Apodaca: Expert weighs in after small earthquakes shake things up in OC

No doubt many Orange County residents were outraged when the ground shook in early June — not once but three times in just two days. Even those of us who grew up in earthquake country may have felt our anxiety levels rise during and immediately after the simple but nerve-wracking triple tremors.

Not Lisa Grant Ludwig. She was excited. This is good news for the rest of us.

Grant Ludwig is a leading earthquake expert. She is a geologist educated at Stanford and Caltech, and a current professor at UC Irvine and chief of the UCLA Department of Public Health for Population Health and Disease Prevention. A former president of the Seismological Society of America, she has testified before Congress, received a medal from NASA and served on a federal advisory committee dedicated to earthquake safety.

I could go on listing Grant Ludwig's impressive credentials, but I think the point is clear: she's smart, knows as much or more than anyone about earthquakes — especially ones that happen in our backyard — and has dedicated her career to reducing earthquake risks. .

So it's exactly the person we want to get excited about when we experience some relatively mild earthquakes. This enthusiasm means she learned something potentially important that could help her and others working hard to keep us all safer when the ground shakes.

Grant Ludwig was born in Norway, but her family moved to California when she was very young. The 1971 San Fernando earthquake, which toppled the church in which I was baptized, left a huge impression.

During her college years, she was drawn to the earth sciences and what she describes as the interaction between the Earth and humans. But it wasn’t until she was in graduate school at Caltech and the Whittier Narrows earthquake struck that her interest began to shift from water pollution to earthquakes. She recalls a particular lightbulb moment inspired by a comment one of her professors made that earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.

“I was really fascinated by earthquakes,” she said. “It seemed to me a more difficult problem because you can’t prevent earthquakes at all. The solution to the earthquake problem is a human solution.”

Another turning point came when she was still in graduate school and the Landers earthquake occurred. At that time, she was in the hospital, about to give birth to her first child, and her grandmother, who was in critical condition, was in another hospital. After her grandmother died, she began thinking about the question of how infrastructure affects public health, which eventually led her to work at the School of Public Health, an unusual move for a geoscientist.

“It's very problem-focused,” she explained. “You can take any disciplinary background and focus it on real-world problems that affect people's health and well-being.”

Which brings us back to recent earthquakes, what I learned from them, and what can be done to improve safety.

Grant Ludwig was kind enough to drop some very technical information for me. Basically, it is important to understand that there are different types of earthquakes and faults.

Most of us have probably heard of the Newport-Englewood Fault, a major fault zone that cuts through densely populated coastal communities and perhaps poses a greater threat to Orange County than even the San Andreas Fault. A devastating 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck this fault in 1933 — although known as the Long Beach earthquake, Grant Ludwig said the epicenter was actually around the border of Huntington Beach and Newport Beach — leading to the adoption of some new regulations.

When the smaller triple quakes occurred recently, some initial reports suggested the culprit might once again be the Newport-Inglewood fault. Like the San Andreas, this fault is known as a strike-slip fault, which moves mostly in a horizontal direction.

But beneath the San Joaquin Hills is also a blind thrust fault, meaning it's underground so we can't see it, and it moves vertically. It bears some resemblance to the fault that caused the Northridge earthquake, but little is known about it.

The last three tremors were impulse earthquakes, and they were all located around where Grant-Ludwig believes the San Joaquin Hills Fault converges with the Newport-Englewood Fault. Moreover, they were oriented in ways you would previously expect from the San Joaquin Hills Fault. The data collected could lead to a better understanding of how future earthquakes will behave and which areas are most at risk.

This knowledge also represents a crucial element of Grant Ludwig's work: politics.

On this front, she is calling for the reauthorization of the 1970s-era National Earthquake Risk Reduction Program, which supports research, strategies, tools and technologies to reduce the harmful effects of earthquakes, but is at risk of collapsing its funding.

She also wants more advanced early warning systems, and a comprehensive plan to ensure that all structures are earthquake-resistant and meet standards that can be adjusted based on the seismic risk in the area. She even has a novel idea to post earthquake safety ratings on every building, similar to the rating system used for restaurants.

She is now preparing to take time off to undertake another worthwhile endeavor: writing a book summarizing her recommendations.

So, yeah, I guess we can excuse Grant Ludwig if he gets a little giddy about earthquakes. This means that she is putting her considerable brain power to work on solutions that will benefit us all.

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