Today marks exactly 100 years since the great San Francisco earthquake and fire which utterly devastated the Bay Area, reminding everybody just how fragile our cities really are. Until New Orleans, it was considered the worst natural disaster ever to have struck an American city, though the epicentre was actually in Santa Rosa, my wife's home town, in Sonoma County. There have been a few biggies since then, most notably in 1989, but everybody around here knows that we are living on borrowed time, and that the Big One could strike at any moment. It could strike right now. Earthquakes are not like terrorists - they are far more indiscriminate. And are we any more prepared than they were a century ago? I was watching a show about it last night, and it seems that back then people believed that their buildings were strong enough to withstand a powerful tremor, and the fire fighting service, with its fancy horse-drawn cart, was the envy of the US. Now when the quake hit, not only did it topple large stone buildings - including some of America's first skyscrapers - it also ruptured both gas pipes and water mains. The fires that ensued were impossible to put out, and San Francisco, which had a great deal of wooden houses and buildings, became a massive firestorm for days. It would baffle me that anybody would want to build another city on top of such devastation, were it not for the fact that many great cities have been destroyed and risen again, London being an obvious example. So with our modern technology, with everything we know about earthquakes, with our supposedly retro-fitted architecture, are we still at as much risk as they were back then? A lot of people seem to think so, and many of the people that are worried are those out here in the Valley, who live away from the major faultlines. They foresee a major earthquake in the Bay Area rupturing the delicate levee system that protects the Delta, not only severely flooding many areas and cities including Sacramento, but contaminating the water supply for the whole of northern California. Ouch. New Orleans has shown us how a modern city in a modern and supposedly wealthy nation can be brought to its knees by the merciless forces of nature. Citizens are encouraged to prepare for such emergencies by stockpiling fresh water and non-perishable supplies. Children are taught how to correctly react to an earthquake. But when the Big One comes, will California able to cope?
whose fault is it anyway?
18.4.06 20:39
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(19.4.06 14:27) Isn't that why they appointed Schwarzenegger? So that they don't need to cope, they can just wait for the superstar action hero to come rescue them? |
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