Did You Feel It?

I thought it was a truck going by, but that's what I always think when the little earthquakes strike. It took me a moment to realize what it might be. It was near the end of the work day for me, but my laptop was still on, so I logged on to the U.S. Geological Survey site to find out that it was a magnitude 3.3 earthquake near Oakland, CA yesterday. I was far enough away that I barely felt it.

I reported it on the USGS "Did You Feel It?" page, adding my data to everyone else's, not just because I've been studying statistics lately but because it's exciting to make even a small contribution to science. I showed a printout of responses to my children later and they were interested, too; one of them had felt the earthquake, the other had not.

The USGS site shows math and science in action, data gathered and maps produced for the public good. It's much more interesting to see concepts applied than to, say, memorize the times table. Science that you can feel, hear, and touch is fun to learn, and Americans definitely need to learn more science (perhaps starting with Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and her misguided comments on HPV vaccination).

I wanted to thank the USGS for making science fun and relevant yesterday. Did I feel it? Yes - surprise and excitement and a twinge of worry as the earthquake passed through and I looked up its magnitude online. Did my kids feel it? Yes - surprise and excitement as they realized that science had just rattled their world a little.

Goodbye, Firehouses

Many years ago, a neighborhood firehouse in San Francisco was quietly converted to a battered women's shelter. If you have to take a firehouse out of commission, at least turning it into a shelter keeps the building's function in the realm of public service. But that type of firehouse conversion is not the norm here. I was dismayed to read a profile in the San Francisco Chronicle today of a converted firehouse in San Francisco that has been recently renovated into two multi-million-dollar townhouses.

Real estate in the Bay Area has become much more valuable over the past few decades, while California's Proposition 13, passed in 1978, continues to limit the amount of property taxes that can be collected from these properties. Property taxes help pay for emergency services, among other things, and without adequate funds, many smaller fire stations have closed - and often renovated into luxury properties. Currently, 51 fire stations in San Francisco serve a population of roughly 815,000 people.

San Francisco was destroyed by the earthquake and subsequent fire of 1906, and the fire did far more damage than the earthquake. Fire returned after 1989's Loma Prieta earthquake, fueled by a broken gas line, destroying parts of San Francisco's Marina District. This video compilation from the San Francisco Chronicle shows some of the extensive damage caused by the 1989 earthquake, such as the partial collapse of the Bay Bridge:

There is no large earthquake here without a fire, it seems, and many people wonder how well the fire department could handle another earthquake. To help bridge this gap, the San Francisco Fire Department now trains citizen groups in basic disaster skills, including rescue and disaster medicine. Because if you need fire fighters or paramedics, it's no use banging on the door of a townhouse that contains a fire station's original fire pole but cannot help anyone in need.

Japan and America, Post-Quake

I'm not a morning person, but on Friday, March 11 I woke up fast when I heard the news announcer on the clock radio say something about a 9.0 earthquake in Japan, and a tsunami afterward, heading for the West coast where I live. The tsunami arrived a few hours later, around 8:00 a.m. PST, smashing boats together in Santa Cruz.

Since then, I've been following the news out of Japan as closely as I can, both because I've been writing about it for work and because I live in California. First, there were fears of another major earthquake on the West coast, at the other end of the Pacific plate. Then the worries shifted to the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan that were leaking radioactive materials, a scenario made more vivid by a somewhat misleading New York Times forecast of the jet stream whipping its way east from Japan. Stories about panicked Americans buying potassium iodide began to pop up in the media.

There's a certain myopia at work here, though. With Japan 5,000 miles away, for example, the radiation risk to the West coast is minimal. People in Japan are obviously much, much closer to the source. Furthermore, some of the daily aftershocks in Japan are bigger than some of the big earthquakes we've had out here, such as the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, a 6.9 on the Richter scale. Our troubles are small in comparison to Japan.

I worry about natural (and manmade) disasters as much as the next person. I've got my earthquake kit - I put it together long ago - and water bottles stashed around the house. But right now it's Japan that needs our help, and whose problems loom the largest.