES (California Office of Emergency Services). We have the
privilege of moderating this session. And as Sarah alluded part of the idea here is
whether it's wetter or drier or hotter affects potential earthquake impacts consider for instance the increasing
severity potential fire or potential heat related mortality in a hotter state, maybe especially in southern California. The electricity goes up and greater landslide potential if it's wet and so on.
And there's also the idea of learning by analogy among different types of events. During the 1964 flooding which we'll hear about from Michael Furniss parts of northern California were semi-isolated
for a long period of time, as might, also be the case after severe earthquakes.
So Jia is going to introduce the first set of speakers and looking forward to this.
Thank you. Steve. Thank you, Sarah, for inviting me to co-moderate with Steve, it's an honor.
Our first speaker is Lori Dengler from Cal Poly Humboldt and the topic is the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964.
Hello I'm Laurie Dengler and I'm starting off this session on the environmental issues associated with earthquakes and tsunamis
and so forth with a discussion of the great Alaska earthquake, tsunami
and evolution of the U.S. Tsunami Warning System.
In 1964, we had one tsunami warning center, the Honolulu Observatory established in Hawaii in 1949 in response to the 1946
Aleutians earthquake and tsunami.
At that point, no telemeter information seismic observatories around the Pacific would telephone in
key wave arrival times. What was the purpose? A successful alert allowing people to evacuate before a tsunami arrived.
And nobody died and no one was injured there were successful alerts issued.
After the 1952 and 1957 Aleutians and Kamchatka earthquakes not so successful in 1960
after the great Chilean earthquake and tsunami; 61 people died in Hawaii 00:04:13.000 -- > 00:04:25.000 and more deaths in Japan. So what happened in 1964? I was fortunate to get a copy of the Honolulu Observatory log and note here that all times are Pacific Standard Time, so I'm taking a California perspective
and over here we have minutes after the earthquake. Earthquake happens, 7:36 p.m.
it takes 8 minutes before an alarm even sounds to wake up the people who are on duty at the Honolulu Observatory
and another half hour before they send out the request for seismic data. So over the next hour, we get reports from Manila, Hong Kong, Guam, Japan, Berkeley, and Tucson,
and we learn that we're not gonna get any help from Alaska because all communications are out.
So the first bulletin gets issued 86 minutes after the earthquake. We don't call them tsunamis, tidal wave or seismic sea wave.
We get the information that a severe earthquake has happened no estimate of the magnitude. The rough location don't know if the tsunami is there or not.
We do get one estimated arrival time from Honolulu the first arrival should be at about 900 hours.
Universal time or Zulu time.
Almost 2 hours after the earthquake, we get the second bulletin. At this point, we actually get some more information.
Lots of arrival times throughout the Pacific. Here's where we get the first arrival times on the West Coast.
Crescent City right around midnight now this information goes to the California Disaster Office, the predecessor of the Office of Emergency Services.
For reasons we don't understand, it takes them about an 1.5 hrs before they issue a bulletin.
So the Sheriff's Dispatch Office and Del Norte County receives their first official bulletin at 11:08 p.m.,
And it says nothing in it about what time the tsunami might be arriving.
Okay. So here's a snapshot of what may have been happening if you were in Del Norte County on that
cold March night and the tsunami is actually only 52 minute away from you
when that first bulletin arrives. This is highly exaggerated, but gives you a picture of what is sort of happening out there in the ocean.
So bulletin at 11:08 p.m., and in all of the slides you'll see this arrows that shows you when that bulletin came.
We know that high tide is about the same time, 11:30 p.m. and it's gonna be really high over 8 feet, and at this point, Del Norte County Sheriff's Deputies start going out
door-to-door telling people it's time to evacuate. Now, Crescent City folks had experienced a tsunami only 4 years earlier when the Chile tsunami arrived so they had some experience with it and most people up here have evacuated on getting that information. The first surge actually arrives a little bit earlier than what was estimated 11:50 p.m., and it's quite significant.
Notice it sitting here on high tide and it reaches a whopping 14.5 feet above what we call mean look or low water, our sort of reference level.
And it's a positive way. There's no drawdown. And it does affect the waterfront area.
Here's my sort of cartoon version of what it might have been like after that 11:50 p.m. surge came and went out.
This blue area was all flooded up to Front Street and this is based on eyewitness accounts.
Many people described it as quite similar to what had happened in the Chile tsunami in May of 1960.
Here's a photograph of what it actually looked like in as a result of the 1960 tsunami.
So all of this area here within this box might have looked very much like this.
So we have the water draws down and we have a second surge that comes in at 12:20 a.m. and it's not as big, it's still pretty high 12 feet above mean lower low water and people are still pretty much evacuated at that point.
And now there's a fairly long time where really it doesn't look like much is happening. It's night, it's a full moon so people describe being able to sort of see what's going on.
But, during this period, nearly an hour, it looks like nothing's happening.
So a lot of people at this point think the tsunamis over. They go back to check on their property.
Some wanna just sightsee and others unfortunately decide to party with poor concept with dire consequences.
So we know all of this solid red is the actual tide gauge recording. A third search begins to build,
but right here, right around 1 a.m., the gauge breaks and that's the tide gauge station right here.
You can see all the damage. We're fortunate that they were able to recover this much of the record.
Third wave we know is larger than the first, and smaller than the fourth. So it's definitely beginning to do some damage.
Again, from eyewitness accounts, everyone sort of agrees that it's the fourth surge that is highest
and we have a pretty good idea of how high it was even though the gauge is broken because it breaks over this barrier
and that gives us this number of 22 feet high.
Impacts were significant, 29 city black blocks flooded, 10 deaths in Crescent City, another near the mouth of the Klamath River and two others elsewhere in California.
This is the map that Orville Magoon, who worked for the Army Corps of Engineers at that time and always was fascinated with tsunamis.
He managed to convince his bosses for him to spend three days studying what had happened in Crescent City,
and many years later he shared these maps, his maps with me. I had an undergraduate student who converted them into a nice GIS project
and we know pretty much what happened to every structure and what the water heights were. Here we're looking at the harbor 1962 before 1964 after.
Many changes in the U.S. tsunami warning system, as a result was very clear that the system in Hawaii was not adequately providing information to Alaska in particular.
So in 1967 the Alaska Regional Tsunami Warning Center under the jurisdiction of Coast and Geodetic Survey was established.
With a very limited task in other words, big earthquake occurs offshore of Alaska,
your job is to provide information to coastal residents of Alaska. In 1973, it switched to the weather service in 1982.
The responsibility was expanded to Alaska and the West Coast. In 1996 it becomes the West Coast Alaska Tsunami Warning Center.
In 2013, it becomes the National Tsunami Warning Center is what it is today.
So today, we have two U.S. Tsunami Warning Centers in red. This is the area of responsibility for the National Tsunami Warning Center,
and all of this in orange is under the auspices of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
It's not a perfect system. In fact, there are some big challenges and the biggest one is because these two Tsunami Warning Centers have evolved for decades
with different responsibilities, different areas of responsibility, different bosses, and completely different computer systems. One is a Unix space system, the other is a Microsoft system.
They have a different chain of command. They don't have the same boss. I've been sitting on NOAA's Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel for the last couple of years and our number one
recommendation was gotta unify these systems so that they're using the same software that they can actually back each other up that their protocols are the same,
and NOAA has agreed, has made this a top priority as well. The problem is the expense, you know, rewiring both systems so that they speak the same language,
but hopefully in a couple of years they'll have the same logos too. So thank you very much.
If you have questions, please get ahold of me. All of my talks are collaborative work with
many different agencies, organizations and in particular the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Lori, for the great presentation where it detailed account on what happened. There are some questions for you in the chat.
And The next next speaker is Michael Furniss also from Cal Poly Humboldt remembering the Christmas storm of 1964.
Hi, I'm Michael Furniss, I'm retired from the research branch of the U.S. Forest Service at Redwood Sciences Lab and still up to a number of different things and happy to talk about the 1964 flood.
It was a big, banging California geomorphology, lots of superlatives, epic, biblical, the thousand-year flood,
and we've seen nothing so big since. We did just have a 30-year flood on the Mad River this month.
The evidence of the flood is still everywhere in our watersheds and it provided us with a valuable learning opportunity, a hard one and triggered many policy and infrastructure changes.
So this is what I'll talk about. What happened? The landscape it rained on, landslides and gullies, lessons and policy changes, and the future.
So lots happened in 1964. It was almost like 1968, but more happening than in most years it was really significant.
I won't read these for you, but I will note that in hydrology the Smith River in Del Norte County recorded its lowest daily average flow ever in October of 160 cfs and it peaked 2 months later at 228,000 cfs.
Also, found a few years ago that Vietnam had its worst ever recorded flood. I've done a lot of work in Vietnam and I was just flabbergasted when I found this fatalities on the y-axis its worst flood ever in the same year that we went to war with Vietnam in Vietnam.
And these floods terraces are still almost ubiquitous. In my early career I walked a lot of creeks and nearly all of them had large, 1964 flood terraces that have been cut through and most are likely still mostly there.
Some are over 10 meters tall and some were associated with log gems like this one, but certainly not exclusively and sometimes we got tired of talking about the '64 flood and hope for another huge one we never got it and we're still talking about this flood nearly 60 years later.
And 50 years later, Jay Patton and I produced a 50 year anniversary event. It was sold out.
We had a great time. We had a lot of really interesting short presentations and most of my slides came from folks that presented there, and big thanks to them.
There are many young folks here that should note that the geology group at Redwood National Park made huge contributions to land use to geomorphology and how we understand extreme events, including but not limited to Marianne Madej, Randy Klein, Danny Hagans, Bill Weaver, Darcy Short, Terry Sprider, Mike Sanders, and others,
and it's really worth noting that because we're sort of a world centre of ideas about how to do land management so that it doesn't interact so badly with these huge floods.
So of course it was an atmospheric river sneaking up from the tropics. We didn't have this kind of satellite technology then and we didn't call them atmospheric rivers so this not a shot of the 1964 atmospheric river but it was one of those giant super wet rivers that visited northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho in
late December, 1964. California got the worst of it as it mainly came from the tropics.
So this is real data from the National Weather Service and essentially it was an extremely wet atmospheric river from the south
and then it met a wet frontal system from the north and they collided and stalled over the west and rained and rained and rained and it plotted up as about a 105-year flow on the Eel River.
And so here's cumulative rainfall from Randy Klein. You see Honeydew's almost always in the lead if you don't consider the Smith River, and then Richardson Grove on the South Fork of the Eel is a pretty good surrogate for the Eel River, which really had some of the biggest peaks anywhere and it was basically a 10-day period of heavy rain and snow,
but it was really a 3-day period where it rained unbelievable amounts. You can see over here it's like more than 30 inches in a few days and a lot of that came in less than 3 days.
And then following that there was additional rain and so this big peak here is what caused the huge flood peak and then this total rain fall was responsible really for the really pervasive
landslide that accompanied this flood. So here's a little heat map, 35 inches were recorded in Hoopa over the full storm sequence.
Just amazing, and then this is just those 3 days when things really got pumped up. This shows the Eel River hydrographs for the '64 flood and also compared to 1974 in 1999, which were the largest peaks since and I think, 2024 is gonna go on this chart not as big as the '64 flood but the Mad River was just a few
feet below the level of the '64 flood level just a couple weeks ago. And you can see just a tremendous amounts of discharge.
Cubic feet of water staggering amounts of water ran off all told an estimated half-trillion cubic feet came downstream in a ten-day period.
And the Eel River stands out as the biggest peak even though it's only a quarter of the size of the Klamath it had larger peaks than the Klamath River.
And this is looking at antecedent moisture content or antecedent precipitation index.
And this carries over into case prior rainfall, and so this long duration of saturated soil conditions along with denuded hill slopes for unregulated logging contributed to the massive landsliding.
And so here's a flood frequency workup that Randy Klein did. Many characterized this as the 1,000-year flood, but hydrologically it was just a 103-year flood.
And we'll always value our records although this expression of probability is no longer much good with the rapid warming we're seeing.
As the future is not likely to mirror the past. But here it is. And when we look at landsliding, it's certainly transcended the 100-year returning roll, even though we don't calculate that for landslide density or frequency.
And in land use wise it was unprecedented. So why isn't he talking about rain on snow?
Was it a rain on snow event? Well, in the north coast it was not. And there was snow in the Sierra Mountains in the Oregon Cascades, but there was very little snow on the ground in our coastal mountains.
And Nancy Dean from the National Weather Service we invited her to our 50-year event
she did a bunch of digging and came up with the data for this. This was the amount of snow on the ground on the nineteenth.
Not a lot of data for the North Coast, but Nancy verified that and it's good data.
And the values are in inches. So significant snow began on December 27th after the big peak,
and fell through about January third with the break on New Year. So despite what everyone believed nearly everyone I think including me it was not a rain on snow event; it was in the Oregon Cascades and the idea of rain on snow came strongly out of Corvallis at the time.
And that may be what I think we all picked up this idea in the absence of data. Also a lot of the pictures that came out after the '64 flood from helicopters and whatnot there was snow on the ground and that sort of confirmed the idea that maybe it was a rain on snow that it wasn't not here.
And so as Gerry Franklin might say, "wrong again! What a delight!" It's great to be wrong and examine why you made those assumptions as I have done.
So this tremendous flood fell onto a really pervasively damaged landscape. Prior to the 1964 flood, there was a tremendous amount of logging happened.
Most of the watersheds on the North Coast were over half eroded and logged or about 14,000 miles of road, many of them in the wrong place.
And about 57,000 miles of bulldozer skid trails. After World War II, we had access to large bulldozers
usually the D8 size, very large redwood material to move and no forest practice regulations whatsoever, and so a lot of the landscape looked like this
and this is what the flood found, and all with no forrest practice regulation or no culture of soil and water protection by and large.
And so the vulnerability of the landscape was about as extreme as you could imagine. So this is Willow Creek,
nine communities were completely destroyed especially along the south fork of the Eel. Nearly all communities were impacted;
27 major bridges were lost and an estimated $200 million dollars in financial losses. This is the Smith River near its peak
in 1964. There are several of these mind blowing high water marks around the oven of the giants for the Eel River and I always slow down and try and imagine what that might have looked like in that place,
and it's like, you just kind of shake your head. Extensive damage to the classically unstable Northwestern Pacific Railroad,
it took immense effort over many months to rebuild this and of course it didn't stay rebuilt.
And this was no place to put a railroad, but there weren't trucking related highways at the time how to get that redwood to market in San Francisco and it's astounding that it ran as long as it did, but required constant rebuilding.
It was the most expensive line in the whole country. And here's a picture of Orick.
You might remember the Palm Cafe on Highway 1; lots of cattle were lost near the coast.
So one big cow floated out to sea on a log and was saved. And after the flood line, after the flood mudlines were visible everywhere in the right period for us.
And it really gave a great indication of what the high water looked like and most of these are gone.
They're kind of washed away, but I found one last year on the Avenue of the Giants.
And so when you're walking around repairing redwood forests, look for these because some some little remnants are still there and it can tell you how high the water got in that location.
Overbank flood deposits and again this is that high water mark And so landslides. It wasn't just a big peak flow on a damaged landscape.
This long duration soaking rains builds poor pressure in the slopes and this will decline quickly if there is a break but when it rains a lot for days with no substantial breaks the water buoys up the land reduces friction increases weight and whoosh down it goes and so these long duration soaking rains triggered thousands of landslides, many of them really massive and you'll see them all over
still. This is the bare basin slide on the upper south Sisky Fork of the Smith in the Middle Fork watershed.
Millions of cubic meters and it took out all the bridges on the Middle Fork Smith along Highway 199.
And you can still snorkel in the Middle fork and find lots of bridge records wreckage and washed out covers in the river.
And most of those are from the 1964 flood. This is from Redwood Creek.
Massive landsliding on the North Coast, removing a lot of soil productivity and massively impacting the stream channels.
And the early research that was done by Dick Janda and others really kind of concentrated on the landsliding and how much of it there was and how kind of unprecedented this was but these landslides are what you could see in the aerial photos.
And when Redwood National Park hired a brilliant cadre of geologists, they started kicking around in the brush.
And what did they find? Gullies and lots of them and if you add up the cubic meters from all the gullies that happened is comparable to the amount of landsliding that happened,
but you just couldn't really see these on the air photos and they were caused by disruption and diversion of hill slope drainage by roads and skit trails.
And so this was a really huge impact. We couldn't see on the air photos. You could see it now with Lidar.
These were all over the place and really influenced a lot of the thinking about roads and low volume roads in our wildlands.
And there were huge amounts of wood mobilized by landslides and by a vulsion of riparian lands.
Many huge jams were formed. Most of them were burned. Many large log decks in mills near the coast, which is where most of them were, were lost to the sea.
And so in terms of what we did about this, one of the sad things was, well, most of the North Coast river estuaries were diked off in the early twentieth century.
And in fact, this is likely the biggest reason for the loss of Alsalmanid runs. But those that were not diked off like Redwood Creek, after the flood they were put in bondage in big dikes.
And these keystone estuary functions were lost, like here at the mouth of Redwood Creek.
We're finally getting after these. It's not easy, but we're finally doing it, and restoring this keystone estuary function in many places.
And this is likely to bring back a bun in salmon runs, but it'll take some time.
And after this happened, there was a really increased recognition of the impacts of logging and it led to the establishment of Redwood National Park and its expansion in 1968 and I think '78 was the expansion and a bunch of other changes in in how we look at land management and how we do forest practices and the institution of the California FARC practice rules, now some of the most stringent in the state
in 1973 and so many changes in attitudes and policy were engendered by this flood.
It was a real learned experience and just to wrap it up, my friend Jim Goodridge, he's long retired now, but when I was collecting rainfall data on the Smith River, we would talk a lot because I had big numbers.
A wonderful guy and he would always say this, it was even on his stationary. The biggest one is yet to come and indeed that has to be true.
Just close with if the next big earthquake comes when the slopes are saturated as they are now, landsliding would be greatly increased.
And so that flooding and that loading of the slopes with persistent soaking rainfall is a real factor in the vulnerability of the landscape to large shaking.
So thank you very much.
Thank you, Michael. For the great presentation. Appreciate the historic photo you put together and back then and now it's a very illuminating.
Our next speaker is, Daniel Swain from UCLA. His presentation, "Will increasing 'hydroclimate whiplash'
in a warming climate amplify co-seismic hazards in California and beyond.
Well, thanks for having me here today and the invitation to speak. This is my first earthquake related meeting, which I'm excited to be here because I've actually given a fair bit of thought
to the kinds of meteorological hazards as they might coincide with seismic hazards in a place like California.
So I'm excited to have the opportunity to talk about all that today.
I want to jump right into things with one of the key things that I see as germane to this intersection between extreme weather and climate change and code seismic hazards.
One of these is what I like to call the the expanding atmospheric sponge effect really used to describe why both California and many other parts of the world are in many cases already experiencing, but increasingly will become even more likely to experience increasing 'hydroclimate whiplash.'
In a warming world. So in other words, greater swings and sometimes faster swings between extremely dry conditions on the one hand and extremely wet conditions on the other.
And this works really pretty well as a tangible visual metaphor. What the sponge and the increasing size of the sponge represents is the increasing water vapor holding capacity of the atmosphere which rises exponentially in a warming climate
by about 7% per degrees centigrade of warming. This is a consequence of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, which essentially relates to the basic thermodynamics of the atmosphere and the notion that the amount of water vapor that can be held by the atmosphere when it is saturated
increases quite rapidly as temperatures go up. This is probably pretty intuitive because in the sense that it raises the ceiling on how intense precipitation can become.
So this is the primary reason why precipitation extremes, heavy down pours become more intense in a warming climate, but a little bit less intuitive and I think less widely known is that this very same effect also increases the potential
dryness of landscapes because essentially it increases the effective thirstiness of the atmosphere. The atmospheric evaporative demand, sometimes as quantified by the vapor pressure deficit.
And these are all technical terms of saying that although the ceiling on how intense precipitation can becomes does go up rather quickly in a warming climate.
So too does the ceiling and how intense evaporation can become. And in many cases, you actually see significant increases in the precipitation extremes, the heavy downpours on the one hand, and on the rapid erudification or desiccation of the landscape on the other hand due to the really the other side of the same coin.
Larger sponge can soak up more water, it can also produce more water if you bring it out.
On the kitchen counter or in the case of the analogy from clouds in a warming climate. And so this explains really two sides of the hydrologic coin and really gets up why we expect to see increasing hydroclimate whiplash in many regions globally, which is the focus of a review that we currently working on right now where we find that indeed everywhere in purple, on this map are places where we expect to see
significant increases in hydroclimate whiplash. These swings from extremely wet to extremely dry conditions or vice versa.
In a warming climate you may notice that this essentially encompasses all populated land areas over most of the continents with very few exceptions.
So what this means is that I don't really need to do a complicated map of where the seismic hazards are and where the precipitation whiplash changes are, pretty much it's just going to map where the seismic hazards are because the increases in precipitation whiplash are so ubiquitous over land areas that anywhere where there is a place where people live on
Earth. There's likely to be an increase in the, hydroclimate variability and whiplash
that might amplify the risk of coseismic hazards. I'll get to that in a moment.
We do see in general that these increases in projected blush are higher over land and they emerge earlier with less warming.
We also find that there is a projected acceleration of increases in whiplash between somewhere between about one and 3 degrees centigrade of global mean warming.
Well, guess where we are right now. We're right around 1.3 to 1.4 centigrade degrees integrated global mean warming.
So we're right in right smack dab in the middle of that part of the plot where the rate of whiplash increases is quite rapid.
So I'll hold on to your hats.
And to bring it back to California, I don't think you need to motivate sort of why California is a good poster child for all this, which is to say, well, we've seen a lot of this precipitation with flash in recent years and here's just some visual reminders of what it looks like up by Orville Dam and like Orville up in Butte County just over about an 8 or 9
year period we've seen two complete swings of the pendulum from extremely dry or record dry to record wet and then back again and again.
So this is sort of something we're seeing in real-time in the real world in this part of the world.
And in California, in particular, this is likely to be a global hot spot of changes in what we call precipitation whiplash based on previous research that we've completed several years ago suggesting that even in places like California where the average precipitation changes are expected to be relatively modest overall but or maybe even uncertain in signs so we don't know if it'll increase slightly or decrease slightly.
What we do know is that there's likely to be an increase in the precipitation variability overall.
So more of the very wet conditions, but also again more of the very dry conditions leading to an increase in what we call precipitation whiplash.
This is particularly pronounced if you look at the seasonal cycle in California. You know, in California we already have a strongly seasonal annual cycle of precipitation.
We get wet winters and dry summers generally with transition seasons in between. But the reality is that in a warming climate we expect that seasonal cycle to become even more accentuated with potentially drier autumns and springs and even winter winters.
And this has a few practical implications. It means we have a shorter, sharper rainy season with a greater potential for intense but limited duration bursts of extreme runoff and flooding, but it also means, and this is probably what's most relevant for me coseismic risk perspective, that the intensity of the autumn wildfire season and the emergence of wildfire season in spring will both be later
and earlier respectively, leading to a longer and potentially more intense fire season. But also the potential for that increased runoff and soil saturation during the core winter months when we're most likely to get those extreme precipitation of events and flood events in the first place may also be going up.
And so the seasonal cycle amplifies as well as the inter-annual variability in a warming California.
And on the wet side of things, this mainly comes from the fact that that atmospheric rivers storms, these corridors of extremely concentrated atmospheric water vapor, are intensifying.
In a warming climate and we will eventually begin to see historically unprecedented atmospheric river storms in California.
These kinds of events are both a blessing or a curse depending on the context for California they deliver most of our much needed water but they also are responsible for almost all of the major floods that happen in this part of the world.
And what we see in doing our own research in the past couple of years is that the risk of a really big multi-weak extreme storm sequence and California widespread severe or catastrophic flood event has increased quite considerably in the background while we've been busy worrying about drought over the past decade.
In fact, between about 1920 and 2020, so about over a century that comprises most of the global warming that's happened so far, the likelihood of seeing one of these extremely strong and wet storm sequences in California that could produce as much as 50 to 100 inches of rainfall in some of California's mountains by the way has probably already doubled.
Out there in the background while we were busy dealing with droughts and wildfires. So this is sort of a hazard that's out there in the background lurking quietly but eventually won't be so quiet.
And wildfire, I think, is perhaps maybe more an obvious concern in this part of the world, but nonetheless, We haven't seen everything we're going to see yet.
And there's a quite a strong observational and process based modeling that suggests that the relationship between historical vegetation dryness wildfire extent and severity is the main link between wildfire and climate change in a warming climate.
This may be a nonlinear response. And this is maybe one of the reasons why we've underestimated the wildfire impacts in warming climate so far, which is that we're not so good at understanding some of these relationships between exponential processes in the atmosphere and their relationship with the biosphere and the land service, which of course is what matters primarily in the context of wildfires.
So we know the climate change is making wildfires larger and more intense and that they become more dangerous in recent years and that climate change is one of the major reasons why this has happened.
In fact, the, when we look at the occurrence of extreme fire weather conditions in Ottoman, California and we find that they have already doubled
over the past few decades. So one study we shown a doubling in the likelihood of an extremely severe flood event that lurking in the background even though we haven't seen one recently, we also find a doubling and the same using the same models
that the risk of extremely severe fire weather conditions have doubled over a shorter period. So they are not mutually exclusive things and they do appear to be evolving in tandem in conjunction with one another.
And again, increasingly dry vegetation, the dry side of the expanding atmospheric sponge is the primary physical reason why that's happening.
So to get to the matter at hand, co-seismic hazard earthquakes and weather extreme weather and climate change, I want to go through a few different sort of thought experiments the way I've been thinking about this in recent years.
One is that there are some dry sides of co-seismic hazards. One, I think the most obvious one is the risk of fire.
And this can take the form of wildfire or also of these sort of for lack of a better term, hybrid, urban, wildland conflagrations that emerge in the WUI,
the Wildland Urban Interface, as the acronym is called. And I distinguish between these because wildfires are the ones that are occurring out in open land burning primarily vegetation, but sometimes causing harm when they burn into communities.
But in recent years, in many, many parts of the American West, we have seen what are arguably hybrids between wildfires and old school past century urban conflagrations.
Where fires that may or may not have begun as wildfires progressed into populated areas and then kept going.
So it wasn't that just the homes of the edge of the open space burned, but these fires once established in an urban setting with without a lot of capacity to to fight them under sufficiently adverse conditions effectively become urban firestorms.
You've seen that in California multiple times. We've seen that in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and too many other places really to list.
This is something that would be a major concern. We all know that in San Francisco in 1906 most of the city burned down in the wake of that devastating earthquake.
That is not something I think that's in the past as a really foreseeable risk and potential hazard.
I think this is actually a risk, especially if we get an earthquake at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I'll get to that in a moment. This risk may be re-emerging much as we've seen the reemergence of urban firestorms due to increasingly severe wildfire conditions in recent years.
This is probably because earthquakes can directly trigger numerous simultaneous ignition. So it's one thing if you got to deal with one or two fires during a strong wind event, but if you have dozens or hundreds of ignitions all at once, yikes! That's a big yikes!!
And they can also impede directly emergency response. You have broken water pipes, you have blocked ingress and egress routes, that man man matters both for the ingress of firefighting resources and the egress, evacuation of people trying to get out of the way.
Lack of personnel they're busy dealing with other crises disruption of information flow you know to do the authorities know where the fires are in the moment do people know where to evacuate from them?
Due to power infrastructure damage that's something we already have seen absent earthquakes just during extreme weather events in recent years
in California and beyond. And then we also have the amplification of water scarcity challenges during drought because earthquakes can disrupt not only local water supplies by breaking a water main, say on your street so your neighborhood is cut off from water for a few days.
That's in many cases the best local case scenario, but there's also that cascades to city level when larger pipes or when treatment systems go offline due to damage or power outages.
But also in California where we're piping a lot of water from hundreds of miles away from northern California to southern California, for example or from Hatch Tetchy to the San Francisco Bay Area.
We have a lot of long-range water conveyance infrastructure, the forms of canals and pipelines, some of which directly cross major fault lines which could be the the epicenter of a major quake.
There could be significant ground displacements. And if that happens, you know, we're even talking about risk to storage facilities to dams,
and what all this means is that the water supply consequences as a major quake could actually be quite widespread and could spread
well beyond the radius of damaging shaking from the quake itself. If there's a northern California earthquake, it's very possible that southern California could see water supply challenges or if there were an earthquake in in a somewhat unusual region, say in the Sierra Foothills, that could adversely affect the water supply for San Francisco quite easily even if the quake itself was not directly damaging.
All right, and then we have what I'm gonna call the "wet side" co-seismic because it's the most obvious of which are probably things like landslides and rock slides that might happen anyway during really wet conditions but which an earthquake might greatly supercharge the risk, and this is true both for shallow Slope failures, you know and that would be especially true during recent or ongoing heavy rain,
but also and probably more importantly deep seated landslides. We've seen this in any number of recent earthquakes in what places at what times of year most recently in Japan just a few weeks ago during either an especially wet season order and especially wet period where the soil calm becomes saturated to great death because those deep-seated slow failures are responding mainly to deep and prolonged saturation of the soil column
over time, the earthquake can then be the trigger to to let that slope go. But then there's also the risk of inland inundation
and here I am not talking about tsunami hazards that is a separate problem, but here I'm talking about things like levy failures particularly in the San Francisco Bay Delta region or in San Joaquin Valley where some of those structures are frankly over a century old, they're not well engineered, and in some places, have experienced 5 or 10 feet of land subsidence in recent years.
So this is something where the infrastructure is already vulnerable and at risk and it would not necessarily take an extremely large earthquake to cause failures,
it might take even a moderate earthquake could potentially cause those problems. There's also the risk of structural emergencies on dams or dam auxiliary structures.
If dams develop suspicious cracks, if there's suspicious land movements, upstream of dams or landsliding into the upstream reservoirs or damage to the outflow structures or the spillways.
All of that, for example, what happened the Oroville Dam spillway emergency back in 2017;
the dam didn't fail, but there were serious concerns that there could be a catastrophic outcome because of non- seismic damage to that spillway.
There are some high hazard dams, frankly, in California too that the Army Corps of Engineers has highlighted as being both at risk
from earthquakes and extreme storms. Some of these are immediately within a couple of miles of densely populated areas in southern California.
It's difficult, I'm not a structural engineer, it's difficult to quantify the risk of dam failures in this context, but it's something I think that we really can't ignore when we're looking
at the sort of plausible worst case scenarios especially when it comes to co-seismic hazards and those risks would be amplified under conditions when those dams are already under stress so during an extreme storm sequence or something.
That all brings up how we'd handle downstream evacuations. Under conditions of what some folks call a crisis within a crisis,
and all of this is likely seasonal. There's a seasonality to the co-seismic hazards in California.
What do I mean by that? Well, the risk of post-earthquake wildfires and an urban hybrid conflagrations as I mentioned that's pretty seasonal because that's going to happen primarily during fire season.
So that's going to be summer and autumn, although sometimes also winter in southern California, we do get those offshore wind events into January sometimes.
The risk of post-quake landslides or inland flooding from levee failures things like that's probably highest in the winter although it could linger into spring either for deep-seated landslides requiring saturation of the soil column or also for levee failures in the San Joaquin Valley if it's a wet year and there's a lot of
snow melt, which can persist all the way into June sometimes. Both of these conditions, notably, are likely increasing in a warming climate quite substantially, given the seasonal changes that I mentioned, but also just the sort of the increases in hydroclimate extremes generally on both sides of the spectrum, on wet and dry.
So just a quick thought experiment about a plausible worst case co-seismic hazard scenario, well, from a fire perspective, that might be a large quake in or near the San Francisco Bay Area or the Los Angeles Metro during autumn, during an especially dry year or a drought perhaps and immediately prior to or during an offshore wind event.
So either the those post-quake fires get ignited and then winds arrive or even worse those fires ignite while the winds are already strong.
That's likely something that might happen between August and October, but could potentially happen as late as December or January
in southern California, depending on the year. What's a worst case post-quake landslide or flood scenario?
Well, again, a large quake in either the San Francisco Bay Area or the LA Metro, but in this case occurring just after or perhaps during a fairly intense storm sequence with ongoing or imminent flooding and a super saturated cell column, that's a recipe for a big mess.
An alternative is again a more modest quake near the San Francisco Bay Delta or in the Sierra Foothills where the vulnerabilities are higher and it would take a less extreme a co-occurring meteorological event to cause big problems
and this would likely be at the opposite time of year in the cool season, probably December through March, although again, depending on the details, maybe through April or May, depending on where we're talking about and if it's an exceptionally wet year or not.
All of this brings me to the the question of whether we need to be thinking about developing co-seismic hazard scenarios in conjunction with things like ShakeOut or the HayWired Scenario as somebody who's been working on ArkStorm 2.0
with USGS colleagues in recent years. There's a lot of similarity structurally between these kinds of disaster scenarios.
By design, many of the same folks who worked on these earthquake scenarios have also worked on ArkStorm, but maybe there's a really an important need for Nexus for research
involving the USGS and California universities here. I think that this is sort of screaming out for better contingency planning and a better understanding of what these co-seismic hazards actually are.
Everything I've said in this talk is speculative. I have not done any research on the co-seismic aspect of things.
I think it's really a potentially fruitful avenue for that research and probably an important thing for us to be looking at.
So with that I'll close. I'll thank everybody for their attention and look forward to the questions at the end of this session.
Thank you.
Thanks, Daniel, for another fantastic talk and I'm sure it is going to inspire discussion in the session.
There's already some ticklers in the chat I see. Our next speaker is Deepti Singh
of Washington State University on compounding climate events.
Good afternoon everyone and thank you for the opportunity to participate in this workshop. I'm an assistant professor in School of the Environment at Washington State University and an author on the 5th U.S. National Climate Assessment.
As part of the assessment, I contributed to the climate trends chapter and the focus on compound events.
And today I want to share some findings from the report to contribute to the discussion on disaster resilience in a changing climate.
So I want to emphasize three key points today. The first is that we have a strong understanding now that human activities are changing climate conditions and in particular contributing to the increasing frequency and severity of extreme events that pose substantial hazards to human and natural systems.
And this is creating more opportunities for their interaction with other natural hazards. We also have a growing body of evidence now that's suggests that when climate hazards occur they tend to disproportionately impact vulnerable communities.
This includes, low income communities, rural communities, African-American communities, indigenous people, and tribal peoples.
So as we think about building resilience, we need to identify solutions that can help address multiple community objectives.
This includes addressing the inequities that exist in our society today as well as adapt to changing climate risks.
Societal risks are shaped not just by the frequency and severity of our climate or natural hazard, but by their interaction with other socio-economic and geographic factors.
By this I mean the climate hazards or national hazards for that matter pose risks when they occur in places where human or national systems exist,
and they're also shaped by the vulnerability of those systems or their capacity and ability to cope with and manage that hazard.
And this really helpful framework from Simpson et al., 2021, explicitly includes response as a driver of risk.
As, you know, in the society we live in today, there is, an increasing opportunity for interaction between climate hazards as well as their interaction with other natural hazards
and this affects vulnerability to individual hazards and can also complicate decision-making and impact the ability to respond to disasters or emergencies.
So one example of how climate risks or climate hazards can interact is when extreme rainfall occurs on burned landscapes.
Together, these increase landslide risks.
Another example is from 2020 when we had a very active wildfire season and smoke from these fires impacting a large fraction of the U.S. population and this occurring while the COVID
19 pandemic was happening and together these interacted in impacting human health. In particular, the respiratory risks from both COVID-19 and smoke from wildfires led to magnifying risks
To human health. In addition, climate risks can occur with completely unrelated factors. For example, wildfires and earthquakes and
together these risks can aggregate on communities. For example, mortality associated with these 2 hazards can be compounding if they occur either
back-to-back, or even simultaneously.
Such interactions are already happening around the world. For example, this is an event from early 2023, a major earthquake affected Turkey and Syria.
The climate conditions at the time impacted the death toll from the earthquake as well as disaster response.
They were freezing conditions, heavy snowfall, and freezing rain that impacted rescue efforts and contributed to the death toll associated with the earthquake
because of the number of people that were trapped in these cold conditions. A month later the region was impacted by heavy rains that caused flooding to these already affected earthquake communities before they had the capacity or the ability to recover from the earthquake that had just occurred.
And this resulted in additional deaths.
There are also examples of places around the world where such interactions are happening.
This is a figure from Munich RE showing various hazards around the world that occurred in 2023.
The red dots here represent geophysical events like earthquakes. Green dots represent meteorological events such as tropical storms, cyclones, hurricanes.
The blue dots represent flooding or hydrologic events and the orange dots represent climateological events like extreme heat or drought.
So I want to draw your attention to a couple of regions. For example, much of South and Southeast Asia saw both hydrologic hazards and geophysical or earthquake really these are I think mostly were earthquakes that occurred, and this was within one year several communities in these regions were impacted by both.
Similarly, we see even in western parts of South America and Central America and a co-occurence of these hazards within a single year.
We know that climate change is exacerbating the risk of hydrologic events.
In fact, that's one of the clearest signals we have of climate change; the intensification of heavy rainfall events.
These risks? Let's talk about next let's talk about, you know, closer to, to us in the Western U.S., how climate hazards interact with a region where the earthquake hazard is potentially high.
So the National Climate Assessment concluded that rainfall and temperature patterns across the U.S. are changing. So these represent changes in temperature, annual temperature, and precipitation that have occurred over the last few decades
and we see an amplified warming across the Western U.S., and the Western U.S. has also experienced drying over this period;
unlike the eastern U.S. Together, these rising temperatures and reduced precipitation are contributing to drought risk.
In addition, we're seeing an increase in other types of extreme events. So here we see an increase in hot days or days with temperatures above 95°F as well as an increase about 17% increase in the southwest of the amount of precipitation falling on the top 1% of heaviest rainfall days.
And so, together, these are increasing the changing climate conditions as well as extreme events are contributing to increased risk of large wildfires as well as the hydrologic hazards that are associated with them.
And across the U.S. these changes in climate conditions and extremes are contributing to substantial damages to society. This is one metric showing the $1 billion dollar weather disasters across the U.S. in 2020 and there were 22 of such disasters.
And these include economic damages that result on communities but also damages to critical infrastructure, damage to homes and property
that leaves communities vulnerable to subsequent disasters. As communities experience
such disasters this results in elevated vulnerability to future risks and could sometimes also result in higher exposure.
For example, in 2020 when several towns in the Pacific Northwest were completely destroyed by wildfires and many people were homeless or living in temporary housing
at the time, it left them more exposed to other hazards and it also affected the ability of those communities as well as regional and national emergency management to respond
to disasters. And so as we see an increase in climate hazards with climate extremes, we're seeing the chances of multiple climate hazards either occurring simultaneously or back-to-back
across several parts of the U.S., including the Western U.S., and such interactions can have amplifying effects on human and natural systems
that would result in impacts that were larger than if those hazards occurred just individually. And as I mentioned earlier, there are certain commodities that are disproportionately vulnerable to such hazards.
And so these compound events that is you know the events that represent the the interaction of climate hazards or has climate and natural hazards across space and time are particularly placing a burden on frontline communities and affecting their ability to respond and cope.
With, this increasing occurrence of disasters. And so the NCA calls for
infrastructure design, planning and governance as well as disaster preparedness to explicitly account for the risk of compound events.
And I want to use a couple of examples to illustrate the importance of accounting for such risks as we try to build a resilient society.
So this is actually an example of an event that affected the region I live in in the Pacific Northwest.
And this was just from 2 weeks ago when within a span of one week, we experienced three winter storms.
We had a snowstorm with extremely cold conditions and extremely strong winds that resulted in downed trees that impacted energy infrastructure and left thousands of people across our region
without power.
And a few days later, before the region had recovered from the closures and the down trees and the freezing conditions we experienced an ice storm
that converted all of that snow as you can see on the top right image here to ice.
And three days later, we had another ice storm and this has resulted in numerous impacts to the region that we're still recovering from.
In addition to the damage to roads and trees across the region this event resulted in a really high number of emergency visits, highest that the region the city of Portland has seen in several years.
It also led to unprecedented demand on the emergency shelters or the warming shelters.
And one of the ways that the city responded and to illustrate how response can affect risk.
After the second storm, they actually shut down the shelters, which meant that there were numerous houseless people that were left
In the second ice storm were left exposed. This resulted in again increased health impacts that were observed across the region.
And these back-to-back storms impacted the ability of the utilities and of the city to help clean up and restore power so people could cope with subsequent storms.
Another example is from 2020. This is a figure that shows wildfire smoke from Oregon, Washington, and California burning simultaneously.
And at the same time, there was Hurricane Sally that was about to make landfall on the Gulf Coast.
Although this is just one day showing the extent of the region affected by wildfire smoke and also the simultaneous wildfire hazards that were occurring across the region as well as the simultaneous hazard between the west and the east, there were both western states as well as the eastern states experienced either an unprecedented or a really high number of climate hazards and for example the
eastern U.S. had the highest number of Atlantic storms that they have observed in several decades. All of this together with the COVID
19 pandemic placed an unprecedented demand on FEMA that struggled to respond to so many simultaneous disasters
and COVID-19 complicated the response to these disasters.
And so as we think about enhancing societal resilience to compound risks which result from interactions between climate hazards as well as climate and non-climate hazards
we need to think about a few factors, the NCA calls for transformative socially just adaptation to respond to the risks from climate change
and in particular, specifically talks about accounting for how climate impacts can be distributed unequally and and have greater impacts on some communities.
It also calls for specifically incorporating the risk of compound events, in design,
planning, and preparedness and in particular, building infrastructure that is resilient to multiple hazards. And finally, allocating resources to solutions that can help manage the risk of multiple disasters but also help address multiple objectives including reducing the vulnerability of communities that are disproportionately affected as well as adapting to climate change which can at least help reduce climate risks.
And so make the compound risks of climate and potentially earthquake happening together lower. Thank you and I look forward to the discussion.
Thank you Deepti Singh for that excellent overview of a compounding event, compounding risk,
I think that section of the 5th assessment that you worked on was sort of one of the inspirations for this session.
Our next speaker is Charles Scawthorn of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center about climate change effects on earthquake risk.
Hello, my name is Charles Scawthorn and I'd like to speak to you today briefly on the potential impacts or effects of climate change on earthquake risk.
To do so, I'd like to use a concept I developed a number of years ago having to do with earthquake loss and I determine the chain of causation.
It begins with the occurrence of the earthquake or the hazard proceeds through the damage of vulnerability and to determined in the end the loss of risk that occurs.
There are a number of links in this chain and if we can put these links via mitigation at any point in the chain
then we can reduce or eliminate the earthquake loss or risk, and with results shown on the right here.
Now applying this concept to the current question. Climate change effects begin with global warming which can result in a number of phenomena such as heat waves, loss of polar ice,
sea level rise and so on. Each of these phenomena may be linked to the chain of causation of earthquake losses from various phenomena such as shown here, liquefaction, landsliding, flooding, and so on.
So I'd like to examine each of these in turn. There are two overarching impacts by the way that also may occur due to climate change.
One of these will be migration or population shifts, which may result in more pressure for construction on more seismically hazardous sites.
Another overarching effect may be increased competition for earthquake research funding, these are the climate change research funding.
I'll speak to both of these also. But let's begin with the idea of the concept of earthquake impacts or effects on seismic hazards.
This is a map of glacial rebound. The rate of post-glacial rebound by Paulson et al., in 2007,
and we're all familiar with the notion that there is seismicity in the northern and southern latitudes.
So due to post-glacial rebound and with global warming and the loss of polar ice we may get acceleration in rebound and increased seismicity
Kim et al., have examined this question for Korea and on the Korean Peninsula found that the ongoing global warming trend could potentially increase earthquake frequency on the Korean Peninsula.
Another related phenomena that may occur will be increased rainfall resulting in hydrologic-loading related to seismicity.
Negale et al., has looked at this for the Himalayas. I found, for example, that there was a strong correlation between rainfall, which is shown in the curve, this pseudo sinusoidal curve on this graph versus rate of seismicity, which is shown seasonally by the yellow, blue, and green bars,
and there's a strong correlation between hydrologic-loading and seismicity. This has been found by others also.
So with increased rainfall, we may be getting increased seismicity in some regions. Looking next at climate change effects on earthquake liquefaction Grant et al., have examined this for the San Francisco Bay Area and I found that overall that probably will be only a modest change,
due to sea level rise, but in selected areas, presumably low lying such as the Mission Bay Area, San Francisco, that may be significant increases in liquefaction, likelihood and severity.
This is kind of common sense in a way, quantifying it though. This has also been examined by Rahman et al., for the Gulf of Aqaba-Elat
region where they found that you can see level rise and increase in the area of high liquefaction hit the area with increased by 26% to 49% from the current area extent.
Quilter et al., have also looked at this in the Christchurch, New Zealand area
found that an increase of moderate to liquefaction manifestation increases 2 to 4 times. Given a half to one meter of sea level rise.
Looking at earthquake related landsliding, Jacob et al., have looked at this in the Vancouver region of Canada and found that in climate change they anticipate by the end of the century up to a 3 times or 300% increase in the frequency of shallow landslides.
And not only an increase in the frequency but also the average volume linked by as much as 50%.
Another aspect of this is Loche et al., who examines surface temperature controls on the pattern of post- earthquake landslide activity
found that while surface temperatures is not correlated or related to co-seismic landsliding post-seismic landsliding is correlated with land surface temperature.
If we get global warming and increase in land surface temperatures presumably we would have more post-earthquake landslides occurring.
Look at earthquake related flooding. Well, sea level rise clearly is going to increase the potential for tsunami hazard and risk.
And this has been examined by Sepolveda et al. in the Hong Kong area where they've found that the potential for tsunami hazard increases,
from about 1 in 500 years to 100 years as shown on the right here.
To go out to migration, what the patterns of migration do to climate change will be hard to predict.
But it is interesting to look at the pattern of migration in the United States. For example, this is a map of migration and by county in the 2010s.
And what we see here is while there has been some out migration from California as in the press recently most of the migration is still from rural areas particularly in the Midwest, the center of the country and so on to urban areas such as in Florida, the northeast and the Pacific Northwest and also parts of California.
It is interesting to contrast this pattern of migration with that of U.S. migration. The 1950 where there was a very strong migration from rural areas to urban areas as shown here.
The point here is simply that the United States has had a long history of migration and that going forward we've been able to deal with it in the past and going forward we'll probably be able to deal with the migration also. With regards to
earthquake funding on the left is shown the history of NEHRP funding over the last 20 years and currently is about $160 million dollars a year funding for the NEHRP funding. On the right is shown the research funding for the U.S. Global Change Program, which in last 3 years has grown from about $3 to over $5 billion dollars.
This is a factor of about 30 between climate change and NEHRP funding. Which is huge!
But it should not be concerning perhaps, for a number of reasons. First, it's only a rough comparison.
it may not have captured all the funding. Second, federal resources are not a zero-sum game,
if more funds are needed for earthquake research we can come up with that funding. Frankly, climate change research funding being significantly larger than erthquake research funding may be appropriate
given that climate change has been more recently recognized and in a sense playing catch-up. Climate change impacts are somewhat broader, probably larger,
and have the potential for being existential threat to the United States, whereas I don't think anyone sees earthquake as an existential threat to the United States.
Go out to fire following earthquake in 2008 I provided these results for the ShakeOut study, which given a M7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas fault estimated over a 1,000 ignitions would occur in the southern California region, leading to a loss of about 133,000 homes and about $60 billion dollars in losses.
For the 2017 HayWired study I did a comparable analysis finding that they would be on the order of or 400-600 fires that would lead to the equivalent loss of about 52,000 single family dwellings
and a direct property loss on the order of $30 billion dollars. Now, both of these studies met with considerable skepticism,
which really surprised me, given the history of 1906. The losses there, 28,000 buildings due to fires after the earthquake.
In 1923, Tokyo earthquake where we had lost over a 100,000 people their lives
in that event. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake which showed that this potential still exists in modern times.
And the ongoing large fires that fire departments are dealing with on a almost daily basis. This is one in San Francisco and another example of these kinds of fires is the First Interstate Bank fire in 1991
where a third of the Los Angeles City Fire Department had to respond to deal with one ignition in one building.
So given this history, I was surprised that there was so much skepticism about the potential for this, especially when you look at our cities.
San Francisco, for example, this photo shows the large extent of very flammable wood construction that we have in San Francisco
and this is such a high fire risk that the Fire Chief Ed Phipps terms this "...the city built to burn,"
he was speaking not just figuratively but literally. This is a map of the Mission Bay District of San Francisco.
The black outline is the areas of potential liquefaction, and it also tends to coincide with the area where we had the 1906 fire and we can see the magenta buildings outside that area predate the fire,
in other words, all those buildings were from 1905. The magenta builds "built to burn,"
and this is true not only for San Francisco, but when you look at the East Bay, the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles is shown here.
What do you see? Well, when I look at it, I see vast amounts of fuel. Very densely packed,
low-rise wood framed buildings, which could potentially be subjected to Santa Ana's winds. So some of the reasons why the skepticism surprised me.
Another reason was that we simply had just not so long before in 1991 the East Bay Hills fire where we lost about 3,000 buildings in a few hours for one ignition on non-earthquake conditions.
So if this can happen under those conditions, why can't it happen after an earthquake when it's going to be tremendous damage to the water supply system also.
Since then we've had, and most of you are familiar with this, the Santa Rosa Tubbs fire where we lost 5,000 buildings,
and in 2018, the largest natural disaster of the year globally was the camp fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise and 18,000 buildings resulting in 85 people dead.
Last summer we had the Lahaina fire in August which killed over a hundred people and at $4 billion dollars in losses.
So given these repetitive, very large conflagrations admittedly under high wind conditions the skepticism may be tempered somewhat.
I hope it is. I want to point out that both of these studies that refer to the ShakeOut study and the HayWire study
we're conducted in average wind conditions. They did not look at extreme wind conditions that we've seen in these recent fires.
And as a matter of fact a Santa Ana type or what's also termed a Strong Wind Condition in the Bay Area is called the Diablo Wind
has never been examined for fire following earthquake. This is a gap in our knowledge that we need to close.
We need to look at what are the potential impacts of a large earthquake under strong wind conditions in the Bay Area and or southern California.
The potential is increasing. Dong et al., have looked at the season for large fires in southern California and found that depending on the greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, it will increase from the current 36 days per year of Santa Ana wind conditions to 58 to 71 days per year
by the end of the century that is due to climate change. We're getting a 50 to 100% increase in large fire days.
This equates in effect that there's a 20% probability; 71 days a year out of 365.
There's a 20% probability of an earthquake occurring during Santa Ana wind conditions.
Other people have looked at this also, this is by Guzman-Morales et al., and come to similar conclusions.
So, when we look at all these different trends all these different aspects of how global warming may impact
the earthquake chain of causation the overwhelming trend that I see is exacerbation by climate change.
Earthquake risk is going to be exacerbated by climate change. I see nowhere where it's going to be a decreasing trend.
And of all the aspects that are most exacerbated by climate change, see fire following earthquake risk as most exacerbated as I just pointed out to you.
But with that, I'd like to thank you very much. It's a pleasure to speak to you today, it's always a pleasure for me to interact with the USGS.
So thank you again for the invitation.
Thank you very much, Charles and our last speaker in this session, is Noah Patton
from the National Low Income Housing Coalition affordable housing and disaster recovery and after Noah's talk, we should have a half hour for a
fruitful discussion.
Hello, my name is Noel Patton, manager of disaster recovery at the National Low-income Housing Coalition (NLIHC)
So happy to be talking to you all today and many thanks to the USGS for having me.
Today I'm going to be talking about affordable housing and disaster recovery, challenges, and best practices. But before we get going, let me just explain a little bit about what NLIHC is and, why we're doing disaster recovery.
The National Low-income Housing Coalition organization dedicated to achieving racially and socially equitable public policy that ensures people with the lowest incomes have quality homes that are accessible and affordable and communities of their choice.
NLIHC facilitates the disaster housing recovery coalition. It's a group of over 900 local, state, and national orgs working to ensure that all disaster survivors receive the assistance they need fully
recovered. You know, it's in our view that existing inequality directly impacts the preparedness, resiliency, and recovery of disaster impacted
communities, as such efforts to address housing inequality and related areas of equity work
to have a significant role in that field so that's why we created this disaster housing recovery coalition. We'll get into the direct housing impacts
disasters in just a second, but first let's kind of identify what the underlying issue here is.
That is question being what is the affordable housing crisis. So the housing crisis has three components.
First off, is that housing cost is largely out of reach for minimum wage earners.
So here you can see and the housing wage for 2 bedroom or 1 bedroom home as well as the income.
percentiles of the population as you can see it's out of whack
for the lower end of the spectrum. Number 2, the supply of housing for extremely low income households is scarce.
That means that those extremely low income households that can't find affordable homes for themselves, they're forced to become rent-burdened and take up homes that are affordable to kind of the next income echelon and who were forced to become cost-burden and so on and so forth
all the way up to the top and then finally there's also, you know, a race, a racial component.
Where we see higher cost burdens among non-white subpopulations like, Black-Americans, Hispanic- Americans as well as Indigenous,
and Hawaiian Islander-Americans that you can see here.
And so just to give a prudent example, this is the
housing profile for California for 2023. You can't transpose all the issues that California is experiencing onto every part of the country, but it does have the essential elements here.
There is a shortage of homes affordable to folks on the lower end of the income spectrum,
widespread rent burdens, and a very high housing wage compared to the wages that people are making.
It's important to highlight that this isn't just a random accident
this problem is an intentional result of 300 years of intentional policy built to prevent access to opportunities.
For, non-white Americans and that has an impact on a
wide variety of aspects of our lives. Specifically talking about disaster recovery it also has an impact on you know disaster mitigation infrastructure.
I know it's not earthquake related, but just looking at this map of Houston, Texas, you can see there's neighborhoods that are labeled by percentage of minority population.
This map shows overlays the number of open ditch drainage service areas over those neighborhoods that open ditch
drainage is kind of what you would assume an open ditch drainage would be to handle stormwater runoff and so on.
As you can see is very unsophisticated way of dealing with storm water is heavily prevalent in neighborhoods where there's a large number of
non-white folks. And largely absent in neighborhoods that have lower percentages of minority populations.
That's a direct result of intentional policy choices.
Looking at
these kind of direct impacts here. So we have kind of the infrastructure component. But the direct impact of the housing crisis on disaster recovery
Is significant. There is the lack of affordable housing stock, directly leads to homelessness and displacement, and the lack of equality in terms of economics and geography created disparity
between the impacts, of these folks. So looking here, it's kind of greater scarcity of rental housing creates greater inaccessibility post disaster which leads directly to population loss.
This impacts and here's some kind of additional issues that again kind of we're talking about how the housing crisis impacts multiple aspects of our lives and those aspects then directly impact
how communities recover from disasters.
Now these also impact the utility of government assistance programs in the aftermath of disasters looking at the federal assistance following a disaster you're most likely talking about FEMA assistance and when you're talking about individual households you're talking about
the Individual Assistance Program. Which study after study have shown that, you know, is significantly, it's significantly difficult for households with lower incomes to access this type of assistance.
For a wide variety of issues that would take up an entire additional presentation
so I won't go too much into it now, but suffice to say that there's a lot of administrative burden and you know an overvaluation on property value to determine how much assistance is provided and that sort of thing.
So there's a lot of issues, although, shout out to FEMA for this week
they did issue some reforms that are a major step forward in addressing some of these systemic inequities with how you know our government responds.
Our government assists people in recovering from disasters. So there's FEMA and then talking longer term recovery
there's HUD, so there's this community development block brand disaster recovery program is CDBGDR,
Which if you can say 3 times fast they let you be a Disaster Housing Recovery Reform policy analyst. You know these funds are super flexible, they're super flexible for a reason, right?
All disasters are different, even if it's the same hazard and most notably about these types of funds is they're really the only type of funds that
allow new construction, not replacement construction, like new housing to be built, and it's specifically targeted towards households with lower incomes via the targeting parameters on these funds.
The problem is this program hasn't been permanently authorized by Congress and because of that HUD has to rewrite the regs each time these funds are approved,
which really slows down the flow of funds from Congress to disaster survivors, and it also places a significant administrative burden on folks that are administering these funds at the state local levels.
Many times the same folks that were directly impacted by the disaster. Certainly, you know, some issues there as well.
There's also some kind of targeting, nitty gritty targeting issues that again I won't go too heavily.
Into. So if we're planning for disaster recovery with the housing crisis in mind, we're looking at these
considerations that practitioners should should look at, I think it's prudent for researchers to know as well.
We're talking about ensuring proportionality in assistance between renters, homeowners, and individuals experiencing homelessness.
We're ensuring quick deployment of housing, strategies. We're ensuring that it's accessible to individuals with disabilities.
We're ensuring that it has the lowest barriers possible and ensuring that there's substantive community participation throughout the entire process.
Just kind of sum up, I always tell people, this is obviously this is a Simpsons meme, but you know, there's this concept of full-rights.
it was initially kind of synthesized by folks in the Northeast Action Collective in Houston.
And it's the full-rights. It's every community must have the right to leave.
Every community must have the right to stay. Every community must have the right to equal treatment. And then each community must have the right to have a say.
So usually I say, if all of these rights are being covered by a recovery operation, then you're in pretty good shape
for having an equitable disaster housing recovery. I also wanted to just make a note,there are civil rights rules at the federal level.
Laws, civil rights laws at the federal level that do require equity and fair housing. I like to flag that meeting the requirements of Federal Civil Rights Law is the floor.
So like, let's shoot for the ceiling in terms of our planning when we're talking about Disaster Housing
Recovery. "Believe in yourself, aim higher!" And there's of course the
Civil Rights Act of 1968
that defends against discrimination based on all of these factors here.
There have been issues with disaster having recoveries in the past these are kind of some highlights that I just pulled out. New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy are good friends of the Fair Share Housing Center teamed up with some local Civil Rights groups and actually sued the state of New Jersey because they had undercounted the number of renters impacted by Hurricane Sandy and as such had pumped
substantially more money into homeowner assistance recovery programs instead of to renters who were predominantly, Black and Latino.
That actually resulted in the biggest Fair Housing settlement at that time, I think. In addition, there are issues with Louisiana after Katrina specifically disaster survivors being referred to landlords that refuse to rent to African-Americans.
In St. Bernard's Parish there was issues with exclusionary zoning laws being passed very quickly after the disaster preventing any sort of new rental housing from being created.
That was desperately needed for the region. And then for California wildfires, it says, 2007, but throughout the history there
been replete with language access. You know specifically among farm worker communities and that sort of thing as well.
So again, kind of some best practices or use HUD certified counselors, resident education,
proactively working to identify sites for rental housing for disaster victims and that sort of thing.
It's some additional best practices that I'm letting you read.
I did want to make a note just before I close, talking about disability access. So. people living with disabilities are 2 to 4 times more likely to die during a disaster than an individual that's living without a disability.
Inconveniences to folks living without a disability during the disaster recovery and you know response process can be deadly for individuals with disabilities.
So it's always important to significantly factor disability access into everything that we do with disaster recovery.
And I did want to note there is issues with kind of involuntary institutionalization of individuals with disabilities.
Oftentimes a local government view placing someone in a managed care facility is like a solution to their disability access related issues,
but in reality, an individual that is forced into that kind of situation is typically extremely unlikely to ever be able to leave that facility.
So much so that it actually like prevents or discourages people with disabilities from
reaching out to authorities for assistance following disasters. So that's always an important point there.
If it sounds like there's a lot here, that's because there is.
A quite a lot here, but luckily, you know, organizations like NLIHC, like our members of the Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition, are here replete with resources to assist.
any practitioner who's attempting to navigate these issues and any researcher looking to find out more about any of these issues.
Here's some additional kind of disability access stuff. I wanted to conclude just with you know what I call the bestest practice, which is ensure that all individuals with lived experience and their representatives can provide actual input throughout all stages of planning process.
Typically you know the minute that you're able to accomplish this best practice you're gonna be in very good shape for a disaster recovery.
With that I'm going to conclude and thank the USGS again for this opportunity to present.
Thank you for listening. And, yeah, feel free to reach out to me. There's my email and thanks so much everybody.
Thank you very much, Noah. I think at this point we invite you and all the other speakers to unmute yourselves and turn on your video for the discussion.
And Jia, you were gonna...
I can ask the first question while you guys put your thoughts together. So when our agency work on the statewide plan, the state has a mitigation plan we're trying to understand the whole climate change and how it
elevates earthquake risk and that we were trying to find a quantifiable data. And about California, but sounds like a today.
There's a big data cap and even from Charlie's presentation all those resources you cited only when if I'm not mistaken is about California which is done by USDS on the liquefaction risk in the Bay Area.
So, the California faces climate change, data call also identified this as a research gap.
But then understand there will require a lot of a collaboration between the climate scientists and earthquake engineering earthquake scientist.
So I want to ask for your, all of your opinion that how, does this collaboration would occur to fill in this data gap.
You know, other than the the chat that between. Daniel and. And. Right, awesome from CGS on the perfection.
Well, may I respond to you? Thank you for the question. I was I wanted to give a broad overview of how climate change.
Might affect earthquake risk. So I took sources from around the world. I didn't focus on Northern California.
But I think the other speakers in the session, this is the virtue of having a number of us speak to the topic.
Mr. Furmiss showed the climate change. Tremendous potential effects of climate change on landsliding
and flooding. And again, an earthquake. May have a uniform distribution of of occurrence in time so it can if it occurs during those times this is a point that Professor Swain made also.
That if it occurs during the times of the High rainfall, or.
Rayville season or I'm conversely in for fire in the dry season. The effects of climate change greatly exacerbate earthquake risk.
And when I looked at these many different factors of a different, different. Potential impacts of landsliding, flooding.
Even seismicity. There are, there is evidence out there. And I didn't try and do a comprehensive survey of literature.
I would have been thousands of hours. But there is evidence out there that in all cases it appears to exacerbate it.
And I think, Press Swings talk. Underscores that.
Because he pointed out the both on the dry season. Exacerbating the fire risk and the white season exacerbating the the local faction and landsliding risk, which is exactly what I was saying also.
So I hope that But as far as how we're gonna work together, well, I think we need, it's a disciplinary teams.
We need people who know quite a bit about earthquake risk. Each link in that chain of causation.
As many and those many of those people are on this. In this meeting today. And we need people who know about climate change.
And some of those people are in this meeting today, maybe not enough. So I hope that answers your question.
Thank you, Charlie. I tell you, you want to wait, we in a little bit about this, because I saw that.
Identified as one of your. Call in the slice presentation.
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that. One of the challenges is is that in a certain sense climate change is sort of an everything problem and that a lot of the things that a lot of the harm that it has caused and will cause comes, somewhat indirectly through other things, through existing vulnerabilities, through existing types of hazards that are either occurring more frequently or greater severity or have a different flavor
than we're actually fully prepared for. And actually we see this a lot with people's willingness to acknowledge the fact that you know we will in living in the complex geophysically and societ, you know, we will in living in the complex geophysically and societally complex world that we, in the complex geophysically and societally complex world that we do, eventually we're going to see things outside of
the range of historical experience, even if the background state isn't changing, but rapidly more so if the background state is.
So, you know, we think about recurrence. Intervals. If you're talking about a 500 year or 1,000 year recurrence interval type of event whether it's a flood or you know birth earthquake related ground acceleration or something it doesn't really matter what the hazard is But the are the way we think about these low likelihood events I think is really challenging.
And I think in some ways one of the better examples in the world is how some places at least have prepared for larger than observed earthquakes.
Locally, San Francisco and Los Angeles are preparing for earthquakes that are as larger, larger than anything in, certainly in recent memory and even in more distant memory.
We don't do that. With a lot of the weather and climate related hazards still, this is a problem.
This is sort of how we got into trouble with with the recent surge in extreme wildfire activity and frankly I think some of these fire scenarios following earthquakes They're not, you know, there's been some comments in the.
In the chat about how they, you know, they're very implausible. I actually think the opposite is true.
I think they're highly possible if you can see wildfires on their own as an isolated singular disaster.
That we're over, you know, tens of thousands of structures burn. I don't see how that the outcomes, you know, that we were hearing about today would not occur if you get an earthquake under those conditions.
I mean, that is just the reality. It doesn't even need to create new admissions, by the way.
It could just be amplifying the the hazards associated with all of the other ignitions that we tend to get during strong wind events anyway.
And so in that way, I think you could extend that metaphor to other hazards too, but, but hopefully that.
The offers and insight.
Thank you, Daniel. Okay, go ahead.
Can I follow up, Gia? I don't see, I don't wanna ignore anybody who's got their hand up, or anybody who's got their hand up, but I didn't see anybody who's got their hand up but they didn't see anybody and this follows a little bit on what Daniel just said, but it's specific to to Michael.
You know, we heard in earlier sessions how lessons learned from past earthquakes and form building codes and help us do better with the next Next earthquake and so on.
So I'm thinking about the 1964 flood. You know, given the infrastructure improvements up there in the landscape changes, what sort of damages might we expect now from a repeat of 1,964.
Well, I think there's certainly be less damages. You know, the, use of large bulldozers, which is basically, wasn't, a sort of a spin-off from tanks.
Did incredible damage to the hydrology of hill slopes. Leading to a lot more landslides and, and all of the gullies basically that were observed.
So. There's been a lot of progress on forest practices. And, so I would expect less damage.
But as has been pointed out in a number of other cases, there's still a lot of holes and deficiencies and Downright in competencies really in our overall readiness.
Our overall ability to. Clearly reckon vulnerability with multiple influences. So, I guess the answer would be that there would be less damage from, the, there would be less damage from, the, serious logging damage that was done a lot less, I think, the serious logging damage that was done, a lot less, I think, with better, force practices.
But in the meantime, we've been building next to water's edge, left and right, occupying flood planes, lots of other hazards showing up that where they weren't there in addition to the huge population increases that have happened, especially in California.
Let me chime in on that too. I agree with Mike, but The response in 1964 was actually very good and it was a military response.
And it was a military response. And it was well coordinated. It's still a terrific example of emergency response.
And I think we have other vulnerabilities today that we didn't have then. I think. The number of different jurisdictions and the whole legal framework for response is different.
Our communications network in many ways is more vulnerable. To, an event of that magnitude.
Yeah.
The potential for misinformation is much greater now than it was then when we had populations that were willing to believe the government that was going to actually be helping.
And we have a totally new population. We have a lot of people who have not been in the region.
And this is true for much of rural California where we have this exodus of people from urban areas that don't have the kind of resilient thinking that the old timers have.
We've certainly seen that in Humboldt County and earthquakes. Where Petroleum is now mainly folks from out of the area who don't shop locally who have no clue as to the kind of resilient.
Behavior patterns that those of us who've been here longer have. So, I think you nailed it, Mike.
Very significant.
Yeah, and I'll just mentioned the real frontier and the real, important step I think is to getting really good at vulnerability assessment.
And particularly with these multi factorial or co-occurring disasters and where the vulnerabilities are and aren't and how that informs our readiness for disaster response.
You, G, you probably see Daniel had his hand up and then, and then Noah, I guess.
Well, I don't want a believer at the point. But I think that, you know, it's likely the case that the North Coast is not one of the more floodable regions in California at this point despite the fact can get extremely high flows in the rivers and that is largely because of what we heard about in the last couple of talks, which is that A.
Well, both geographically and societally, the vulnerability is not what it is in some other places.
The confluence of the physical hazards and societal vulnerability is dramatically higher. And part of that is just there's a lot more people that live in flood plains.
In places like the Central Valley or even the San Francisco Bay Area. We'll forget about that.
The Los Angeles Coastal Plain, you know, in 1862 a lot of most of what is now the conservation of Los Angeles was underwater.
It hasn't happened since been a lot of infrastructure that wasn't there in 1862 but On the other hand, we also have, you know, millions of people who weren't there.
This was essentially right here in zone. Back then so We have better infrastructure to control water, but only up to a point.
And then on top of that, we have a lot more people. And differentials. So economic vulnerability is layered in on top of all of that too in ways that I think make some of the places that have less impressive rivers actually much more risk of flooding in California.
Yeah, and I'd say, I mean.
I think there's a, from what I've seen in talking to you know, communities kind of across the country about kind of resilience.
How did we do this? It's less of like a question of like, do they not know?
Do they are they not like factoring in that kind of risk into the future but it's just a you know, the mundane answer of like, well, I don't have the money to like.
Put my house up 2 feet. I know it'll flood. It's flooded before, you know, or like my granddad lived in town, like, you know, you know, it'll flood, but I don't have any money to do anything about it.
Or I don't have the expertise and things like that. And at that kind of individual, if you're talking about resilience at that individual level, you know, to.
Like only harp on the you know, the understanding, and like in the individual understanding of risk, but not actually provide any kind of resources to address that risk.
You know is rough and bound to fail that's my 2 cents please
Do you see it?
So now if I make just make a comment, no. Number of years ago when I was flying into Pakistan after an earthquake There I was dwelling on the topic and it occurred to me that if you look at the built environment as society It breaks down to 3 sectors.
And that is publicly owned infrastructure. Capital privately, privately owned is broken into 2 parts the commercial industrial and the residential.
And 2 of those 3 sectors, the commercial industrial and the publicly owned, have the resources in terms of Hey, economics, money, and, access to technical expertise to deal with disasters.
And, but the, the residential sector typically doesn't. That's the real vulnerability of our societies.
So To come back to the what we're talking about here is the intersection of climate change and earthquakes.
And as Daniel, the point, climate change kind of cuts across everything and makes everything worse. That's the conclusion I came to too.
And to then respond to Gia's question, what are we gonna do about? How do we deal with it?
I think we need to in some way we all live in our little silos. We need to I'm not gonna get on a ranch about silos or anything, but we need a cross cutting team.
That has the knowledge of climate change and then knowledge of other hazards. And try to deal with these in a holistic manner.
In the previous session I talked about The, as an example, the, the seawall in San Francisco, which is dealing with climate change, but it's not dealing with.
Not really taking that opportunity. They're going to of course design it for earthquake. But while they're rebuilding the embarked there with San Francisco, they're not taking the chance to upgrade the buried infrastructure there also.
So that's What you want to do is leverage your climate change, adaptation opportunities to deal with.
Earthquake or flood or other hazards. Keith, Konusa made that point earlier.
So I think we need a little bit change in. Or broadening of our attitudes.
And this meeting is an excellent way to achieve that. So just comments here.
Gia, there's a there's a really nice question at the end of the chat that I, that maybe be good to close with, it'd be real nice if we can resolve this in the next 3 min.
What are the primary challenges researchers face when applying their findings to underserved communities? Can you highlight any successful strategies or initiatives?
And this kind of follows a little bit on what deeply talk about and Noah and and Dan or you know everybody at some level.
I can maybe share a couple of thoughts both related to the previous question as well as this one. I think, in the climate science community, we've been talking quite a bit about.
Hmm.
Story lines like developing story lines or extreme events and like potentially these extreme extremes. And I think that's that's an approach that I think could be applied in this context as well where we think where we sort of collaboratively climate scientists with with cosmologists can like work towards developing plausible future scenarios that incorporate these risks.
Hmm.
And then as part of that, you know, working with communities off once we have come up with those scenarios working with communities to identify like Well, who is gonna be most vulnerable?
Do those communities have the, like, which communities are gonna be the most vulnerable, which ones have the resources or lack of resources to respond.
And then incorporating them in thinking about where resources should be allocated and and what sort of disaster preparedness they might be lacking in the in the context of these plausible scenarios that we've sort of discussed and alluded to in the context of climate change.
And just to kind of hop on that and then answer to get at kind of the reason, I'm not a researcher, so I don't even play one on TV.
But talking about I've seen a lot of very exciting like community driven research occurring especially like in the greater Houston area where you do have research practitioners that are working directly with organized groups that are kind of thinking about resiliency, thinking about climate change, thinking about.
You know, hazard risk. And I think that that can be a really effective way at getting at under served coming you know applying you know research to underserved communities in a way that like also presents kind of like advocacy tools that that community can then use to push for the funding and everything to implement.
Wonderful and there is one more hand up in the sort of in the audience Barry Hirshhorn.
Can I invite you to? Close for us.
Yes. Thank you. I have a question for Charles. That was, I really appreciate your talk because I think it really brings home.
The magnitude of the fire danger which in many cases can be the most, you know. Extreme I think.
And I guess my question is relatively simple but impossible to answer maybe in some respects but what are the like sort of biggest bang, most effective for ways that one might.
Try to mitigate. I mean, I know there's the obvious things like find your fire valve and a certain, you know, as soon as the quake is overturned off your, your fire, your, I'm sorry, your propane gas or, etc.
Hmm.
But, you know, what would you recommend? Sort of overall key messages. In whatever context or part of the response you think is appropriate.
Well, it is possible. It's not an impossible question. It's possible to answer that.
How much time do you have?
Okay, okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
But I, If I may, prevail upon the organizers for about 1 min, 60 s.
TED Talk here. First I've got a report for City of San Francisco. It examines 22 different options.
Although some of the most cost-effective are a, Complete universal seismic gas shut off device on all gas meters.
Hmm.
Japan implemented this after the COBA earthquake. And they replaced for the population a hundred 25 million people that are placed every guest meter in the country.
In the United States. Pg and E, for example, replaced all those gas means to get rid of, yes, metre readers.
But did not install gas, seismic gas, shut off devices in the meters. So we need to do that.
Okay.
Another one is the, And this is something that Gia and I have been talking with OHS about.
The ability of water departments to move water. Is not as good as you might think it is.
They can move water a block or 2, but they can't move it a mile And with these large configurations, you're gonna have to be able to move water a mile or 2.
And, it's a very complex question which involves the border utilities and the fire departments.
And there. Well, there's some consciousness in those 2. Stakeholder groups There's not enough communication on this issue, really.
Besides the safety commission has tried to address this in the past but their efforts are only scratching the surface.
I can keep going, but I'll stop there. There are things to do.
But it's. But we get a major earthquake in the next few decades under. S.
Run for your life. That's where the mouse do.
That's a happy note to close on.
There's
I was gonna say, you know, that's a wonderful closing voice, Charlie. Well, well done.
Really put the cap on this conversation.
Yeah.
The run from your run for your life session.
Yeah.
Yes. Yeah, I can choke that people all so happy. Thank you everyone. I mean it breaks my hole to try and bring this to a close because this has been so good.
Thank you so much to our wonderful moderators and speakers. This has just been the absolute best.
Thank you, take care. Bye.
I want everyone to enjoy their thoughts and one for their lives practice it for the next 15 min until we come back at 3 45.
However, if you have a Fundo talk, please stick around so we can help you get to set up for that.
That would be. Austin Christie Data Chris Kim, Tidal Ben, Don, Alice and Stephen, Cleo, Danielle, John, and Loi, stay with us.
Everyone else? Pail the One for your lives.
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay.
John, I think we can pause. I'll stop the recording.
Thank youThank you