Natural Hazards Observer
| May 2006 | Volume XXX | Number 5 |
Invited Comment
The 1906 Earthquake and Public Policy
Windows of Opportunity
Megadisasters change the social and political landscape as effectively as they change the physical landscape. Such changes were evident after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and they are taking place now as we observe the slow recovery of New Orleans. The 1906 earthquake and, in fact, earthquakes in general, are both a blessing and a curse when viewed through a public policy perspective. While they bring public and media attention to the hazard, they are also accompanied by a desire to rebuild as quickly as possible and the shared common belief that if a community survived one earthquake, it will survive the next.
Not Beyond Our Control
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was the first of several earthquakes in the past 100 years that acted as a catalyst to public policy change in California. While small and large earthquakes outside of the state proved to be learning opportunities for scientists and engineers, no single event has been nearly as great a force in public policy change as the massive 1906 jolt. Because of the 1906 earthquake, California state and local governments no longer consider earthquakes and their effects to be beyond human control. They now recognize that while these events may be inevitable, their impacts can be better understood and managed through targeted scientific investigations.
This perspective was supported by a small group of Bay Area political Progressives who were dedicated to changing public policy by using science-based decision making to address issues related to environmental resources and hazards. One of the first products to embrace this idea was The California Earthquake of April 18, 1906: Report of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission.(1) One-hundred years later, this report, unmatched in completeness and detail, is still being cited in new earthquake safety policy proposals. It was this report and efforts by early leaders of the California environmental and seismology movements that enabled the scientific community to evoke policy change when windows of opportunity opened after subsequent earthquakes.
Reframing the Disaster
Devastation caused by disasters evokes a very human desire to normalize situations. In 1906, politicians and the press saw that minimizing the disaster impacts by calling them “fire-related” (a more familiar type of disaster that could happen in any city) was a way of doing this most effectively. Additionally, local business and political leaders used this campaign of disinformation, downplaying the severity of the disaster, to avoid attributing the damage to an earthquake for fear of harm to the region’s good reputation. Earthquakes were bad for business.
This reframing of the disaster also aided the region’s recovery, which depended on the availability of money to rebuild. The treatment of the earthquake by the insurance community as a fire disaster, rather than as an earthquake with a resulting fire, provided the money and illustrated the relative lack of understanding of the earthquake problem by those in the financial and public policy centers of the eastern United States.
Change Can Be a Challenge
The San Francisco Bay Area has experienced few damaging earthquakes in the past 100 years, due in part to the stress released by the 1906 earthquake. However, it is the opinion of many Bay Area residents that the relative lack of damage from recent earthquakes is evidence that the Bay Area’s built environment is earthquake-resistant. They do not take into account the fact that these more recent earthquakes were much smaller than the one that struck in 1906. Legislative efforts to adopt new seismic mitigation strategies or policies are met with skepticism. Thanks to the 1906 event, advocates can respond with scientific and historical information about the hazard and its associated risk.
The idea of acting to reduce deaths in future earthquakes was not widely discussed following the 1906 earthquake. Instead, the death toll was played down: “The direct loss of life from the earthquake last Wednesday [April 18, 1906] was less than the loss of life caused every summer in any large Eastern city by sunstroke,” quipped Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin.(2) While research by Gladys Hansen and others documented over 3,000 deaths, the official U.S. Army relief operations staff noted only 664 deaths in the region.(3) San Francisco public officials simply denied that most of the disaster fatalities happened in the first place.
In the past 100 years, it has become common practice for scientists and engineers to work with public policy officials to reduce deaths and injuries. In addition, they are working to reduce property damage and time needed for community recovery. The idea that taking action after one incident that would speed regional recovery after another should have resonated even in the early 1900s. But, at the time, the response was simply to speed rebuilding without any thought to long-term earthquake hazard mitigation. The 1906 earthquake and subsequent earthquakes show that speedy restoration of the region’s economy is the driving force behind rebuilding, not increased safety. The politics of policy change for safety’s sake remain a challenge, and new safety regulations can only be instituted if they do not delay rebuilding or add significantly to costs.
Windows of Opportunity
Local, state, and federal elected officials and their constituents make policy decisions in an environment of competing demands for limited resources. Earthquake mitigation priorities compete with other public health and safety programs, such as reducing homicides and traffic fatalities, and fighting both infectious and other diseases. These health and safety programs, in turn, compete with the need for better education, more roads and public transit to reduce traffic congestion, affordable housing, jobs, and environmental quality. But, priorities do suddenly change in the immediate aftermath of disasters. The future careers of politicians and business leaders often depend on how well they respond to these events.
As is typical with most difficult policy challenges, California has largely dealt with earthquake risk reduction measures during the brief windows of opportunity that open after damaging earthquakes. These windows allow policy initiatives to rise on a political agenda that is not clouded by competing priorities and rival interest groups. For example, the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake helped frame earthquakes as a California problem, not just a San Francisco problem. Shortly thereafter, the 1933 Long Beach earthquake led to the Field Act for school safety and the Riley Act that required the establishment of city and county building departments to issue permits for new construction—major changes in the depth of the Depression.
It could be argued that the Santa Barbara earthquake focused the attention of the scientific and engineering communities on the organizational and political changes that were necessary. When the earthquake struck Long Beach in 1933, policy options were available. Similar windows of opportunity were capitalized on following the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the 1994 Northridge earthquake.(4) Between disasters such as these, policy makers settle into an equilibrium where competing interests are relatively balanced, resulting in only minor changes to earthquake safety policies.
Lessons from 1906
While Californians may not have initially embraced lessons learned from 1906, the abundance of evidence from the disaster has created opportunities for California to prepare for and mitigate the effects of earthquakes. Advanced preparations and commitments by disaster managers, earthquake engineers, and scientists have gradually improved the ability of those who live and work in the state to be safer and recover more quickly from future earthquakes.
The current emphasis of local and state governments on transportation, water supply, and continuity of government services is a direct reflection of the 1906 San Francisco experience—a massive failure of the water supply system and government services. Caltrans, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, East Bay Municipal Utilities District, the San Francisco Public Utility Commission’s Hetch-Hetchy system, and many other local government infrastructure providers are leading the way with ambitious efforts to reduce risk. Several of these projects have been funded by bonds passed by an increasingly educated populace—an educational effort based on photographs and vignettes from 1906.
The lessons of 1906 can be applied to disasters of different types and geographic regions. Hurricane Katrina will likely have equally long-term impacts on public policy in the Gulf Coast region and the nation as a whole. Similarly, California is learning from Katrina: the recent disaster has ignited an interest in the safety of levees in the San Francisco Bay-Delta system, the need to rebuild California’s infrastructure, the importance of retrofitting older housing and buildings in historic downtown areas, and the disproportionate exposure of vulnerable populations to hazards. Disasters are key tests of our collective ability to respond decisively, recover quickly, assess the effectiveness of policies, and make necessary course corrections.
Jeanne B. Perkins, Planning Department, Association of Bay Area Governments
Arrietta Chakos, City Manager’s Office, City of Berkeley, California
Robert A. Olson, Robert Olson Associates Inc.
L. Thomas Tobin, Tobin and Associates
Fred Turner, California Seismic Safety Commission
(1) Lawson, Andrew C. 1969. The California earthquake of April 18, 1906. Report of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington. (Orig. pub. 1908.)
(2) Fradkin, Philip L. 2005. The great earthquake and firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco nearly destroyed itself. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 267.
(3) Hansen, Gladys, and Emmet Condon. 1989. Denial of disaster: The untold story and photographs of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. San Francisco: Cameron and Company.
(4) Olson, Robert A. 2003. Legislative politics and seismic safety: California’s early years and the “Field Act” 1925–1933. Earthquake Spectra 19 (1): 111–31.
Pacific Disaster Center and Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative Launch New Disaster Risk Management Communication Tool
The Pacific Disaster Center (PCD) and the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative (EMI) have developed and launched Megacities Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Base, an Internet-accessible risk communication tool. The purpose of the knowledge base is to share and understand sound practices for disaster risk reduction and management that have been implemented in some of the world’s most disaster-prone urban environments. The PDC, EMI, and partners from the Disaster Risk Management Research Center in Kobe, Japan, are working with contributors from 20 major cities and megacities that actively participate in EMI programs. Disaster risk management profiles are currently available for Istanbul, Turkey; Tehran, Iran; Kathmandu, Nepal; Mumbai, India; Manila, Philippines; Quito, Ecuador; and Bogota, Columbia.
The knowledge base is part of the EMI’s Cross-Cutting Capacity Development (3cd) Program, a collaborative effort between researchers, policy makers, and practitioners to assist megacities in reducing their vulnerability to disasters. Under the partnership, 3cd program experts worked closely with the PDC to take the knowledge base from a concept to reality.
The partners encourage local officials, practitioners, researchers, students, and the community in general to visit the knowledge base at www.pdc.org/emi/ to learn more about disaster risk reduction and to contribute their own megacity disaster management practice. To learn more about the knowledge base and 3cd, visit www.pdc.org/emi/ or contact Jeannette Fernández of the Pacific Disaster Center at jfernandez@pdc.org.