When the Big One comes: the woman preparing LA for life after a major quake
LA isn’t just idly waiting for the catastrophe. For the past year, Mayor Eric Garcetti has been working with the US Geological Survey’s southern California earthquake expert Dr Lucy Jones to develop an quake resiliency strategy for the city. In October, the city enacted the showpiece of that effort, a set of aggressive seismic regulations that will require retrofits on more than 15,000 buildings across the city.
The city of Los Angeles is complex, with strong neighbourhood identities, a fabled history, growing cultural assets, people from more than 150 countries speaking 220 languages, and industries – old and new – that are reinventing, innovating and constantly changing.
The city of Los Angeles has 87 other cities in the county and Southern California is much larger. So in order for the city to be resilient, working with our neighbours and the rest of Southern California to improve our resilience is really important.
In December 2014, the mayor’s office released Resilience By Design, an 18-point plan to help the city prepare for, respond to and recover from earthquakes. Its recommendations led to the city’s seismic retrofit ordinance, and also seek to address water security and telecommunications stability in the event of a large earthquake. Aho is working to improve the stability of cell phone towers so that they’ll be able to operate and connect people with critical emergency services during an earthquake or other major disaster.
The main tunnels that bring water from the California Aqueduct down to the Los Angeles basin lay almost directly on top of the San Andreas Fault, a major continental fault between the Pacific and North American plates. A moderate to major earthquake could destroy the tunnels and cut off the city from its water supply.
The key is getting ready, Aho says. “Typically you have a major disaster, a Northridge, a Katrina, a Sandy, and then you start making changes,” she says. “We’re making changes before.”
Netherlands:
Less muskrats caught in 2015 (Dutch) The number dropped with 6% to 88,650 muskrats, who often cause damage to levees by digging tunnels. The number of caught coypu (river rat) increased by 16% to 1,212. Their numbers have increased the past few years due to mild winters and thereby migration from Germany. The water boards are working together with local governments and nature organizations on how to manage the return of beavers, an endangered species that also damages levees and is causing safety concerns.
Other:
Earthquake hits India's Manipur state: Seven dead and 52 injured in Manipur (India). At least three people were killed and about 40 others injured today in Bangladesh in quake—related incidents as people rushed out in panic. The tremor was felt throughout Bangladesh around 4:35 AM local time. In Dhaka, most people rushed out to the streets in panic.
Vulnerable People:
Floods in UK:
This flood was not only foretold – it was publicly subsidised
Upstream flood banks now protect crops, not the city of York. Internal drainage boards – which are public bodies but tend to be mostly controlled by landowners – often prioritise the protection of farmland above the safety of towns and cities downstream.
Farm subsidies everywhere are conditional on the land being in “agricultural condition”. This does not mean any actual farming has to take place there – only that it looks like farmland. Any land covered by “permanent ineligible features” is disqualified. What does this mean? Wildlife habitat. If farmers don’t keep the hills bare, they don’t get their money. Scrub, regenerating woodland, forested gullies, ponds and other features that harbour wildlife and hold back water must be cleared. European rules insist that we pay farmers to help flood our homes.
We need flood prevention as well as flood defence. This means woodland and functioning bogs on the hills. It means pulling down embankments to reconnect rivers to their floodplains, flooding fields instead of towns. It means allowing rivers to meander and braid. It means creating buffer zones around their banks: places where trees, shrubs, reeds and long grass are allowed to grow, providing what engineers call hydraulic roughness. It means the opposite of the orgy of self-destruction that decades of government and European policy have encouraged: grazing, mowing, burning, draining, canalisation and dredging.
Natural flood management of this kind does not guarantee that urban floods will never happen. But its absence exacerbates them. Yes, Britain has been hit by massive storms and record rainfall. But it has also been hit by incompetence, ignorance and concessions to favoured interests. This, at least, we can change.
How
the floods united the north – from chefs bearing curry to refugees with
sandbags
The Sikhs had been dishing out free curry in Mytholmroyd for a few days when a man in his mid to late 20s came up to them, looking emotional. He had a confession to make. “I used to hate Asians,” he told one of the coordinators from Khalsa Aid, a Sikh charity based in Slough, who came up to volunteer in the West Yorkshire town after it was almost wiped out in the post-Christmas floods. “I used to be with Combat 18. But I’m so ashamed of that now, having seen how you are all up here helping us.” He vowed to go and apologise to all the Asian shopkeepers he had been rude to over the years.
On Sunday night, he logged on to Facebook for the first time in his life. “Hi, my name’s Mark and I lost everything I own in the Boxing Day floods,” he wrote. Within an hour, he’d had 80 offers of help from people he had never met in his life, prompting his second-ever Facebook post. “Incredibly overwhelmed by the response, not too proud to say tears have been shed over the well wishes and offers of support, again from strangers. I have to admit, I was a single, cynical man, living in his hometown of Sowerby Bridge, a town I barely recognise from my youth and I felt a huge disconnect. I felt no sense of society or belonging [to] the town where I was born. And it took a tragedy, at a time when most people focus [on] their own families. And yet, without request or reward, people have put their backs and hearts into helping strangers. It took a tragedy to bring a dawning of a new year with more hope for myself than I have felt in a long time, all thanks to a community I didn’t believe existed. I’m ashamed to say I thought Britain was broken. I’m now proud to say the scales have fallen from my eyes and now I see.”
While the floods helped restore Slade’s faith in people, they did show up the cruelty of a minority of others. (…) A week on, he cannot believe that anyone would be so callous. “The thieves took advantage of the fact that the power was off, so the CCTV wasn’t working and nor was the alarm. It makes you think these people know what they are doing. The only comfort we can gain from this is that people care. A hundred thousand people saw our Facebook post about the theft. All over the country people are trying to help us.”
Yasser al-Jassem, a refugee who escaped Syria a few months ago, explains why they were there: “I volunteered when I was in Aleppo. I was an ambulance driver and helped with humanitarian rescue efforts when the Assad regime bombed civilian areas. Now, in the UK, I also want to volunteer, and so do many other Syrians who recognise the importance of humanitarian efforts like this one because of the destruction in our homeland.”
