Thanks Dr. JonesIt’s pretty rare for me to give an assignment in one of these posts, but if yo

Thanks Dr. JonesIt’s pretty rare for me to give an assignment in one of these posts, but if you’re reading this, you have one. Your assignment is to head over to the twitter page of Dr. Lucy Jones and say “Thank you”.Seriously, she deserves thousands of thank you messages for the work she’s done. In the next few decades, her work will save thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives. Today it was announced that Dr. Lucy Jones will be retiring from the US Geological Survey, where she has served as an expert on earthquake hazards for decades.Dr. Jones is particularly famous in the Los Angeles area as the main spokesperson on television every time there’s an earthquake. When the ground shakes, 5-10 news trucks will line up outside the seismolab at Caltech with reporters waiting to broadcast her remarks. She explains how strong a quake was, where it hit, and what the likely damage is. In the age before twitter, you could tell an earthquake had happened somewhere in the world when the news trucks started lining up to see her.Much of her research has been directed at understanding the properties of earthquakes, such as: the relationship between foreshocks and larger quakes, the stress states of faults, and the workings of the earth that generate earthquakes. But the role history should remember her for is the role she adopted over the past 10-15 years – that of a lifesaver.In 2002, Dr. Jones began working with an organization called the California Seismic Safety Commission, which was established in 1975 to study ways of reducing seismic risk. The work I’ll remember Dr. Jones for comes from this panel and her efforts to focus people’s attention on what science says about the coming disaster that will someday hit Los Angeles.I don’t know how Dr. Jones reacted to hurricane Katrina, but for urban hazard engineering there were important lessons in 2005. When Katrina struck New Orleans, there were systems that should have helped handle the disaster, but those systems had weaknesses no one had thought of.For example, there were pumps that could have rapidly removed water from the city, but the pumps were unshielded and on the floor of the facility. When the levees broke, the pumps were submerged rendering them useless. Hospitals similarly had generators on the basement floor and lost power when those floors flooded. No one paused to consider that these systems relied on levee integrity to operate, and when the levees failed the other systems went down with them.In 2007, Dr. Jones led development of the “Great California Shakeout” drill, which she described to us as an effort to spin up all of California’s emergency systems to look for failures like those in the event of a major earthquake striking Los Angeles. When she presented the results, it was startling that the same sort of interconnectedness of systems that caused failures in New Orleans was suddenly being recognized.There are a few examples that still stick with me. Many highways in Southern California cross the San Andreas Fault and the fault does not care about county lines. Counties like San Bernardino County have most of their resources such as fire-fighting equipment on one side, but plenty of people on both sides. When the fault goes, those fire trucks suddenly will be cut off from half the county. How do you control wildfires when firefighters can’t reach half the county? No one had asked that question.Los Angeles receives much of its electrical power from generators in the deserts of California and Nevada. When the fault ruptures, it will break any power line that crosses the fault. This won’t just cut off power to Los Angeles, the power being generated at the time of the quake will surge backward and have no where to go – causing a cascade failure knocking out power across the western half of North America. How do you respond to a disaster in Los Angeles when half the country is in a blackout?Finally, the one that really hit me was water. Much of Los Angeles’s water supply comes across the fault in aqueducts that will be broken by the quake and take months to rebuild. But even more than that, the concrete sewer and water pipes throughout the city will be devastated. Basically the entire water system of Los Angeles will need to be rebuilt from scratch.Dr. Jones told us an anecdote of being in a room with representatives of multiple water agencies and reaching a moment where they realized that there wasn’t enough pipe being manufactured in the country to do this job. The project they’d have to do would take the entire manufactured pipe output of the United States for more than 2 years – in other words, Los Angeles would be without running water for at least that long and they’d all be fighting for the same manufactured pipe. How do you fight a Santa Ana wind driven fire in those circumstances? That’s truly terrifying.Because of her work, agencies are now planning for these contingencies. People are developing new warning systems to do things as simple as “open the doors on fire departments” because she helped point out that was a problem. Her work on understanding risks to buildings drove California to develop and recently pass even more stringent building codes. Today the Shakeout drills involve millions of people worldwide and even point out that areas away from plate boundaries still need to prepare for these events. When California, or anywhere else, is hit by the next major quake, people will live because of Dr. Jones’s work.Dr. Jones is retiring from the US Geological Survey at the end of this month, but keeping her appointment at nearby Caltech. According to press reports, she intends to develop a new center bridging science and public policy, with a focus on saving lives from disasters as she did previously. One of her main focuses will apparently be helping cities understand the risk associated with climate change – in this case she hopes to spur the same sort of dialog she did in Los Angeles where she forced them to recognize what the science said about the actual hazards.Thanks Dr. Jones.-JBBImage credit: FEMAhttps://www.fema.gov/media-library/assets/images/57402References:http://lat.ms/1nUiMZrhttp://www.seismic.ca.gov/about.htmlhttps://profile.usgs.gov/jones/Dr. Jones’s Twitter Feed:https://twitter.com/DrLucyJones -- source link

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