ShakeOut Wants You Prepared for the Big One

1. Residents in older buildings on the floodplain roughly north of First Street are more at hazard. This is the area mapped by the USGS as being prone to liquefaction. Sustained shaking in a large event will cause the ground to turn to mush. Walls, billboards and utility poles will slough or fall over outright. Buildings will sag and lean. Asphalt paving will bulge upward, crack open and geysers of mush will erupt. If high-pressure utility lines maintain pressure, they could erupt out of the roadway and fly up into the air like a giant string of spaghetti - including those with gasoline and hot oil. A very serious quake on one particular fault, a deeply buried/blind thrust fault, could make the L.A. River run backwards and form a lake. That would be located right in the narrows, between Elysian Park and Lincoln Heights.

2. In your residence, locate any tall, heavilly laden bookshelves with care. When they fall over, you don't want them to bury you while you're trying like hell to get out of your waterbed. No one should have a waterbed, unless they are a sea-going veteran, U.S. Navy or otherwise. Anyone with a waterbed in a wood frame building is likely to end up on the ground floor following the Big One. Yes, you'll have a landing cushion, but you will go down.

3. Remember, some of the converted buildings have pools up on the roof. Most of the water will eject and the cornices will become the lips of Niagara Falls. Pedestrians below beware.

4. All residents should research the two major, historic quakes which struck 11 days apart on opposite sides of the L.A. Basin in December of 1812. The second of the two had a particular effect upon the Santa Barbara coastline. These two events had a marked impact upon the early development of the L.A. Pueblo.

Responding to the astonishing article concerning earthquakes posted in the new edition of the Downtown News, I submitted the following letter to the editor. I wonder if they will post it, or print it in next week's edition...

Here goes:

And nary a mention of the use of one certain brand of solder in the welding of steel highrise structures from the mid 1970s up into the 1990s. That the tendency of joints to crack, joints welded with said solder, is well known in the structural engineering and building safety spheres. These joints are known to be too brittle. A 7.8 event on the San Andreas, centered near PearBlossom, could bring far more damage to Downtown than one might imagine from reading the above article. A 7.8 event on the Sierra Madre fault north of Pasadena would devastate Los Angeles, particularly Downtown.

Mention has been made in the press of cracking of joints of modern highrise steel frame structures in the Northridge earthquake. The investigation and uncovering of this type of cracking of joints has been tamped down by the real estate industry's influence upon elected representatives. The extent of the 1994 damage is unknown and the big boys do not want the public to know of the hazard.

Structural engineers involved in private practice are not likely to speak on the record about this. Structural engineers in academia can be relied upon to begin to vet the problem and speak for the record. Building and safety officials can be relied upon to take down your number and get back to you.

(The L.A. Weekly once dug into this in a major cover story, somewhere back about the mid to late 90s).

Clarification - in "Drop, Cover, and Hold On" you drop to the floor, take cover under a sturdy table or desk, and HOLD ON to that piece of furniture (not the ground) as the furniture will move in the room and you want to move with it.

Thanks for your support of ShakeOut and helping make people safer! For more information, please visit ShakeOut.org/dropcoverholdon

Check this out, people: http://www.defectlaw.com/pdf/Statute-of-Limitations.pdf

Juanito, your letter to the ed. of the Downtown News didn't get posted. Interesting, considering what has been. It's just like the LAT: protect and coddle the Big Boys at all costs.

WebSites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA (head-line, New York Times website, currently on view) As newspapers shrink, rival operations have arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow their lead (bi-line).

When BlogDowntown was updated and improved this past year, Ed commented that it could eventually lead to the demise of the Downtown News. I've come to rather like that idea. There was once a time that I would drive way out of my way on my homeward commute to pick up a new edition of the News.

Hey Crandell, the Downtown News still hasn't posted your above letter. You oughtta call up Jon Regardie and grill him about editorial integrity. It appears that they (as well) just wanna keep the Big Boys happy.

tired: "that said"

wired: "wanna" & "gonna"

January 20th: "yes we gonna"

Courtesy of High Country News:

In 2005, Scharer and Biasi, along with USGS geologist Tom Fumal and Ray Weldon from the University of Oregon ("our visionary," says Biasi), took the published data on 56 prehistoric earthquakes, derived from 12 sites on the southern 400 miles of the San Andreas Fault, and plotted them in three different scenarios. Their graph, with its brightly colored lines stretching across segments of the fault over time, reveals that earthquakes may have been happening on the southern San Andreas as frequently as once every 100 years. At any rate, no lull in the past 1,600 years has gone on longer than 200 years. It defies logic to think that the current calm will last much longer. What will happen to Southern California when a 7.8 earthquake breaks open on the San Andreas Fault, exactly where Hudnut calculates that it might? Unstable desert sand will turn into something like barely set gelatin and many of the houses built on it will collapse, as will any remaining unreinforced masonry buildings (known as "URMs" -- or, as one seismic engineer calls them, "FPRs": Future Piles of Rubble). Hillsides throughout the San Gabriel Mountains and on Cajon Pass will collapse in cascades of rock and debris; dams will splinter. Seventy seconds into the rupture, seismic waves will reach deep into downtown Los Angeles, where 55 seconds of sustained shaking, measured from the moment the waves hit, could bring down older "steel-moment" high rise buildings. (By contrast, a 6.7 earthquake that hit Kobe, Japan, in 1995 -- one year to the day after Northridge -- shook for seven to 10 seconds. One third of the city's 600-some steel-moment frame buildings came down.) Fire will likely follow the destruction: The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power anticipates 1,600 ignitions in the urban wildlands interface, hundreds of which will merge into larger blazes before they can be contained. Throw a dry, hot Santa Ana wind into that scenario and Los Angeles, like San Francisco in 1906, may well burn to cinders. Closer to the fault, it will be mayhem. In 1857, Fort Tejon, the estimated epicenter of that year's quake, was an outpost inhabited by a handful of military personnel, Native Americans and 28 camels. The 7.8 temblor temporarily changed the courses of several rivers, tossed fish out of nearby lakes and left a surface rupture more than 300 miles long. But only two people were killed, one of them crushed when her adobe house collapsed. Nowadays, however, the Los Angeles exurban area stretches north beyond that fault segment, and several million people live along its edge."

Forewarned is forearmed.

Courtesy of today's L.A. Times:

Standard building design formulas rely on the average effects of earthquakes recorded worldwide, said Swaminathan Krishnan, an assistant professor of civil engineering and geophysics at Caltech who led the modeling. But information on earthquakes the size of the one modeled -- a magnitude 7.8 on the San Andreas fault -- is sparse, he said. Simulations of this size became possible only in recent years, thanks to supercomputers that also allowed scientists to feed in specific geological and topographical details for Southern California. The model produced a lot of long, rolling ground motions in the Los Angeles Basin that are problematic for tall steel buildings, especially those built before the 1994 Northridge earthquake. THAT QUAKE EXPOSED PROBLEMS IN A TYPE OF WELDING TECHNIQUE THAT HAD BEEN POPULAR FOR SEVERAL DECADES. A FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY STUDY OF 185 STEEL-FRAME BUILDINGS IN THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY SHOWED THAT TWO-THIRDS HAD DAMAGED WELDS AFTER THE TEMBLOR. ABOUT HALF OF THE DAMAGED WELDS WERE CRACKED AND THE REST HAD MORE SERIOUS DEFECTS. ELEVEN PERCENT OF THE BUILDINGS SUSTAINED DAMAGE TO MORE THAT 10% OF THEIR CONNECTING WELDS, WHICH ARE CRITICAL TO THE BUILDINGS' STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY. Krishnan estimated that across Southern California there are about 150 of the kinds of buildings that sometimes had problems in the Northridge quake. Krishnan modeled hypothetical buildings at 784 locations and fed ground motions into the computer. Buildings fell at about 12% of the locations, but none of the collapses in his model matched up to the actual locations of tall buildings. Because the actual buildings are close to the model's collapse zones, Krishnan recommended that emergency planners prepare for eight collapses. Standard formulas would have expected zero. "I think this is a big difference," Krishnan said. "The building codes have not assumed for ground motions as strong as these."

_Finally_, this issue has been pulled out from beneath the rug! According to a previous cover story of the welding issue published in the L.A. Weekly, the controversial welding technique was used from the later 1970s up to the 1994 quake. Downtown highrises constructed __before__ this period would include Transamerica Center, buildings at the s.e. corner of 6th & Spring, the s.e. corner of 6th & Olive, the n.w. corner of 6th & Grand, ARCO Plaza, Union Bank tower at 5th & Fig, 333 S. Hope, the s.w. corner of 6th & Hope, the Bonaventure Hotel and the three building Broadway Plaza complex. Construction on all other, more modern, steel highrise towers in Downtown began prior to the January 1994 earthquake, excepting (obviously) the recent, concrete formed residential condominiums of South Park as well as the hotel/condo tower at L.A. Live. Five years after the quake an associate and I went up to the helipad of Library Tower to board a helicopter flight to Catalina. Changing elevators at the building's transfer lobby was a disquieting experience. The polished terrazo floor was still cracked all to hell and gone and it scared the hell out of me. I wondered if the concrete decks in the upper floors of the building had been similarly damaged.