The green purchase button below the viewer screen. You, learn mother about u upcoming Virtual Events on our website and on crowdcast. Let me briefly introduce our speakers for tonight. Susan hough is a Research Seismologist at the u. S. Geological survey in pasadena, pennsylvania, an jett she serve on the boards of directors of Seismological Society of america and the Southern California earthquake center. She is the author of five books including earth shaking science. Joining he is henry fountain. He loves the innovationed need to overcome Climate Change if wrote about research fawning from across the world of science. He is the author othe great quake, a book but in the 1964 alaskan earthquake. Ill turn the screen over to our speaker is. Enjoy the talk. Wow. Thank you. Hi. Great to be here. I want to thank the book store and thenry for being here. Im really excited about this event. I live not far from volpemans although im living in a Virtual World like everyone else. But its long been my Favorite Book store and henry has long been one of my favorite reporters and i when i the title of my book came to me one day, and i eventually told henry i had not consciously riff ripped off his book title but its possible it was in my subconscious. But i would encourage everybody if youre interested in earthquakes and good science books, check out both the great quake and the great quake debate. His book is a lot of fun and focuses on the 1964 earthquake in alaska. So, thank you to everyone out there who is tuning in. Think we have some people from a was away a ways away and thats great. A lot going on, some good, some not so good so i appreciate everyone tuning in and we look forward to leaving room for q a at the end. But to get the ball rolling, i was going read just a couple of pages for a few minutes to start off and then move to our conversation between me and henry and then leave time for q a at the end. Theres an ask a question tab hopefully the bottom if you have any questions. So, i was going to start reading on page 160 so to set the stage, where i start reading the 1925 san san Santa Barbara quake struck causing damage and the scientists used the event as an example of the kind of damage in quakers can occur Business Leaders were pushing back. So this is then the earthquake was to some extent a teachable moment for scientists to make the case but lost after a few months started to lose momentum and willis stepped forward at that point. So, jumping in, whatever understanding had been work out between hari wood and local business lead in other words Southern California in 1923 willis distance in San Francisco bay area never signed on to the deal. In the words of historian, by the end of 1925, quote, willis decided to embark on a new strategy. He would scare californians by not only pointing backward at the recent seismic tee trucks and predicting a catastrophic earthquake larger than Santa Barbara shock would strike Southern California. His prediction based on a survey. After the results became know, scientist avoided making overly alarmist public statements. In addition to having been specifically cautioned about public statements, he knew that analysis of early data could be imprecise and the resulting questions were preliminary, estimated from triangulation measures not connected to the larger regional triangulation survey. Mowover scientists would have been reduck tan to go public with a result that raised concern in scientific circles but did not support a specific forecast or precise prediction. As woods had written in hi 1916 article, quote, at what time future shocks will occur we do not know, especially in any precise way but we know that since 1769, no half century has passed without the ocurrents of at least one great earthquake in the region help was wrong by the way. The average points concludes a way to greater frequency, however close redisk of the occurrence of the day or hour, even the month or year, cannot be proximate mated as yell. He was right but that. With the survey result anyone a prudent scientist faced a dim lema that is familiar to dilemma. On the one hand an apparently sound scientific result raise concerns in professional circleles and on the other the result was clear and the result did not imply any specific time frame or even a quantifiable statistical forecast. They both knew that a regional buildup of strain it existed would be released eventually in a large earthquake and that the relatively modest Santa Barbara quake had not been that. Willis had spoken publicly but the billup of strain before the Santa Barbara earthquake struck and that led to the lower than he had predicted Santa Barbara quake. Before 1925 drew to a crow he latched more squarely on the u. S. Coast survey reresult, pointing to the result head told day lie palo alto leaders in november 1925 a large earthquake in the southland was nigh. No one knows when but when it dot come ill will come suddenly and those who are not prepared will suffer. In the earthquake business theres a fine line between saying enough to get people to take earthquake hazards seriously and being openly alarmism either direction from the line unfortunate things happen. In one direction the public and decisionmakers ignore warnings. In the other people might panic or fail to take action. Were all doomed, whats the opinion. And starts to be a danger of crying wolf too often. Now some individuals flirt more closely with that line than others. In the statements he made in november of 1925, willis did more than flirt. No one knows whether it will be one year or ten years. In fact then as now no one knew whether it be one year or ten years or 100 years. The modern reader can virtual the words with the benefit of almost a century of hindsight, damaging quakes did strike the Greater Los Angeles area, including not only the one that was mostly put an to end the great quake debate and the earthquake in whittier and a pair of larger earthquakes that struck they san fern unanimous devalley 1971 and 1994. Yet the earthquake they warn without, a great earthquake in Southern California rivalling the 1906 San Francisco earthquake did not occur within three years or ten years or 90 years. When the. I was going to leave it to everyone to read more about the debate that played out thats more than half the debate you read their, right . Mr. Hill as well, doctor hill. The book evolved into intertwined biographies into protagonist, one of them was baily willis. Who ended up on his own side of that vanishingly fine line and the other was robert hill who landed on the other side. Hill was the skeptic, willis was the crusader. When i started working on the book i was interested in the debate itself because there is a couple of different takes on it you can read about that dont quite agree. I was curious what the real story was. I thought i would introduce hill and willis briefly and then move on to the debate. The more i got into their lives, the more i realized what really fascinating individuals they were. You can delve into both of these people equally. Hill was a pain in the ass, if i can say that. He reminded me quite a bit of my late father who was an academic and brilliant but didnt always play well with others. But when you get into hills life story and what he went through as a child, he was born in nashville tennessee in 1858 and then the next thing when he was still a toddler the civil war literally rolled through his hometown, his parents lost their house. His father lost his life, not in war but to illness, his mother was confined to a Mental Institution and the one memory he had of her was of a military team dragging cool away and her screaming for her children. From there phils childhood proceeded as a teenager he made his way to the front here in texas and its just such a compelling life story what he went through and then made his way through it all to cornell university, never having gotten past, i think ninth grade he got to cornell and was able to launch his career. He never left the chip on his shoulder. [laughter] its interesting. You are in the business so to speak, im just a journalist. Im not aware of the history but how big, is this the idea of the debate that went on in the mid20s in Southern California, is that something that if i were to go to a school and become a seismologist i would learn about that . Or is this an obscure thing you kind of latched onto . Dont say just a journalist. [laughter] to give away the punchline. a i often end up talking to top Science Writers and realize they often understand the science extremely well. What was the question . Was this something that you this idea of the debate that took place . I wouldnt say Everybody Knows about it, scientists in general dont tend to be that interested in history or the history of history of science is kind of an orphaned subfield because historians dont tend to care so much about science and science ascientists dont tend to care about history. Im sort of unusual, there are some of us who are more interested in the history. I had been aware of it and it had come up a little bit in my previous books, the book on a on prediction because baily willis was the first to go out with the production in california. If you look back, scientists since 1925 have occasionally been making kind of alarmist statements that the san andreas to Southern California overdue for great earthquake and started in 1925 but then there were others, statements in 1969, the palmdale old famously in the 1970s, i had touched on it, i was aware of it and the conventional telling of the great crate debate was that Bailey Willis was the flawed hero crusading from aand Bailey Willis willis was tool painting as a left things ab painted as a laughingstock. Eventually over time i became aware that there was a second version of the debate which painted hill as a victim, like he had been set up by business interests who had twisted his words. I wouldnt say its well known among seismologists but i became aware of that there were two very different versions of the story and interested in figuring out what the actual truth was. If i remember correctly, baily willis was he in Santa Barbara when the Santa Barbara ahappen. It didnt deny he had predicted the earthquake, where in fact he really hadnt. He didnt shy away from opportunities to step on to a stage ab maybe a little bit of a showboat. Willis left his papers to the Huntington Library just on the road for me. I applied for reader privileges and was looking into the earthquake and then i realized, there is this huge collection i started getting interested in the other part of it. It is very curious. He had made public statements based on this survey result that seemed to show a lot of strain was building up in Southern California and he had made limited public statements in 1923. Then on june 28 he and one of his sons took the train to Santa Barbara he didnt talk the very next morning the Santa Barbara earthquakes strike. He didnt take teams to set the record straight. Im just wondering if we. He didnt seem like the type of guy necessarily to be influenced in that. You never know. You could see looking back i was fascinating abit would fascinating the book to look back and realize that hill and willis were born around the same time. They both started and the usgs within a few years of each other. Their careers were sort of intertwined. They took a road trip together in texas in 1898. You could see that willis wasnt shying away from Media Attention. There were a couple times in my research i actually laughed out loud in archives is something youre not supposed to do. Archives are very quiet places. One of them was finding a little news paper article that willis had saved that was just hysterical it was a beach mermaid a little editorial letter in the Santa Barbara paper that was suggesting that willis had gotten use to the Media Attention and driven the prediction. Meanwhile, hill is kind of fuming ab and cant seem to get out of his own way he was starboard and irascible as willis was smooth and charming. Its interesting, im not a big reader of biographies but certainly i dont know that ive ever read the dual biography which really broke this in but theres a lot of similarities in them in terms of their age and their profession, etc. , etc. There are so many differences and nature versus nurture type person you could have a field day looking at hills background as you described going up in the civil war. Versus willis who had relatively easily time similar up in new york state i believe, right . Willis did lose his father at a young age, willis is father had been a renowned writer, celebrity, they lived in a country estate, it was really ideal look until his father fell ill. Willis his mother had a number of kids but willis was the youngest and his mother thought that he hung the moon. She was the world to him and i think vice versa. He grew up with an absolutely doting supportive mother. Whereas hill grew up to all intents and purposes, an orphan. So in some ways they were just an absolute study in contrast. Including the yankee versus confederate, they were on opposite sides of the civil war. That matter thats one interesting thing about the book is that diversity is now on a lot of peoples minds and rightly so, some of the conversations are very overdue, hill felt like the victim of discrimination and you look at that now as he was white, he was male, he was european descent, like every other geologist in the state but he was a southerner so he was from the south among a northern Government Agency and intellectual elite. That was a lifelong chip on his shoulder that he felt like he was a victim of biases. He wasnt entirely wrong. He was seeing biases behind every little issue that came up. It took on a life of its own. It was interesting to really think about the fact that there were biases against people from the south. May be some of those are still out there. He even felt it when he went to cornell, didnt he . It certainly was for him he had never been north of the masondixon line he had grown up having yankees pretrade as monsters. All the sudden hes going off takes a stagecoach eventually lands in cornell in the middle of a snowstorm and he doesnt have Winter Clothes but he actually described cornell for the most part as being very good experience. Was very Good University and for the first time in his life he was in a setting he people were interested in science and knowledge after his parents were gone he lived with a grandmother who was extremely religious, extremely strapped and there wasnt a lot of encouragement or their work sign books abscience books in the house. Cornell was a relation for him. I think that part of his life was, when he got to the usgs in washington dc that he started to run into what he perceived the biases. And still paying Student Loans. [laughter] he was practically on the deathbed and he a he wrote a check in 1928 to cornell, i never figured out if he paid them off entirely or not but you think of Student Loans as a modern day issue but yes, he got to cornell with no money so working his way through school and borrowing money. I think to me the thing that is so interesting is how human these people are and its always great, in my job i talked to scientists all the time and some seem pretty human and some dont seem very human. To really get the rich humanities, its really a valuable thing. Your book also is wonderful bringing george oscar to life yet i envy you and its great, george is very much alive and well so he was a people havent read his book, george is kind of the leading scientist who went up to alaska after the earthquake and sorted out what had happened in the earthquake at a time when, the leading seismologist turned out to be wrong and george is a great guy, he works for the same organization that i do. Hes alive and well in his early 90s and you got to talk to him. I got to spend a lot of time with him. Before i wrote that book, which is three or four years ago now, i didnt know anything about geology or ageorge basically was my geology teacher so i feel pretty abwhat a deal for me to have somebody like george describing mountain building in alaska, it was just a great experience. [inaudible] i met him when he was really active usgs guy, i dont know what he was like really but certainly as a ausgs guy he certainly doesnt have the chip on his shoulder that bill does, he takes life with much more a to get to know science and i think thats what your book does it helps, i feel like i got to know those two people. Another thing is that the part that you read as well, in this book i kept thinking, obviously we are in a different time now, in a lot of earthquakes in the 90 years spanned but there is still the issue of house threatened, whats the word, how should we deal with the risk . I know thats part of your job is talking to people about risk. It seems like in some ways things really havent changed, although they have obviously. We know so much more than we did in the 20s, that was before the plate tectonics revolution, which george oscar contributed to. People really didnt understand what drives earthquakes, they had some sunset earthquakes were clustered in certain zones but they didnt understand that we have boundary zones and they didnt understand the weights of earthquakes, how often earthquakes occur on average. Bailey willis, harry ward made a statement about earthquakes, great earthquakes happening every 50 years, they didnt have a sense of how big earthquakes were even, let alone how often they occurred. Geologists have dug into the San Andreas Fault and found evidence of past earthquakes, the hayward fold and from that we get an average occurrence. We know on average how often great earthquakes occur. That is one of the key ingredients for seismic hazard mops that have gotten better and better. Those are critical to develop building codes with appropriate provisions. An awful lot has changed. We still want to know, whens the next big one going to be . Thats where we really havent made any headway in terms of making a prediction on a short timescale or even decadeold timescale. There is a sense we are waiting for the southern san andreas the 1857 earthquake which was more north los angeles, was 150 years ago. That starts to feel like quite a long time, there is various evidence that theres a lot of strain built up, wouldnt be surprised if something happened but we cant say its going to be this year or even this decade. That translates for the public how worried should i be . I didnt grow up in earthquakes, i grew up in new york and lived until recently in new york. I live in new mexico which is really not earthquake country. I only thought, how do people live in california. Obviously you come to terms with it. Just like if you live in new york you come to terms that youll have a hurricane once every 30 years. There still the issue of how as a seismologist or person whos an earthquake expert, warm people but not get them to panic. Thats a vanishingly fine line which hasnt gone away. I heard the author event with the j while the two days ago thats been a book about los angeles and the senseless place. I asked him about earthquakes which i think have contributed to the sense of place in los angeles the sense of identity we all feel and he said that if you live here part of living here is being on the edge and having that realization that they could hit you at any time. As a person whose job it is to inform people of the risk. That fine line, it hasnt gone away and i think its gotten worse because theres been such a weaponization of science now. We have debates but theres a body of knowledge thats established and even in the 20s hill and willis both knew that earthquakes happened and knew that Hazard Mitigation was important. Theres a body of knowledge but if you are trying to have a nuanced balance discussion in the context of the larger political environment where people are refusing to accept basic science it just gets i think more and more difficult. I do conclude that scientists play a role in the process but the media plays an Important Role as well and there are some really good science journalism out there and i think that helps. Its interesting because as you point out in your book, even then as we see in the news, much more interested in the photo of a disaster than a photo of a near disaster. Thats true today certainly true at the place i work at the New York Times and its true obviously and broadcast cable news. You talk about nuance, there is just not as much nuance as one would hope or one would wish in media. Getting into the great debate, thinking or looking more at what the business and trust were doing because they are very easy to paint as the bad guys that were denying earthquake hazard. I think like most things in history, the truth is more complicated than the simple short towing. Excuse me. Some of the things they were saying back then werent entirely unreasonable and they were making the point that when earthquakes happen the coverage tended to be biased towards the dramatic you see the pictures of the buildings that are knockdown and as recently as 2015 the big earthquake in aif you think back to the headlines and the stories you saw on the news and remember headlines saying that nepals Cultural Heritage was destroyed and i worked in nepal and got friends there, my heart was in my throat initially and it was a horrible earthquake that killed 9000 people and took a very heavy toll but i landed in kathmandu about a month after the earthquake and it was just stunning how few signs of damage there were perthe pictur got just five years ago in the media visas the boots on the ground reality were significant. It does apply as well to even just when earthquakes got notice. Sumps i am i guess the person on the times knows most about earthquakes. Whenever theres an earthquake, people editors ask about it. A six point aint in chile ab a 6. 8 in chile, maybe a fatality or two. This is really unusual and i have to point out, theres probably 6. 8 earthquakes a week and are places where there arent anybody so we dont hear about it. Its a lot of like the coverage and i assume back then based on if theres people around to report on it and put it into print or put it on the tv. And having the photographs really made a difference when the 1906 earthquake had a huge impact for a number of reasons there were actual photographs of the damage. And it plays very basic figures and Dartford Hill had very a thoughts about fears and the thoughts people tend to worry about the wrong things and worry about plane crashes when 40,000 americans are killed on the road and nobody has panicked over that. Earthquakes are kind of the same way you dont like them, they are terrifying. Hurricanes at least you see them coming whereas earthquakes, when your house starts shaking at 4 31 am, even if you are a seismologist, thats terrifying. They are fundamentally scary in a way thats kind of hard to deal with. There are people who leave california, just not something they want to deal with, especially if they go through a big earthquake. I think it does shape the folks who stay here. Crazy or something to put up with it. Speaking of science one of things i thought was perfect in your book came toward the end was the fact that this is really this whole debate was really science at work. There were a lot of both a ideas and robert hills ideas that they were frauds in their thinking, they probably got half the stuff right and certainly didnt get everything right but over time, thats the way science works. There is debate about things and things get worked out and then bad ideas get debunked and good ideas get promulgated and so this is great, like the scientific process that work i just thought how great, in my book too, the book was really all about plate tectonics, there were all sorts of crazy ideas. It got a long time to work out but it got worked out. So in an age when. [inaudible] its good to read a book that shows this. You broke up a little bit there i dont know if other people hurt you but, there were a lot of fun things about researching the book. One of the interesting things was to look at what hill and willis, mostly hill, was saying and things we now know are wrong, but realizing that some of them were pretty insightful at the time. You go back to 1920, 1925, they didnt know the plates were moving around, they didnt know that they could move sideways, they could move vertically so there was no theory to explain lateral sideways forces and all of the theories to explain earthquakes tended to focus on vertical forces. Things being the earth expanding, you talk about this, or contracting or ideas of these blisters that you have local heat and things, your starting through a fundamentally wrong premise you could make some very insightful arguments that are completely wrong, hill was looking at all these folks in the area and, for example, he concluded that the debate of faulting in california have slowed down a lot over time. Which is wrong. The rate of vertical faulting has come down from 30 million years ago. Starting with his long premise he was actually a very insightful conclusion. One thing about earthquake science is that the earthquakes come along and they are going to have the last word, how strong is the ground going to shake in the next earthquake or is this fall back to, fortunately they dont happen all that often. But a lot of advances in earthquake science have happened because notable earthquakes have happened they are giving studies much more than they used to obviously. There is more abmore data that goes through i think even and 64 64 earthquake like four of the most studied earthquake up to its time and its gotten better since then. Its fascinating to read about george running around alaska in a floatplane looking at barnacle lines to figure out what had gone up and what had gone down and nowadays there is just so Much Technology that the ridgecrest earthquakes happen last year in the desert within days less than that we had maps showing what had moved and where the faults were. By developing better and better instrumentation its really driven science. I have one eye on the time and i know we were supposed to, at some point break away for questions . I dont know ablets see. I thought rear and might come back on and guide us through the questions, im not seeing her a. I have them pulled up. How can scientists best communicate the risks of natural hazard . I wish i knew. We have this climate where science, there is a body of knowledge, things we can say, theres a petition out there that has politicized it. Im not sure what the answer is. I wish i knew. I think we just keep plugging away, look for ways to reach the people. s people better, social media, getting information out that way. Trying to make science accessible. I hope with my book 1 of the things ive done is make an interesting story. A story that people will read maybe because hello and willis are interesting characters and you want to know what the deal was. Its one of the ways that you can popularize science and communicate some of the aspects of science to a wider audience. Its something my community thinks about a lot and works on all the time. As a journalist i would say the earthquake Scientific Community actually has a much better job than most scientific communities in terms of communicating with the public. And the usgs in general, not just earthquake hazards but the other hazard groups or whatever, they are very good, very open and these more troubled times, they are willing to talk about their work and help me and other journalists explain it in ways that arent wrong which is good, i think you guys do a really good job. One thing about earthquakes is that they tend to be nonpartisan. And people tend to agree with certain functions are inherently governmental like monitoring earthquakes. Putting out hazard maps now developing Early Warning systems. Even people that are antigovernment tend to want the usgs to be around, in the old days the usgs was the agency that put out the maps that they were known for. Theres a question about earthquakes in oklahoma and other oilproducing states can be manmade. I think the jury is in on that. Its not a hydraulic fracturing per se, hydraulic fracturing is a process of injecting water into typically shale and freeing up hydrocarbons. Its a oil recovery technique and the actual hydraulic fracturing can trigger or induce small earthquakes. But the really bad actor is the wastewater, its a process produces a lot of water, wastewater, its toxic so you dont want to contaminate the aquifer. Its disposed of in the injection walls so those wells get quite deep because you want to get below the aquifer and thats a process that can induce more significant earthquakes. Weve seen earthquakes up to magnitude 5. 8 in oklahoma, we just have the anniversary, the anniversary is coming up september 3, 2016. 5. 8 in oklahoma. There was a debate about that where they were they induced were they natural was this just just a cluster . That settled itself out as well but there was an overwhelming body of evidence pointing to industry activities and that actually is sort of a Success Story in that you can actually, if humans are causing earthquakes you can mitigate hazard by changing what you are doing. Places like oklahoma have developed stoplight systems so if you have wastewater injection and you start to have earthquakes you scale back and that sort of thing. The rate of earthquakes the rate of induced earthquakes has dropped over the last couple years. Its really dropped. I think oklahoma has been doing oil and gas for so long they have some been like 40,000 wastewater wells. In fact, i think theres a series of. ,not the big one in 20 but a series of quick surround edmund and they just closed down five injunction levels and the earthquake disappeared. It is a Success Story. Its a hazard you can manage. Theres other issues associated with fossil fuels. I think the induced earthquakes, i think they are manageable. We have time for one more question. Theres one interesting question, does scaring the public even with some level of exaggeration help the public to better prepare for hazards . I come down on the side that scientists have to be honest brokers, im on abi come down on one side of the line. I would not argue that exaggeration is ever appropriate. You can frame things in kind of unvarnished terms. There are things we know, we know what happened in 1964, we know what happened in 1906, so i think that needs to be presented but i dont think we should ever go beyond what the science can say. Just because thats not what science is about. And it can backfire, it backfired on bailey lewis once the prediction was debunked the overall cause of Risk Reduction took a hit for a while. Im waiting for someone, there we are. We cant hear you. I think we are about at our end of our time. Im not hearing our friend. Theres a question about which fault or barrier in my most concerned about. Its really hard to say. There is the hayward fault in the east bay area that has we have a very long record of moderately large earthquakes, last earthquake in 19 ab1868 the fall to run through the densely populated area. Thats definitely a concern. California has lots of faults. There is one half a mile north of where im sitting. Almost every part of california is fair game for large earthquake. I do think that we are at the end of our time. I was told an hour at the outset but i think our host at bromans is having trouble connecting. abhas malfunctioned, she says. Should we signoff . Sounds like we should. [laughter] i want to thank again everyone who took time out of their evening, or the day, wherever they are, to tune in. This is part of the process of understanding hazards and communicating, its great you were able to join us and thank you again to henry and vromans university of Washington Press publish the book. Booktv continues now on cspan2. Television for serious readers. Welcome to powerhouse Virtual Events, my name is chris im the events coordinator. Tonight we are very happy to be hosting the locks for how we live now by bill hayes. In conversation with ayou can buy the book at our house bookstores. Com. Th