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"  Editor&amp;#039;s note: This story was originally published on August 14, 2012. This Sunday morning, a 6.0 quake struck Napa, Calif. The Peeps were moving. It was Easter Day, 2010, and I was at a potluck brunch not far from downtown Los Angeles. It was characteristically sunny and warm, and many of the guests had settled into the host&amp;#039;s backyard garden. I was one of a half-dozen people sitting at a wooden picnic table when the shaking began. At first I thought it might be nausea. I was four months pregnant and had already eaten one too many of the sugary marshmallow chicks. Then I saw that everything on the table was vibrating.  Earthquake.  Little about it was scary. In fact, the sensation was mildly pleasant, just a mellow undulation, like standing on a floating dock as a spent motorboat wake rolls through. In seconds, it was over.  Soon other guests filed out of the house. &amp;quot;Did you feel that?&amp;quot; people asked one another. A lot of them hadn&amp;#039;t noticed a thing, but I was thrilled. After three years in L.A., it was my first true earthquake. Phones were fished from pockets and purses and Twitter feeds consulted. This was the real thing, a 7.2-magnitude tremor that originated in Mexico, 6 miles beneath the Baja Peninsula. There was some damage near the border, but Los Angeles had been spared. A few days later, my husband, Dan, and I were sitting in our living room when an aftershock hit. We briefly locked eyes, then turned our gaze to the darkened TV. We had recently bought our first flat-screen, and dutifully used $20 earthquake straps to secure it to the mantel above our defunct fireplace. They worked. The shaking stopped. Everything was fine. The past few years have been turbulent ones for the planet. Earthquakes have caused massive devastation, killing 86,000 people in Pakistan in 2005; 87,000 in China in 2008; and close to 100,000 in Haiti in 2010. In the two highest-profile earthquakes of the past decade\u2014the 2004 Sumatra quake and the 2011 Tohoku event in Japan\u2014most of the death and destruction were caused by a subsequent tsunami, a rare geological phenomenon that to most Americans seemed as bizarre and otherworldly as an asteroid strike. Four of the 13 most deadly earthquakes in history have occurred since 2004\u2014a statistic that says less about Earth than about how humans live on it. Growing populations and dense urban centers create greater hazards from natural disasters. (Even the strongest earthquake poses little danger to a person alone in a field.) When major quakes strike, as they inevitably will, people-packed cities like L.A. are most vulnerable. Long before I moved to California I knew that earthquake-probability maps show the Pacific Coast traced in red, reflecting the major fault lines that form where tectonic plates abut. But until recently, I hadn&amp;#039;t looked into the specifics: Seismologists estimate there&amp;#039;s an 82 percent chance that a magnitude-7 or greater quake will hit directly beneath Southern California in the next 30 years. Three-quarters of all U.S. earthquake losses are expected to occur in the state, and experts&amp;#039; best-guess estimate is that damages will exceed $30 billion per decade on average.  Meanwhile, Americans have been reminded that earthquakes aren&amp;#039;t purely a California hazard. In August 2011, a 5.8-magnitude tremor struck near Richmond, Va. That quake, felt from Georgia to Quebec, was the largest to hit the Southeast in more than a century. Using new paleoseismic data and more complex computer-forecasting techniques, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is refining risk estimates for places such as the Cascadia subduction zone off the Pacific Northwest coast, the Wasatch fault near Salt Lake City, and the New Madrid seismic zone, extending from southern Illinois into Arkansas, which experienced four magnitude-7 quakes back in 1811 and 1812. Of course, probabilities tend to have less impact than personal memory of actual events, and throughout the U.S., it&amp;#039;s been a time of relative quiet. The last earthquake to cause significant havoc was the 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake, which killed 57 people and delivered $20 billion in damage to the Los Angeles area in 1994. That mild Easter Sunday tremor in 2010 turns out to have been the most powerful earthquake to touch Southern California in nearly 20 years.  The same month, Dan and I were in the process of buying our first home. To us, the property was charming: a peak-roofed, light-filled house perched atop an ivy-smothered slope. We didn&amp;#039;t mind the steep, uneven stairs that led to the front door, or the cracks in the flaking stucco and the concrete patio. For a house built in 1927, such scars seemed minor. We were pleased to learn that the building had been bolted\u2014the foundation attached to the wooden frame with a series of struts and bolts. The job wasn&amp;#039;t to code, but overall it looked pretty good, our home inspector told us. We reviewed insurance options. A basic policy would run us $550 a year. Add earthquake insurance and the cost more than doubled. We had a decent idea of worst-case scenarios: Friends had been &amp;quot;red-tagged&amp;quot; after Northridge, when authorities marked 1600 homes as uninhabitable and forbade residents to return. Still, what were the chances of that happening again? Of it happening to us? Looking more closely at the quote, I saw that the deductible for our home would be close to $50,000. Justifying the decision to forgo earthquake insurance wasn&amp;#039;t difficult. The house has held up for this long, we rationalized. Something truly catastrophic would have to happen to make that expense worthwhile.  Still, Earthly hazards had seized my attention. In the past, I&amp;#039;d been exasperated by my East Coast family&amp;#039;s concerned phone calls following news coverage of Southern California&amp;#039;s forest fires. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s nowhere near us! We&amp;#039;re completely safe,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d reassure them (though once we could see distant flames from our apartment&amp;#039;s front porch). Now, though, I was the one worrying. The financial gamble of homeownership was part of it. The other was my son, Otto, who was born a few months after we moved into our new home. For the first time, I compiled a household earthquake kit, adding a week&amp;#039;s worth of extra diapers, wipes, and baby food to the stockpile of water, flashlights, and first-aid supplies. I made room in the trunk of our hatchback for a basic survival kit including energy bars, a fire extinguisher, sneakers, more diapers, and a couple of 2-gallon water jugs, and studied the emergency-shutoff directions for our gas line and water heater. When the 9.0-magnitude earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster struck Japan in March 2011, Dan and I half-jokingly debated the pros and cons of stocking up on plastic sheeting and duct tape. Nuclear disaster planners recommend a shelter-in-place approach to radiation plumes. But our house has neither a real basement nor any windowless rooms. Maybe sealing off our drafty, old-fashioned swing-open windows would help?  Did we think dangerous fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant might actually stretch across the Pacific? (Some members of an online moms&amp;#039; group I lurked in were convinced it was already happening.) Or were we more concerned about a similar &amp;quot;unforeseen&amp;quot; disaster at the San Onofre nuclear power plant 60 miles to the south? (News that it had been built to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake suddenly didn&amp;#039;t sound so impressive.) I&amp;#039;m not really sure. Both of those possibilities seemed outrageously unlikely\u2014yet it was foolish to completely dismiss them. What I knew to be true was that radiation exposure poses especially high risks for small children. Otto was 6 months old. When I saw a flier advertising a free emergency-preparedness class at the local library, I signed up. Over seven evenings, I sat between an elderly Japanese couple and a row of aging hippie types as an L.A. firefighter schooled us on various disaster scenarios. We practiced triage and first aid with what struck me as a somewhat lofty idea that when the big one hit, all of us\u2014informed, diligent citizens that we were\u2014would be providing crucial backup to first responders. Gory videos of car crashes and building collapses were the backdrop to discussions on how to treat head trauma (the No. 1 earthquake injury, our instructor said); how to make or find potable water when utilities are cut off (mine your water heater); and the California laws governing defecating in your own yard (illegal! my live-free-or-die New Hampshire relatives would be outraged). But I also had a more fundamental question about earthquakes: What were the odds I&amp;#039;d ever have to use these skills? In more than 30 years at the California Institute of Technology, seismologist Tom Heaton has developed a reputation as something of an earthquake maverick, with expertise in both geophysics and engineering. He&amp;#039;s a large man, with suspenders that stretch over his neatly pressed dress shirt and a soft, jowly face framed by a cloud-like crown of white hair. I&amp;#039;m hoping Heaton will provide some straightforward facts to help me frame our mutual earthquake risk. Instead, he leans back, obviously bemused by a question he&amp;#039;s heard too many times before. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s almost like asking how big is the risk from wars, how big is the risk from epidemics,&amp;quot; Heaton says. &amp;quot;When we look at the statistics of earthquake problems, they&amp;#039;re the kind where things that don&amp;#039;t happen very often end up being incredibly important.&amp;quot; Recent U.S. seismic history doesn&amp;#039;t give us any real clues as to what lies ahead, Heaton says. &amp;quot;In the last century, we&amp;#039;ve only had deaths in the hundreds. But if you look at 1906, the largest city in the western U.S. was basically wiped out by an earthquake. Losing a major city would be hard for somebody to even imagine today. Maybe some people would say that it&amp;#039;s impossible. But I don&amp;#039;t think anybody actually knows that.&amp;quot; I ask Heaton what he thinks about my earthquake-insurance rationalization\u2014that my house has endured 80 years of shaking, and so can probably hold up for the four or five more decades that Dan and I will be around. He smiles. &amp;quot;Oh no, that doesn&amp;#039;t really tell you anything,&amp;quot; he says. It&amp;#039;s no accident that earthquake-probability forecasts use a 30-year time frame, the same as the typical home mortgage. Heaton has been intimately involved with the complex number-crunching responsible for those statistics, and while the figures undoubtedly help citizens evaluate risk\u2014and engineers set building code standards\u2014he is the first to admit that the forecasts are perplexingly vague. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve fallen asleep a hundred times with those numbers,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;We argue and arm-wrestle. There&amp;#039;s a million compromises.&amp;quot; A magnitude-7 quake, after all, may be a neighborhood-flattening jolt or just another fun party story, depending on where and when it comes. Heaton has raised three children in a Pasadena home built in 1910. He doesn&amp;#039;t have earthquake insurance either. He used to, up until 1991, the year the 5.6-magnitude Sierra Madre earthquake damaged his home. &amp;quot;It broke some foundation; it destroyed the chimney,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;By the time it was done, it caused several tens of thousands of dollars in damage, and earthquake insurance paid for that. It was a good deal.&amp;quot; Since then, the price of earthquake insurance has gone up, along with deductibles. Heaton and plenty of other Californians calculated that it made more sense to invest in upgrades that would protect against future quakes than to pay a skyrocketing monthly premium.  Though it&amp;#039;s our homes we fret about most, they&amp;#039;re usually the least vulnerable\u2014at least single-family, wood-frame houses like the ones Heaton and I own. &amp;quot;Wooden houses are extremely resilient to earthquake shaking. It&amp;#039;s almost unheard of that they actually collapse,&amp;quot; he says. Far more dangerous are unreinforced brick structures and what engineers refer to as nonductile concrete buildings. Had the Northridge earthquake occurred during the workday rather than at 4:30 am, studies concluded, there would have been 20 to 30 times the fatalities. The same principle will likely apply when the inevitable big one strikes. A study that simulated a 7.9-magnitude rupture on the San Andreas fault (a repeat of the 1906 San Francisco quake) calculated that 8000 people would be seriously injured and 1800 killed if it occurred at night. If it struck during the day? Expect 12,500 injured and 3400 dead. Earthquake Mechanics  Excessive pressure between tectonic plates can cause them to slip and the ground to rupture. A series of seismic waves emanate from this hypocenter (as opposed to the epicenter, the point directly above that on the surface). Fast-moving primary, or P-waves, reach seismograph stations first, and like lightning preceding thunder, can provide valuable seconds of warning before the real shaking begins. P-waves cause rock to expand and contract as they pass through it. Secondary shear, or S-waves, displace material at right angles to their path and reach the surface later. They undulate along Earth&amp;#039;s crust much like ocean waves and, as a result, they cause the most damage.    &amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt; What Makes an Earthquake-Resistant Building       Not long after the Japan disaster, I fell into conversation with the wife of a UCLA seismologist at a friend&amp;#039;s housewarming. Her husband, the woman told me, had been part of a study that identified the most collapse-prone buildings in Los Angeles. Maps existed, but city officials didn&amp;#039;t want the public to know about them. In the weeks that followed, I often found myself examining buildings as I drove L.A.&amp;#039;s surface streets, looking for signs of seismic reinforcement. In restaurants and shops, I&amp;#039;d try to guess the age of brick and concrete, wondering if I might be lingering over a sandwich inside a structure on the secret danger list.  Eventually I tracked down the study in question, as well as one of its lead authors, Mary Comerio, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. In her view, the building list wasn&amp;#039;t quite the scandal I&amp;#039;d imagined over my second glass of wine. It&amp;#039;s a research database that was never meant to be public, she tells me. The effort is part of a much larger project tasked with figuring out how to classify concrete buildings by their risk level.  The number of potentially hazardous buildings in Los Angeles is small compared with that of many other cities, Comerio says. &amp;quot;Los Angeles has had a very aggressive public retrofit program. So every public building in the city has either been retrofitted or replaced.&amp;quot; Because of what she calls L.A.&amp;#039;s big adaptive reuse program (also known as the downtown hipster invasion), lots of warehouses have been converted to residential lofts; planning code requires that such change-of-use conversions be seismically retrofitted. It turns out that Los Angeles&amp;#039; future-oriented, growth-focused character makes it a safer place to live. &amp;quot;Los Angeles, frankly, tears down more buildings than a city like San Francisco,&amp;quot; Comerio says. The latter has about 3000 nonductile concrete buildings, twice the number in L.A. I still wondered why the inventory couldn&amp;#039;t be made public. When the research is complete, it will go into an open database. The building addresses, though, will be stripped out. &amp;quot;There are privacy issues,&amp;quot; Comerio says. &amp;quot;The minute it gets in the public realm, somebody is going to say, this is a list of dangerous buildings. That&amp;#039;s not what we&amp;#039;re saying; we&amp;#039;re saying this is a list of buildings we&amp;#039;re studying.&amp;quot;  Heaton had been less politic when I posed a similar question to him at Caltech: Say you wanted to rent an office space in downtown Los Angeles\u2014is there a database that could help you identify which buildings are more or less safe? &amp;quot;No, you&amp;#039;re toast. You&amp;#039;re hosed,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;There should be, but the politics of it are such that nobody has been able to push that through.&amp;quot; Determined to improve my own assessment skills, I meet seismic engineer Aaron Reynolds in the lobby of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Reynolds&amp;#039;s firm designs hospitals and schools and retrofits older buildings for seismic safety. As the result of improved building codes, it&amp;#039;s typically not the primary structures that are the problem these days, he tells me. In recent decades, nonstructural damage, like broken ducts and water pipes, has been more costly. &amp;quot;I think there&amp;#039;s a lot of confidence that [newer] buildings are going to perform fairly well,&amp;quot; Reynolds says as we stand on the sidewalk beneath Frank Gehry&amp;#039;s glimmering suspended-metal sails, gazing toward the compact cluster of downtown skyscrapers. &amp;quot;Collapse is just unacceptable.&amp;quot;  We walk a few blocks to Temple Street and the city&amp;#039;s fortress-like Roman Catholic cathedral. Reynolds stops a few feet from the exterior wall and points out a small gap in the sidewalk; it marks the edge of a several-feet-wide concrete moat surrounding the building&amp;#039;s base. He makes a crude sketch on his iPad. The monolith rests on rubber cylinders known as base isolators, which act as a suspension system for the entire structure. During an earthquake, the isolators will absorb most of the energy. The moat of concrete is designed to shift as needed\u2014up to several feet\u2014to give the building room to move. &amp;quot;Everybody jokes about the drunk person in an accident; he&amp;#039;s the one who doesn&amp;#039;t get hurt,&amp;quot; Reynolds says as the cathedral&amp;#039;s bells begin to chime. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the person who&amp;#039;s not drunk who ends up being injured because he stiffens up.&amp;quot; A building is similar. &amp;quot;Stiff buildings absorb a lot of earthquake energy. With the isolation system we make it soft.&amp;quot;  In the aftermath of the Tohoku disaster, I kept hearing how Japan had the most advanced earthquake-early-warning system in the world. Information from a vast network of sensors automatically stops trains, shuts down utilities, and sends text and email alerts to citizens soon after a significant quake begins. The lead time is typically just tens of seconds, the time between a fault slipping and the ground waves hitting population centers. But that&amp;#039;s enough to save lives. Scientists have talked about installing an early-warning system in California for decades, but the political will is lacking. It may be that society still holds out hope for true prediction, a word I find causes most seismologists to take a deep, nerve-calming breath. Despite reports of prescient runaway pets, we remain unable to predict specific seismic events. Early warning is our best hope, but experts are pessimistic that the funding (at least $80 million) will materialize before another big quake hits. &amp;quot;If you look at the systems in other countries, they&amp;#039;re generally a result of a killer earthquake,&amp;quot; USGS seismologist Doug Given says. &amp;quot;The Mexican system resulted from the &amp;#039;85 earthquake that killed about 9500 people. The Japanese system was the result of Kobe, which killed 6400 in 1995. It&amp;#039;s our hope that a bunch of Americans don&amp;#039;t have to be killed before we build one.&amp;quot;  Elizabeth Cochran&amp;#039;s office is a 5-minute walk from Heaton&amp;#039;s on the Caltech campus. Cochran invented the Quake-Catcher Network\u2014a citizen science project in which thousands of people attach matchbook-size sensors to their desktop computers. When many sensors in close proximity detect similar shaking at the same time, it&amp;#039;s likely a real quake rather than random jostling. The day before my visit, there had been a 4.0-magnitude earthquake north of San Francisco; within 8 seconds, Quake-Catcher data pegged it at a fairly accurate 3.7. &amp;quot;The idea is that once, or if, it&amp;#039;s found to be reliable, this could feed into an early-warning system,&amp;quot; Cochran says. After an earthquake, seismologists create shake maps that show the strength of the ground motion in different areas. &amp;quot;Right now those are highly interpolated,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;There are stations 50 kilometers apart and you&amp;#039;re essentially guessing the ground motions in between.&amp;quot; A vast network of Quake-Catcher sensors could add valuable resolution to those maps, identifying where to send firefighters, EMTs, and transportation inspectors first.  I leave Cochran&amp;#039;s office with a sensor of my own. Over the next few weeks, I work on my family&amp;#039;s earthquake kit, stashing several extra 5-gallon water jugs in the backyard. I rearrange the furniture in Otto&amp;#039;s bedroom so that his crib is no longer next to the pane-glass windows. I call two different retrofitting specialists to take a closer look at that ad hoc bolting job beneath our house. Contractor One seems genuinely impressed by the work and tells me that if it were his house, he wouldn&amp;#039;t do anything more. Contractor Two, a well-respected local named Greg Sylvis, has specialized in retrofitting for three decades. He is more critical.  &amp;quot;A lot of times they&amp;#039;ll just do the part you can see from the door,&amp;quot; Sylvis says as he pulls on kneepads, a headlamp, and a face mask, then shimmies into the foot-high crawlspace at the rear of the house, over soil littered with ancient Gatorade bottles and opossum scat. He finds no shortage of hardware, but much of it is extraneous, installed on interior posts, which won&amp;#039;t help in an earthquake. The bolts could crack the wood like a log splitter, Sylvis says; newer jobs use clamp-like bolting instead. The plywood that lines the cripple wall, which transfers strength from the foundation to the floor, is 3-ply, whereas 5-ply is required in permitted jobs. More concerning, the wall doesn&amp;#039;t fully reach the floor. A nail gun was used to secure the plywood to the framing and the nailheads are recessed, increasing the likelihood that the nails would rip through the wood during a tremor. &amp;quot;It looks like a responsible contractor did it,&amp;quot; Sylvis says. &amp;quot;But that doesn&amp;#039;t mean he did a good job.&amp;quot; Is it enough? I ask. His answer sounds all too familiar: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a lot better than nothing.&amp;quot;  It will cost roughly $6000 to rebolt the house, so that upgrade remains on our to-do list for now. But in most ways we&amp;#039;ve become well-prepared\u2014especially compared with many Californians. When a violent windstorm knocked out power last December, Dan, Otto, and I were in good shape. We had lanterns and headlights, batteries, an adapter to charge our phones in the car\u2014and Twitter accounts, which proved to be the best way to get information. While friends&amp;#039; panicky Facebook posts talked of evacuating to the Valley or West Side beach communities, Dan was uploading cute pics of Otto eating canned ravioli by lantern light. What if the freeways were closed, I wondered. The supermarkets shut down. ATMs out of service. This windstorm was nothing when stacked up against what a big quake could deliver.  &amp;quot;We live in a world that has things we don&amp;#039;t understand very well,&amp;quot; Heaton says. &amp;quot;Does that mean we throw up our hands and just say it&amp;#039;s inevitable, that we&amp;#039;re going to die anyway?&amp;quot; No. It means we design buildings to make them less vulnerable. We prepare our homes and families to ride out calamities. And we take comfort in the fact that by preparing for the worst, we can maximize the chances that when disaster comes we&amp;#039;ll be among those ready to offer help, rather than those who need it.       Earthquake Survival Guide &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;    "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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