Earthquake Readiness

At least half of the world’s largest cities are considered at moderate or high risk of a major earthquake. Fears of the next “Big One” affect such major population centers as Tokyo, Mumbai, Jakarta, Mexico City, Manila, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Istanbul and Tehran. With the world becoming ever-more urbanized — it’s projected that almost two-thirds of the population will live in cities by 2050 — earthquake preparation is a massive long-term challenge thrust into the hands of short-term elected leaders. What steps should be taken today to protect people, companies and the economy from a threat so remote that it could strike once in a lifetime, if that?

While cities differ greatly in their preparations, many in fault zones are moving more urgently to revisit disaster plans in the wake of Japan’s harrowing 2011 Tohoku earthquake, which spawned a tsunami that triggered a nuclear meltdown and killed more than 15,000 people. California Governor Gavin Newsom said back-to-back earthquakes in July, among the strongest to shake California in decades, were “a wake-up call” for his state’s residents and government. Even before those quakes, Los Angeles was requiring owners of about 13,500 wood-frame and 1,500 brittle concrete buildings to strengthen them, and San Francisco had ordered retrofits of wood-frame apartment buildings that house a total of more than 115,000 people. Newsom said California’s piece of a multistate early-warning system — which could alert people to seek safety and automatically shut down vulnerable industrial and transportation moments before the ground beneath them starts moving — is 70% installed. The system is supposed to be ready statewide by the end of this year and in Oregon and Washington in 2021. Japan, Taiwan, Italy and Mexico are among the earliest adapters of such warning systems, which detect the first waves of a quake and enable rapid alerts via broadcast media and text messages to mobile phones. Improvements to Mexico City’s schools and other public buildings after a catastrophic 1985 quake meant fewer deaths in a September 2017 earthquake, though it still killed almost 400 people.