Update to this week's gas article

Since posting this week's article about gas safety, I've had additional useful correspondence with officials at San Francisco's Earthquake Safety Implementation Program and felt that it would be appropriate to update this article with relevant information.  I've updated the main article, and will have this as a separate post temporarily to ensure that people who were notified of the original article get notified of the update:

While some communities are mandating installation of the automatic shut-off valves in new developments to prevent fires, the prospect of wide-spread automatic gas shut-downs lasting for several weeks has made San Francisco seismic safety officials reluctant to pursue extensive installation of these valves.  They are concerned that the potentially extended lack of heat and hot water could cause hardship for elderly or otherwise vulnerable residents whose gas didn't need to be turned off in the first place.  It could also encourage many residents to leave the city during the post-quake period, which would delay recovery by depressing services and business operations, not to mention volunteer recovery efforts.  I feel that a potential solution to these conflicting priorities could be for cities and gas companies or the Public Utilities Commission to establish guidelines making it easier for automatic valves to be reset rapidly.  This might include official training and certification of large building property managers to reset automatic valves and check for leaks, creating a registry of residences with frail occupants who are the first priority for gas check/restoration, and perhaps inspection of residences by gas companies to determine ahead of time which of them fall into specific situations that allow safe valve resets by occupants, to be followed by the same leak evaluations that most people would undertake immediately after the quake anyway.  This is just my opinion.

Should I turn my gas off after an earthquake? Don't guess about gas...

This topic took several months to research, so I haven’t posted in a while.  I’m finally wading into this after years of giving talks without being able to give clear advice on how to handle gas after an earthquake.  It can be confusing.  On the one hand, it seems safest to turn off your gas, but on the other hand, the official advice from various utility companies and emergency organizations is to not turn the gas off unless you suspect a leak...and yet on the third hand, many sources are telling you to get automatic gas shut-off valves.  How do we fold our three hands together to make sense of these seemingly mixed messages?  I’ve spoken over the last few years, and especially the last few months, with various earthquake safety experts, fire marshals, fire department representatives, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), and Southern California Gas (SoCalGas), and here’s my attempt to make sense of it all.

Big emergency kit for home, little emergency kittens for work and car

We spend a lot of time discussing emergency kits for the home.   Those kits should be geared mostly toward keeping yourself supplied at home if the stores and banks are closed, and at least part should be a portable kit that you casually take to a shelter with you.  You presumably won’t need to grab it and run out of the building during a quake, because you are not supposed to run out of a building during a quake.  So these emergency kits can be large and contain supplies for up to 7 days.

But what about where you work, and your car?  It’s important to think about such things, because if you are stuck somewhere that isn’t home, your home emergency kit isn’t going to be much help to you.  Here are some thoughts about how to go about preparing work and car kits.

Earthquake safety at work is good medicine

While I doubt that people wake up every day with excited anticipation that there might be a new Quaketips post, long-time readers may have noticed that I haven't posted since August.  I had to deal with various crises over a few months and had to take a break.  Fortunately, this month's post has essentially written itself, because a while ago, I agreed to write an article about earthquake safety in the workplace from a medical perspective for San Francisco Medicine, the journal of the San Francisco Medical Society, and that issue just came out and is freely available for reading on the web.  The article is not all that different from what I might have written for the blog, so I'm cheating a bit and instead of writing something new, I'm directing people to that article, available for online reading here.  Hopefully you won't mind that it is written assuming that you are a doctor...unless, of course, you are a doctor.


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At last, helpful hints on installing push-latches for cabinets!

If there was a moderately sized earthquake and your kitchen cabinet doors swung open, what would happen next?  Well, anything in those cabinets could (and frequently does) fall out: breakable bottles of various things, dishes, glasses, and even heavy appliances like blenders.  Look in your cabinets and imagine the mess, loss, and potentially even injuries suffered by small children and pets who might get hit by falling objects.  Even if nobody is hurt, if none of the humans are home but a dog or cat is there unattended, there’s now a bunch of sharp or potentially toxic things all over the floor for the pet to lick and eat before you get home.  Clearly, it’s better just to prevent the doors from opening in the first place with quake-resistant latches.

The problem is that many people are lulled into optimism by a variety of pinch-style latches, magnetic latches, etc., that can make the cabinet door tough to open without some effort.  Some cabinet doors are harder to open than others; but you know that if you pull hard enough on the outside, they will open.  Guess what: that means that if the items inside the cabinets are pushing hard enough on them, they will open.  In some cases, the vibration itself can make the doors swing open and then everything can fall out.

Some people install the child safety latches that allow the door to open an inch and you have to slide your fingers behind it to move a lever before the door can be fully opened, but because this can be really inconvenient, I have installed push latches on my cabinet doors.  That is, the door can’t be opened by pulling on it; you have to push first and the latch disengages, and then when you close it, you push again and it re-engages.  While it’s theoretically possible that vibration in just the right direction might make the door push itself and open, I think it’s unlikely.

I feel that the latches are pretty important, but they are a bit of a pain to install and they take some trial and error.  That’s where this blog comes in; I try to save people from having to go through the same learning process that I went through, so here I’ll be giving you some hints on installation; things I’ve learned in the several times that I have installed these latches.

Experience an earthquake! And then go see the ostrich chicks and have lunch.

About a week ago, I and about 14 other people experienced two earthquakes in a row; and then another ~15 people experienced them about 10 minutes later, and it continued that way all afternoon.  Micro-aftershocks?  No, it was the new Earthquake exhibit at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, where they have a “shake house” that first simulates the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and then simulates the 1906 San Francisco quake.  That was a fascinating experience for me, because when I felt the real 1989 quake, I was outdoors, which is a very different experience; and when I went through the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, I was a little boy in my bed, and was more bounced around than shaken.  Standing on the floor and having the walls shake and the floor rock and shift certainly does feel different.

A personal account from the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

Well, I’m pretty busy this month so I will cheat a little and not really write a blog entry, but instead will link to a truly amazing account of one person’s experiences in the hardest-hit section of San Francisco immediately after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  This is written by Stewart Brand, who is perhaps better known as having been the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog.  Brand just happened to be in the Marina District during the earthquake and helped with the civilian rescue attempts that are credited with having been the genesis of the San Francisco Fire Department’s Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) program and ultimately the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) programs throughout the country.  It’s interesting that Brand encapsulates the lessons that he learned during the experience, things that should be done before this happens again, and this basically sounds like a blueprint for how these programs are run and what they teach to the participants; a very forward-thinking individual!

In fact, this article was brought to my attention just last month by Dennis Hyde, the Co-Coordinator of the Inner Sunset/Golden Gate Heights NERT group.  I’ve linked to it instead of reprinting it here to avoid any copyright problems.

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004327.html

It’s quite long...but honestly, when I started reading it, I could not put it down, due to a combination of his excellent writing style and the no-holds barred and brutally honest account of how he and other people acted that day.  

By the way, there’s been a bug in the last few months in which people who receive this blog by e-mail have gotten messages in which some words are run together, despite looking normal in the blog.  I did some testing and I can’t reproduce the problem right now, so hopefully it is fixed...and of course the e-mail people might be laughing as they read this if it is missing spaces...

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Do I really have to stick down EVERYTHING? What about my TV remote?

When I give talks about earthquake precautions and I mention the concept of sticking down loose objects, I sometimes wonder if people are picturing a home in which absolutely nothing is moveable, with TV remotes, dinner plates, pencils, cats, you name it—all stuck down to surfaces.  Well, that’s probably the safest set-up for earthquake preparedness but it would not be very fun.

I confess: if I want to pick up my cordless telephone, I can!  The stapler and other odds and ends on my desk, the water filter jug on our kitchen counter, my electric razor on the dresser top; they are all perfectly usable.  And our little dog wanders around unimpeded. 

Double feature Part II: Can I get a fire hose to use after a quake if my house is burning down and the fire department is not coming?

(Haven't posted in a while, so this month you get a double feature.)


I got this question at the end of one of my recent talks and said I’d look into it and post an answer.  The question went something like this:  “I was around in the 1989 quake and in parts of the city, it was impossible to find a firefighter or policeman.  There’s a fire hydrant across the street from my house.  Can I purchase and keep my own fire hose to hook up to that hydrant if my house is burning down and the fire department can’t make it due to other emergencies?”

Double feature Part I: If you install a closet organizer system, don’t skimp on that last screw.

(Haven't posted in a while, so this month you get a double feature.)

How many of you have closets that look like this (Figure A)?  These are closet organizing systems, a big business, with companies like California Closets and the Container Store (Elfa brand) making it possible for a small space to accommodate lots of shoes, slacks, shoes, sweaters, shoes, suits, shoes, and if you are like some people I know, shoes.  You install these yourself, or the company will come out and install them for you, and they can make a huge difference.  They work by installing shelves and clothes-hanging rods that are all cantilevered from vertical rails on your wall (Figure B), which themselves are hanging from a horizontal strip of metal fastened to the wall at the top (Figure C).  I installed one of these Elfa systems in our closet a couple of years ago.  It’s pretty impressive, and can hold a couple of hundred pounds in the configuration that I used. 

The amazing thing about this popular system is that it is only attached at the top to that thin horizontal strip of metal that is fastened to the wall by one small bolt every 16 inches (wall stud spacing).  The rails have hooks at the top with which you literally hang them from a groove in the strip (Figure D).  That means that the rails and everything else attached to them can swing out as a single unit from the wall attached only at the top--but they don’t, I’ve been told, because all that weight is pulling the rails down against the wall and it’s remarkably stable.  The heavier the junk is that you put on the shelves, the more it presses against the wall, and those handful of bolts at the top are sufficient to keep the whole thing in place.   In fact, if wall studs are not handy in the right positions, you can even go right into the dry wall with the appropriate anchors because (they say) there will never be a force outward, just downward.

Where should I keep that emergency kit?

I get asked this a lot, and it’s a great question.  Should it be by the front door so that you can grab it on your way out if you have to evacuate (AFTER the shaking stops)?  Should it be in the deepest depths of your home so that if you are physically stuck in there and can’t get out through doors or windows, you’ll have supplies while waiting to be freed?  Should it be scattered around all of the rooms in your home so that you won’t be without supplies no matter where you might get stuck?  Or how about outside your home, so that if you leave the building (again, AFTER the shaking stops) and are not allowed back inside, you’ll still be able to get your supplies?

My earthquake preparedness website is moving!

I really do plan on doing a new real post soon, but I want to send a quick note to people who follow this blog that my companion earthquake preparedness website, which contains information like the schedule of presentations and streaming video of an older presentation, is moving to a new URL.  Apple's web hosting service is closing down in June 2012, and the old site will go away.  I have already reconstituted it at:

http://earthquake.matthewlspringer.com

...and I recommend it as an additional set of informational resources.

Coming soon, one of the most common questions that I get asked: just where are you supposed to keep your emergency kit?

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Small quakes: Good or bad for geology and psychology?

On Thursday, 10/20/11, 8.6 million people in California participated in the annual Great California ShakeOut, according to the organizers.  They pretended there was a large theoretical earthquake and then ducked under desks and other furniture and held on, and hopefully had discussions or at least thought a bit about what they would do in a quake (and hopefully none of them just got next to something, waiting to be hit in their theoretical head by theoretical flying rubble). 

Then, a couple of hours later, there was a real one, a 4.0 on the Hayward Fault!  Then a few hours after that, there was another real one, a 3.8 on the Hayward Fault!  The first one, at least, was unusually noticeable considering its small size (I can’t comment about the second quake because I didn’t notice it).  Then there were a couple of smaller quakes in the same place the following day.  These bring to 7 the number of small quakes on the Hayward fault this year, also known as the predicted spot of the next very large Bay Area earthquake; and they continue a line of small “feel-able” quakes in the Bay Area that have been occurring for several years.  

This invariably raises the question of whether small earthquakes are desirable or not.

“Be sure to bolt your furniture bracing straps to a wall stud”…ok, now for the other 95% of the population who doesn’t know how to find a wall stud:

I have been meaning to post for the last few days and kept getting too busy, so then Colorado had its largest earthquake in 40 years, then the east coast of the US had its largest quake in 67 years*, and then that evening I myself felt a small tremor in San Francisco that was centered on the Hayward fault in the East Bay…ok, ok, I’m posting already!

*The last quake that large on the East Coast was…New York, 1944!  (See my earlier post, “Why the heck do you live in that place with earthquakes”)  Please remind your East Coast friends: DON’T run out of the building, DON’T believe that “Triangle of Life” e-mail spam, and DO drop, cover, and hold on.  Better yet, direct them to this blog!

In my talks, I always feel like my description of how to brace tall furniture to the wall is incomplete, because I say that you need to bolt straps to the wall studs, rather than drywall or plaster, but that I don’t have time to describe how to find wall studs and work with them.  That just gets too far away from the topic and there isn’t enough time in the talk; but really, if you want to brace your furniture safely, you need to know about the wall studs.  So, today let’s get around to that topic.

Should I stay or should I go?...the inevitable dilemma about staying in the building during an earthquake

This month, we are taking a break from the actual preparedness issues and will instead delve further into this annoyingly counter-intuitive recommendation to not run out of buildings during earthquakes.

If you have attended or otherwise watched my talks about earthquake preparedness, you know that I make a point about not running out of a building during an earthquake.  I know, it just seems like the thing to do, when everything is shaking around you, and you picture yourself trapped under pancaked and collapsed buildings.  But the point I make in my talks, and want to emphasize with a bit more discussion here if you read further, is that at least in modern industrialized nations, statistically, you are taking a bigger risk of being injured as you run from your nice strong building into the DANGER ZONE that exists right next to buildings. 

Your MREs (emergency rations) are good for up to 10 years--or are they?? An update...

Many of us have emergency supplies that allow us to be self-sufficient for several days after a major disaster; not just earthquakes, but floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, you name it.  Canned foods have a surprisingly short shelf life: typically 2 years and sometimes 3 years, and of course, what comes out of the can is not necessarily nutritionally balanced.  Therefore, MREs (“meals ready to eat”) have become very popular in emergency kits, and I recommend them in my talks.  These are military rations also used for emergency relief, and have a number of advantages including multiple nutritionally balanced menus, decent taste and texture, a little food-warming packet, and a really long shelf life…or at least they did until 2010.  Surprise!

An amazing story from the past, AND more about hanging pictures that won’t come crashing down (the wired and non-wired varieties)

Even though I don’t plan on posting very often so  I don’t add to the e-mail overload of people who subscribe, it just makes sense to post something on April 18th, the anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.  There are two items on today’s plate: first a link to a then-young woman’s amazing description of what she experienced in the 1906 quake, and then I wanted to discuss a bit more about hanging pictures on the walls safely.

Special considerations for pets

I decided to lift one more of the articles on my website for this blog, which makes it a quote of a quote because that web article is based on a previous article that I wrote for a newsletter.  It's timely because the CNN website just had an article about plants that are poisonous to dogs and cats.  The following is from my website (at the end, I'm adding a little bit more today). THEN I'll start sticking to my promise and post infrequently!

Pets present many special problems, especially if you have to leave your home in a major disaster.  However, here's one big problem that I think people frequently overlook.  Even a small earthquake that causes just a few things to fall over in your home can still cause major problems if you have a dog or cat that stays home alone during the day.  If you have anything that you would not want to leave your pet with unattended, you should make sure that it can't fall and be accessible to your pet before you can get home.  The following is an article that I wrote for the April 2010 Cole Hardware newsletter, Hardware Hotline.

Important information about the recurring "Triangle of Life" e-mail spam

One more "catch-up" post taken from my website:

Many people ask me about an e-mail that circulates with regularity describing the so-called Triangle of Life approach to avoiding injury during an earthquake.  This theory, which holds that one should get NEXT to something uncompressible rather than UNDER something sturdy, has been rejected by many emergency management organizations as being based on a number of incorrect assumptions and questionable premises, and these organizations have predicted that this approach is more likely to cost lives than to save them if the earthquake occurs in a country like the U.S. that has well-constructed buildings. The following is a summary of the issue with links to more information:

Thoughts about the much-publicized North American earthquake prediction for late March 2011

This is what I wrote on my website in late March about the prediction from an ex-USGS scientist and made popular by Fox News.  The predicted quake did not occur, which of course doesn't mean that it won't happen tomorrow; but these thoughts are still worth considering for the future:

Many people are talking about a prediction for a large earthquake to hit North America this week, from a geologist who allegedly predicted the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, Jim Berkland.  I can't comment on the 1989 story, as I am having trouble finding details about it from reputable sources, but here are some thoughts about the widely-viewed recent Fox News interview in which he makes his current prediction.

"Why the heck do you live in that place with earthquakes??"

While some might question the wisdom of living near earthquake faults, it's notable that California is pretty far down on the list of historical disasters in this country.  Hurricanes and flooding in cities like New Orleans, Galveston, Miami, etc. have been much more disruptive, tornadoes and killer winter storms certainly wreak their havoc on a regular basis, domestic and external terrorism in places like New York and Oklahoma City have been very disruptive, and even the 1906 San Francisco earthquake did more damage by starting a fire than it did by shaking.  We haven't had an earthquake of that size (about 7.8 magnitude) in over 100 years, although we certainly could have one again.  The notable earthquakes in the state over the past century have typically killed about 50 people each, which is tragic, but is a small number compared to the number of casualties of many other typical causes; and this number will hopefully shrink as building construction and personal preparation continue to evolve.  And by the way, did you know that the area around Arkansas and Missouri, and the South Carolina region, are both very seismically active, and that there have occasionally been sizable earthquakes every few hundred years in Boston, New York, and Connecticut?

It's also worth pointing out, in the wake of the massive 2011 Japan earthquake (9.0) and the almost-as-large Chile earthquake (8.8) the year before that geologists are saying that the faults in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas are probably not capable of experiencing such massive events.  These faults, caused by tectonic plates that slide against each other, probably can only trigger up to about an 8 (the Richter scale and similar systems are log scales; you go up by 1, and the quake is 10 times larger).  In contrast, the fault systems in places like Japan, Chile, Indonesia, the Himalayas, Alaska, and the extreme north of California by Oregon that have given rise to the truly massive quakes in history (8.8-9.5 magnitude) are subduction zones, where one plate dives under another plate and creates a much bigger event.  So San Francisco probably will never experience something so massive, which is a bit of a consolation, but we should still take precautions against the problems that can occur from quakes like San Francisco 1906 or the 1989 Loma Prieta quakes.

Those in other parts of the country might say that at least they have advance warning about the hurricanes, etc.  That has not prevented large-scale disruption, damage, and loss of life caused by some of these hurricanes.  Plus, it's like I say in my talks, we DO have advance warning about earthquakes; we just have it much farther in advance than for the other disasters...so, there's going to be an earthquake, do something about it!  There, you've been warned.

For information about the precautions you can take, many of which are quite simple, check out my earthquake preparedness website.  And no, I have no financial stake in any of this...

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A blog is launched; opening thoughts

This is my first experience authoring a blog, and there will probably be a few technical bumps along the way.  Earthquake safety is an important topic in a place like the San Francisco Bay Area, and I hope that the information and occasional thoughts and tips here will be of interest to people who are trying to maximize their safety in our occasionally moving region.

It's important to remember that even though we live in a place that is subject to earthquakes, which are occasionally pretty big, most of the risks associated with California earthquakes can be minimized by taking some precautions ahead of time.  Just like one knows not to go jogging alone in the middle of the night in a dark park in a dangerous part of town, one should know what to do and not to do in regions subject to natural disasters.

I'm kick-starting this blog with a few entries in a row, first introductory and then a few entries that have already been on my website.  After that, I'll post occasionally; perhaps even relatively rarely so that I don't add to people's e-mail burdens.  I've got no idea about how many people will be signing on to this, but welcome to those that do!

-Matt Springer

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