I have been a bad parent. The teachers tut-tut; my children look at me uncomprehendingly, the first traces of disappointment sketched on their faces.
”We understand,” says one teacher. ”You’re not from here. But it is something you need to do.”
A confession: my children have no earthquake kit. Over a year ago, I was handed a photocopied sheet of paper. ”Emergency kit”, it said at the top. ”Please help us be prepared”.
I put it in a drawer. Occasionally, I would remember its accusing presence, only to dismiss it as another example of overzealous southern Californian paranoia. Then the tremors started, a succession of small but unsettling ripples in the early summer; then came Katrina.
Last week, just to scare myself silly, I watched Earthquake, the daft Charlton Heston disaster movie bearing the tagline: ”When the big one finally hits LA”.
Chuck, of course, knew what was coming. He was busy making models of wobbly buildings and refusing lucrative contracts to build unsafe skyscrapers (Chuck is the greatest civil engineer on the planet) as the rumbles were a-rumbling. Even in the midst of toppling towers and bursting dams, with hundreds of extras lying bloodied in the rubble, Chuck manages to both leave his wife and save his father-in-law. It’s all very dramatic.
Back at school the earthquake preparations have a decidedly more humdrum air about them. ”Please place your items in one of the following,” read the instructions. ”Very large ziplok bag with child’s name on it. Bags are ant proof and waterproof. Or you could use a standard shoebox. Seal box securely with strong packing tape.”
Inside the box, are the things to get my children through the apocalypse: one space blanket, one small towel, an extra pair of sneakers, an extra set of clothing, a small package of tissues, small packets of snacks and juices, a family photo, a cuddly toy, an out-of-state phone number.
The big one — with or without Chuck — is on its way. Scientists tell us so. Until Katrina, the nation’s costliest natural disaster was 1994’s Northridge earthquake, just outside LA. Sixty-one people died, 20 000 were left homeless and the eventual bill totalled $40-million.
But that was small fry. The worst-case model for any time soon, based on a major quake on the Puente Hills fault under Los Angeles, would leave as many as 18 000 people dead, hundreds of thousands homeless and up to $250-billion in damages, according to government scientists.
But never fear: there is a plan. The plan is to stay put and not worry too much.
”I can’t think of a single thing that would require a full evacuation,” Lee Sapaden, spokesperson for LA county’s Office of Emergency Services told the Copley News Service. ”Even with a tsunami, you don’t have to go 100 miles — just 100ft above sea level or a few miles inland … Even the Northridge earthquake wasn’t region wide — life went on in the South Bay and people kept going to Disneyland.”
LA’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, like his movie counterpart, is worried. ”What happened in Houston is very significant,” he said on a recent trip to Washington DC. ”What they have demonstrated is the difficulties in evacuating that number of people. We’re a much larger area. If you’d ever have to evacuate that number of people here, there’s no question it would be problematic.”
”We’re going back to the drawing board,” Sandra Hutchens, homeland security chief at the LA county sheriff’s office told the New York Times. ”We haven’t looked at mass evacuation or temporary housing for hundreds of thousands of people.”
Authorities did study evacuation back in the dark days of the cold war, another official noted, but those plans had not been looked at for 20 years.
Instead, LA is hoping to rely on two things. First, the authorities hope to build a network of disaster districts, to enable people to be sustained where they are. The second thing is both reassuring and alarming: the sudden nature of a major earthquake and its absolute power.
”It can be a sudden impact of a devastating nature,” the LA fire department chief, William Bamattre, told the LA Daily News. ”The issue of being able to evacuate may be a moot question.”
I’m off to buy a very large ziplok bag. – Guardian Unlimited Â