I sat at a desk in the disheveled offices of the Los
Angeles Times Valley Edition on Jan. 18, 1994.
It was the day after the great Northridge Earthquake and we
were not far from the epicenter. Just the day before, the
office resembled a junkyard, a jumble of broken windows, spilled file cabinets, toppled desks
and computers, books and newspapers, all soaked by a sprinkler system unleashed by the quake.
Through some miracle it was up and running the next day and
we were deep into the herculean task of covering what at the time was the
biggest natural disaster to befall an American city. We paused only occasionally to dive under our
desks when an aftershock rolled through.
Late in the morning the phone rang. It was a woman who called to tell us that she
always experienced a bout of gastro-intestinal distress before an
earthquake. And it happened the evening
before the Northridge quake. Would we
like an interview?
I thanked her for the call and joked that many of us had
experienced gastro-intestinal distress during and immediately following the
quake. She was not amused and threatened
to call another newspaper the next time her symptoms struck.
We received a lot of calls like that, from psychics and
pseudo scientists who were convinced they had found the Holy Grail of
earthquake prediction. Clearly, they
had not.
One call, however, turned out to be at least partially
correct. A regular caller to our office
was a woman once married to a small-time hood who operated in our zip code
called Sid the Squid. Sid had departed
this planet some years ago so we referred to her as the Widow Squid.
Ms. Squid explained that some years back, she would share a
bottle of booze and her favors with a building inspector who would drop by to
visit. On one such occasion, he told her
that if there was ever a major earthquake in the Valley, all those apartment
buildings with parking areas built beneath them would come tumbling down.
All of them didn’t.
But a lot did, including the infamous Northridge Meadows collapse which
left 16 people dead. It was a good tip
that came too late.
The 20th anniversary of the Northridge quake has
raised the question once again about earthquake predictions. Many scientists believe it could become a
reality sometime in the future. Many believe it never will.
While the research continues, there are plenty of folks out
there that will fill the void with their own theories.
Just a couple of months ago, a website called Catholic
Online published a story headlined, “Major Quake Predicted for California.”
In it, the story pointed to the mysterious appearance of two
oarfish washed up upon California shores as a precursor to an earthquake.
“In Japan, there is a traditional correlation between
oarfish and earthquakes that dates back for centuries,” the story reports. “Traditional
Japanese folklore says that oarfish beach themselves as a warning to the people
before an earthquake. The normally elusive fish, which can be up to five meters
in length, are said to be messengers from the palace of the Sea God.”
“A possible scientific explanation may be that deep-sea
fish, such as oarfish, are more sensitive to seismic shifts and stress, and
somehow respond to the tectonic pressure that builds before an earthquake by
coming to the surface.”
It goes on the explain that “to be clear, the only evidence
then is traditional Japanese folklore, which in a scientific sense isn't
evidence at all.”
But it adds, “However, not all folklore is nonsense either.”
Maybe not, but the story certainly is.
Britain’s Daily Mail breathlessly reported to its readers
this month that floating orbs that “ have
been linked to UFOs and hallucinations and thought to be harbingers of doom”
could be a tipoff to a quake.
“The lights, which take many forms and appear before or
during earthquakes, could provide an early warning sign,” the paper reported.
Of course, if those lights happened to be stars or moonlight or aircraft or search lights or swamp gas, well, forget it.
The idea that animals can predict earthquake has been around
for centuries. It is still studied in
Asia. But here, according to the
National Geographic, even though there have been documented cases of strange
animal behavior prior to earthquakes, the United States Geological Survey says
a reproducible connection between a specific behavior and the occurrence of a
quake has never been made.
"What we're faced with is a lot of anecdotes,"
said Andy Michael, a geophysicist at USGS. "Animals react to so many
things—being hungry, defending their territories, mating, predators—so it's
hard to have a controlled study to get that advanced warning signal."
Just to be on the safe side, if you run across a beached
oarfish with strange lights dancing above it while a dog howls somewhere in the
night, you might want to get under a table.
There are well-intended but bogus predictions, then there is
downright fraud. A classic example was
one that hit the Internet in 2010 claiming that Caltech was sending all of its
students and faculty home because of an impending quake.
Adding to the paranoia was the unspoken belief that, heck,
if anybody knew a major quake was going to strike, it would be Caltech.
This, of course, kept the public relations staff at Caltech
quite busy for a number of days, telling
the curious that scientists so far are unable to predict quakes and that no one
had been sent home.
It was my second favorite outrageous rumor, the first being
the alarming disclosure some years back that Zero Population Growth had
booby-trapped men’s toilets with razors to castrate the unsuspecting.
The most accurate prediction about earthquakes is that they will indeed occur, some small, some large, somewhere in California. Always have, always will. And the best advice to take away from the prediction community is to always be prepared.
