Abstract
Looking at how risk and disaster have been defined to articulate scientific knowledge and living experience, this chapter explores the of the two concepts are interwoven with the question of individual and collective responses to threats in a post-Second World War context. The chapter goes on to detail how these definitions have been a constant preoccupation of researchers, who are trying to define both the scope of this particular object of research and its changing relationships with others actants. In an attempt to follow William James’ steps, I recompose the various ways in which the dimensions of earthquakes can be articulated, from scientific definitions to personal experience. Following actor-network theory provides the necessary theoretical backbone to describe the nature of an earthquake, and what a future “Big One” could look like for Bay Area residents.
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- 1.
“Il est très curieux que au dix-huitième siècle, ce soit le tremblement de terre de Lisbonne qui assume quelque chose de cela, où toute l’Europe s’est dite: comment est-il encore possible de maintenir un certain optimisme fondé sur Dieu. Vous voyez, après Auschwitz retentit la question: comment est-il possible de maintenir le moindre optimisme sur ce qu’est la raison humaine. Après le tremblement de terre de Lisbonne, comment est-il possible de maintenir la moindre croyance en une rationalité d’origine divine?” (Deleuze, 1987).
- 2.
“Rapidement, l’émotion face à ce qui apparut comme une tragédie incomparable devint mondiale […] La dilatation à l’échelle du globe et l’écho de la catastrophe s’accompagna de la diffusion d’une dramaturgie spectaculaire, associant des récits, des images de professionnels et d’amateurs, des descriptions plus ou moins scientifiques du tsunami et de ses conséquences, des discours d’anticipation sur les futures répliques envisageables d’un tel phénomène” (Lussault, 2007: 15).
- 3.
Douglas pointed out: “Risk has largely replaced older ideas about the cause of the misfortune. Concepts such as sin, which were once used to provide explanation for misfortune, are now discredited. In their place, is the ‘modern, sanitized discourse of risk’ which ‘is all we have for making bridges between the known facts of the existence and the construction of a moral community […] Indeed, risk provides secular terms for rewriting scripture: not the sins of the fathers, but the risks unleashed by the fathers are visited on the heads of their children, even on the nth generation” (Douglas 1992: 26; as quoted by Lupton, 1999b: 47).
- 4.
“We identified a new set of problems with the earthquake safety of hillside homes; we know how to fix these problems, at least for moderate to strong earthquakes like the Northridge earthquake; as long as the costs of the fixes are significantly below the damage that is likely to occur in a Northridge-like earthquake, and as long as these fixes provide a higher degree of assurance that there won’t be any damage, they are probably reasonable” (VonWinterfeldt, Roselund, & Kitsuse, 2000: 18).
- 5.
Following this perspective, from the authors’ vantage point, the more accurate solution in terms of public policy should be to implement policy that encourages homeowners to invest in minor earthquake retrofitting. “The primary reason for this switch is the longer time horizon. With a longer time horizon, the probabilities of moderate and strong ground shaking increase (approximately, but not precisely, by a factor of three), and the probability of low shaking decreases. As a result, retrofitting alternatives will become more attractive” (VonWinterfeldt et al. 2000: 31).
- 6.
The South Napa Valley earthquake was an M.6.0 event that hit the city of Napa, California, on August 24, 2014, at 3:20 a.m. local time.
- 7.
“Resources extraction and economic development were reciprocal, the gains from resources extraction created prosperity within the region, and the regional special order was such as to maintain these conditions” (Walker & Thomas, 2010: 5).
- 8.
Most of the wildlife is, of course, no longer found along highways or in the backyards of residential areas: “tule elk, antelopes and grizzly bears, and thousands and thousands of migratory shorebirds – so many that duck hunters, up until the 1850s describe being able to kill twelve birds with one shot” (Save San Francisco Bay, n.d.). Wildlife is still present in the East Bay: mule deer, coyotes, gray foxes, raccoons, skunks, opossums, and fox squirrels live in the hills. Mountain lions are also part of the mix of the East Bay wildlands–urban interface, being regularly spotted in the Berkeley and El Cerrito hills.
- 9.
“According to one source, O’Farrell [the civil engineer in charge of the grid] at first blanked when asked to extend the grid without reference to topographical features, but in the end, he did. In accordance with standard practice in nineteenth century America, O’Farrell platted across tidelands that were regularly under water, over marshes, and up the slope of steep hills in order to facilitate land sale” (Tobriner, 2006: 9).
- 10.
Incredibly, in some places, between 40 and 80 feet deep.
- 11.
As Tobriner noted, the city was then selling lots in order to cover municipal expenses (Tobriner, 2006: 11).
- 12.
Mobilization by the citizens and the press had in little to no impact on the city plan, which was drawn according to the city’s overriding business plan.
- 13.
The 1868 earthquake was an M6.8 earthquake, with its epicenter at the southern end of the Hayward Fault. The earthquake was, at that time, the most destructive in California’s history. In San Francisco, five deaths and significant property loss was reported. A significant amount of damage also occurred in Alameda County, where a number of small rural cities were almost totally destroyed.
- 14.
After the 1856 earthquake in Alta California, an editorial stated, “Since the terrible shock of Friday last, speculation has been rife as to the probable effect it would have upon the minds of inhabitants and upon the property interests of the city” (Tobriner, 2006: 18).
- 15.
So-called “Silicon Valley,” on the peninsula of the Bay Area, is geographically the third largest high technology center in the United States, behind New York City’s greater metropolitan area and metropolitan area of Washington, DC. In the San Francisco Bay Area itself, it ranks first. The region is the most important producer of high technology devices in the United States. In 2009, the San Francisco Bay Area’s GDP ranked it as the equivalent of the 22nd richest country in the world, had it been its own country.
- 16.
Since the first moment of its construction, San Francisco has been pulled apart by the exploitation of its resources on one side and the people’s defense of the environment on the other. Bay Area conservation groups are numerous and very active. The Bay Institute of San Francisco, San Francisco Baykeeper, the California League of Conservation Voters, California Native Plant Society, Friends of the San Francisco Estuary, the Greenbelt Alliance, the Marine Mammal Center, and the Save the Bay organization, to name a few, have been very active in trying to protect the remaining space against the growing “concretization” of the greater Bay Area.
- 17.
Among others battles, opponents of non-regulated development of the Bay Area have been able to stop developers from filling in the Bay more fully. The first place to be filled in was the Yerba Buena area, around Mission Bay; soon, thereafter, every San Francisco creek and tideland. Then came the creation of Treasure Island, the Alameda Naval Air Station, Mills Fields, where the San Francisco Airport is located, and the San Pablo Bay fill project. By the 1960s, 91% of the San Francisco Bay wetlands were gone.
- 18.
With the freeway revolt—the first of its kind in the United States—neighborhood associations collected 30,000 signatures against the construction of the Embarcadero Freeway, which was meant to connect the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge. By 1985, the removal of the freeway was supported by a large coalition of environmental organizations. The-mayor, Dianne Feinstein, supported the removal project. In 1991, the freeway was torn down and replaced by a boulevard with trolleys and a pedestrian promenade running along the waterfront. This area’s real estate value grew by 300%. For more information about the removal of the freeway, preserving cities, and, specifically, the Embarcadero Freeway, see http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/FreewaysEmbarcadero.html.
- 19.
“Urban renewal legislation passed by Congress in 1949 and 1954 gave cities the power to assemble land, clear it of offending uses, and finance redevelopment. San Francisco, like all big cities established a Redevelopment Agency to spearhead its efforts. Justin Herman directed that agency aggressively for many years, backed by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association [a citizen group], and later the Convention and Visitors Bureau [an arm of the hotel and tourism industry]” (Walker, 1998: 4). The agencies targeted low-income areas and, as a consequence, destroyed more than 10% of the Victorian houses that were to become city landmark buildings. During the 1950s and 1960s, 20,000 people were delocalized. Other development projects targeted those living in hotel housing, mostly occupied by single Filipino, White, and African-American men who had retired from working on the docks. This renewal marked the premise of the property boom, which lasted for a little more than a decade, between the 1960s and the first major oil crisis of 1973. Among the famous cases of preservation that were embraced and led by citizen-based organizations was the preservation of San Francisco’s cable car, achieved by its receiving National Landmark Status; the “freeway revolt” in 1955, which stopped the freeway from running through Golden Gate Park; and the first loft emerged from Ghirardelli’s former chocolate factory. In 1968, the African-American community living in the Fillmore District of San Francisco won its battle against an urban renewal project, allowing them the right to protect their homes from destruction, which was a historical first in the USA.
- 20.
On this question, see also Insecurity and Segregation: Rejecting an Urbanism of Fear (Pattaroni & Pedrazzini, 2010).
- 21.
This is probably more visible in Oakland and Berkeley than in Albany, El Cerrito, and Richmond. El Cerrito and Richmond, in particular, have seen larger suburban development, targeting both the lower- and upper-middle classes in these areas. Both cities, however, have succeeded in keeping some of their historic buildings.
- 22.
“San Francisco has eight hundred thousand inhabitants, more or less, and each of them possesses him or her own map of the place, a world of amities, amours, transits routes, resources and perils, radiating out from home. But even to say this is to vastly underestimate. San Francisco contains many more than eight hundred thousand living maps , because each of these citizens contains multiple maps: areas of knowledge, rumors, fears , friendship, remembered histories and facts, alternates versions, desires, the maps of everyday activities versus the map of occasional discovery, the past versus the present, the map of this place in relation to others that could be confined to a few neighborhoods or could include multiple continents of ancestral origin, immigration routes and lost homelands, social ties or cultural work” (Solnit, 2010: 3).
- 23.
“All the surrounding cities and towns are jammed with the homeless ones, where they are being cared for by the relief committees. The refugees were carried free by the railroads to any point they wished to go, and it is estimated that over one hundred thousand people have left the peninsula on which San Francisco stood” (University of Buffalo, 2008).
- 24.
As we shall see later, these pieces of information are crucial for our understanding of the event. Some of this more scientific content produced for these events is accessible online, providing useful first-hand testimonies and a fuller picture of the era. Other documents, not intended to reach large audiences, have remained more confidential, even though a well-indexed Google “Advance Search” can lead one to them.
- 25.
I have borrowed this word from November et al. (2010).
- 26.
The maps are regularly published in the newspaper and are part of the earthquake prevention material produced by the USGS and the American Red Cross, “Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country” (American Red Cross et al., n.d.).
- 27.
In the case of earthquake risk in the Bay Area, a great deal of information can be found online but, as many of the informants told me, only the information produced by the USGS is considered sufficiently scientific to be reliable.
- 28.
“But what we just said about the spurious distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘human’ geography is even truer of the efforts to add the fourth dimension to the ‘three dimensions’ of Euclidian space. To be sure, once you believe you have frozen the navigational movements in the three dimensions of Euclidian space, it is very difficult to see how you could insert the obvious fact of movement and transformation. But this difficulty vanishes once you realize that in geography – provided you shift to the navigational interpretation of maps – everything is on the move: the navigator in the yacht, the yacht itself, the pencil on the map, the tide, the current, the Nautical Service in charge of sinking the buoys, in brief the whole damned multi-verse. The very idea of a time separated from a space (as if a fourth dimension had to be added to the three of ‘commonsense’ as if living in a Euclidian space was commonsense!) comes from dreaming over a map too long. […] The very idea of a mobile moving without undergoing any transformation is the result of an aesthetic contemplation of an isolated inscription (Latour, 1986). “It is not a property of the world at least not of the multiverse” (November et al. 2010: 596).
- 29.
Among the opponents to the initial construction project and its retrofitting were several environmental supporters, including several board members of the Sierra Club. According to Daniella Thompson, some members of the Sierra Club had built their homes in Berkeley Hills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other residents there included scholars of the University of California. John Muir, the President of the Sierra Club, who visited the place, described it as “a most glorious season of terrestrial grace” (http://berkeleyheritage.com/eastbay_then-now/sierra_club_leaders.html).
- 30.
“Community power and design with nature suffered another blow when the aesthetics of football triumphed at the University and a huge stadium was jammed into scenic behind the campus Strawberry Canyon” (Walker, 1995).
- 31.
“The plan, which is expected to get under way in the next year or two, calls for portions of the stadium to be sliced into blocks that will rest on plastic sheets. When the earth ruptures, the soil will move under the sheets but, engineers hope, will leave the blocks intact. The price tag for the retrofit is estimated at between $150 million and $175 million” (Jones, 2008).
- 32.
The reason for his strong opposition was the high risk of landslides and seismic activity.
- 33.
From north to south, the bridges are: the Carquinez Bridge, the Richmond and San Rafael Bridge, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the San Mateo Bridge, the Dumbarton Bridge, and, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge. As we shall see later, despite the effort of Bay Area Rapid Transit authorities, experts estimate that the underwater tunnel crossing underneath the San Francisco Bay cannot be totally retrofitted; consequently, it may not be entirely safe during a major earthquake.
- 34.
Some people also discussed the Bay Area Rapid Transit public transportation system tunnel, which runs underneath the Bay, joining localities in the East Bay to the San Francisco Peninsula.
- 35.
The most visible and long-term consequence of the Loma Prieta earthquake was the construction of a new segment of the San Francisco Bay Bridge east span, which began in 2002. As did the retrofitting operations of the Memorial Stadium, this construction has triggered heated controversies and debates.
- 36.
One of the most dramatic stories was the rescue of a young boy, who endured the amputation of his legs in order to free his body from concrete blocks: “For the journalist who had covered the story, details of the rescue of this young boy are still vivid: ‘I remember Betts emerging from the operating room twenty years ago to talk to us; it was 4:30 in the morning by that time, and he was in his scrubs, unshaven, gray around the eyes, and worried about shock and toxins that might be released into the boy’s lungs or kidneys’” (Gorney, 2009).
- 37.
“I was living in Maine. I once lived in San Francisco and was galvanized by the images on TV of familiar places in ruins. So yes, shock waves were far reaching. San Francisco is one of those “national cities” that everyone identifies [with] – had it been someplace like Topeka or Omaha, the images of ruin would not have carried the shock of recognition in the rest of the country,” recalls a respondent [J., 2009].
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Mazel-Cabasse, C. (2019). The Multiple Existences of Earthquake Risk. In: Waiting for the Big One. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15289-5_2
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