March 17, 2006
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
The Argus - Fremont, CA

A massive earthquake like the one that devastated San Francisco in 1906 would in all likelihood turn the Bay Area into an island of catastrophe, with all its highways and bridges impassable, its hospitals all but crippled and outside help beyond reach as more than 150 fires burned on the whim of the wind.

At least 51,000 and probably closer to 100,000 of the region's poorest and ailing, many of them non-English speaking, would become homeless, and almost half of Bay Area homes would be without water for a week.

"There will be mass casualties. There will be losses of businesses and institutions," said Rich Eisner, coastal region chief for the state Office of Emergency Services, in a briefing Thursday for East Bay emergency managers. "Nobody will be safe."

Intellectual talent probably would flee for the Midwest, and as a national center for technology development, he said, "we will cease to function."

Total damages from such an earthquake, magnitude 7.9, are estimated at $122 billion, close to the destruction wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in Louisiana and Mississippi, Eisner said.

"It is comparable to the worst natural disaster in American history," he said, but unlike the hurricanes, a big earthquake would come without warning.

Close to 220 emergency managers sat wide-eyed listening. On April 18, the 100th anniversary of the great San Andreas earthquake, they will conduct a drill as though it were happening all over again, with a momentary foreshock then a full minute of violent shaking centered in the waters just off San Francisco.

They will activate emergency operations centers in the cities of Berkeley and Albany, at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, at Bayer Health Care, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, at the Berkeley Unified School District and at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, in a "tabletop" test of their response and management of a regional disaster.

Reflection on a large earthquake shaking a region with 15 times the population it had in 1906 "really does provide an impetus to say, 'Hey people, wake up. Get prepared,'" said Gil Dong, assistant fire chief in Berkeley, which has conducted similar exercises for the past three years.

Photo: This image shows San Andreas Lake and Crystal Springs reservoir from the air, looking Southeast. The highway paralleling the lakes to the left is Interstate 280, "the most beautiful urban highway in the United States''.

This valley is remarkably straight because the San Andreas fault runs down its center. San Francisco Bay is there at least partly because the block between the San Andreas on the West and the Hayward fault. The San Andreas continues a few more feet (or tens of feet) on its long slow journey North (eventually to be plastered onto Alaska?).

San Andreas Lake (from which the fault takes its name) formed naturally in the valley of the San Andreas fault. Man has enlarged San Andreas lake with a dam, and created two additional lakes in the same valley, Upper and Lower Crystal Springs Reservoirs.

These lakes hold the water supply for the City of San Francisco.

In the drill, emergency workers must work as if the region, even Berkeley itself, is on its own, and that may be a good assumption. Unlike Louisiana, California has well-evolved arrangements for sending help where needed in a fire or a natural disaster, but the neighboring fire, medical and police agencies travel by highway.

"In our earthquake scenario, if our roads are down, how are we going to get mutual aid?" Dong said. "It's going to be difficult to provide those types of resources, whether it's food, shelter or humanitarian aid."

Bill Metcalf, a Southern California fire chief sent to Louisiana by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, said emergency managers also ought to plan on missing many of their own. He found the Louisiana state Emergency Operations Center "in a total state of disarray."

"A good chunk of even your well-prepared people are not going to be even to get to your EOC. Can you do business?" he asked.

Public safety and emergency managers there were unable to grapple with the enormity of the destruction, which affected regions in Mississippi the size of Great Britain.

"They would have all told you a week before this event that they had it dialed it, that they had practiced, that they were prepared," Metcalf said.

"I think the president was way too quick to stand up and take the blame for the failure at the federal level. There was failed leadership at all levels. What we saw there were cascading failures, starting at the very local levels with failures of personal preparedness."

Southern Louisiana also lost all forms of communication in the hurricanes, from telephone land lines to cell phones to public-safety radios of the same kinds and frequencies used by most agencies in the Bay Area, he said.

"Satellite telephones that were supposed to be the magic bullet at best were a muzzle-loading musket that worked some of the time," he said.

"It was spotty."

Metcalf said he made contact with outlying fire chiefs by flying overhead in a helicopter and dropping notes in water bottles then reading the hand-scrawled signs that they held up in reply.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/argus/localnews/ci_3611644