EarthquakesL.A. considering first responses to the inevitable Big One

Often referred to as the “Big One,” the inevitable cataclysmic earthquake that will eventually strike at the San Andreas Fault throughout the city of Los Angeles is expected to be incredibly destructive. According to seismologists, it is no longer a question of “if,” but more just “when.”

As Emergency Management reports, the predicted damage due to a large-scale earthquake in the city would be a enough to impact four million residents and an estimated 400,000 businesses. Given the scale and infrastructure, it could either be equivalent to disasters of the past, less harmful than predicted, or an event entirely new.

“What is big? Is it Haiti big? Katrina big? Or will it be Los Angeles big, and what does that really mean? How can we categorize it?,” said Anna Burton, the interim general manager of the Los Angeles Emergency Management Department, describing just one of the associated questions that emergency planners grabble with when confronting the Big One.

According to Brent Woodworth, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Foundation, the appropriate responses can be gleaned from assessing the different sectors of the city that would likely be most damaging.

Woodworth identifies several key parts of the greater Los Angeles infrastructure that will need to have firm response plans in place to deal with the fallout of a major disaster, specifically transportation and communication — the two things needed to coordinate and react to everything else.

In terms of transportation, he says, the ultimate goal will be to quickly reestablish mobility. The Department of Transportationwill have to assess the situation and coordinate its own emergency operations center within the city to dispatch the 100 engineering personnel and 300 traffic officers at its service. Additionally, identifying debris for removal to clear road and rail ways will also be an important first step.

“The ultimate goal is to re-establish mobility, open the major highways, the rail lines, the mass transit system,” said Aram Sahakian, a transportation engineer in the department’s Special Traffic Operations Division.

Additionally, the impact on communications networks would also be immense and in need of quick fixes. LA-RICS, an organization tasked with creating data and voice networks that could survive a cataclysmic event, has put in place a system that would bridge and connect 81 different public safety agencies within forty different radio systems. The company now has a plan in place with Motorola to develop 229 sites that could withstand shakes and ground swells. The entirety of the communication network is expected to be in place by 2015.

Many believe that curtailing these very important first-second responses to the chaos that such a disaster would illicit might ultimately have more of an impact on the total recovery than anything to come after.

“We can’t prevent all losses,” said Lucy Jones of the U.S. Geological Survey, “We are trying to prevent enough of them to prevent a mass evacuation where the economy comes apart. That will be the measure of a real recovery. And I really do thing we can do it.”