Lori Dengler | Humboldt Earthquake Education Center Turns 40 – Times Standard

Happy Birthday to the Humboldt Earthquake Education Center (HEEC). The center owes its existence to the California Earthquake Education Act of 1984 when the California Legislature decided to establish six Earthquake Education Centers on California State University campuses.

The Humboldt Geology Department had been involved in community earthquake awareness activities much earlier. The northern California coast had always been a seismically active place, and the Geology Department, established in the mid-1960s by John Young, Frank Kilmer, and John Longshore, was a natural place to study and respond to local earthquakes.

The department grew rapidly, and by the time I arrived in 1978, it had gained a national reputation in the field of regional tectonics. I had expert resources in Gary Carver, Ken Alto, Bob McPherson, and Adam Honea to understand why our little corner of California was such a special place.

In 1981, the state funded the Lawrence Hall of Science to create the California Earthquake Education Project (CALEEP), a K-12 curriculum. The California Earthquake Education Act of 1984 provided three years of funding to spread the curriculum to California schools. The CSU system also provided grants to establish six regional earthquake education centers to train teachers.

I liked the curriculum I saw and it seemed worth a try. I knew little about kindergarten, elementary, and high school education at the time, but I led the effort to throw my Humboldt hat into the ring and won one of the spots. The prize was only $5,000, and the only requirement was an annual teacher training workshop for the next three years.

Mother Nature wiped out our new epicenter with an earthquake. On September 10, 1984, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck on the Mendocino Fault, 134 miles west of Cape Mendocino. No damage was done, but the quake was felt from San Francisco to Port Orford, instantly putting us in the media spotlight.

This was long before the advent of the Internet and easy access to real-time earthquake information. Caltech, UC Berkeley, and the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado had earthquake information phone lines, but they weren’t updated regularly and often missed events felt in our area. We started our own data logger, the Humboldt Earthquake Hotline (707-826-6020), shortly after the 1984 quake to provide local information.

The annual training workshop became a 700-level professional development class designed for area teachers to maintain their current certifications. It was so popular, we held it every semester. The interest and enthusiasm led us to add several more 700-level classes, including weekend field trips involving faults, excavations, and landslides. We added two classes focusing on the tsunami of the 1990s.

The CALEEP grant expired in 1987, and the legislature passed an authorization to continue the program. Then Governor George Deukmejian vetoed the appropriation on October 1, 1987. Even the magnitude 5.9 Whittier-Narrows earthquake that struck Southern California that same day ($300 million in damage and 8 deaths) was not enough to convince the governor that it was worth continuing. A few trained teachers incorporated aspects of the program into their classrooms, but CALEEP was not widely adopted, and without support, it faded away.

Except for Humboldt. The HEEC center continues to this day. There were several reasons for our survival. We offered CALEEP training as continuous development courses, so it did not require additional resources as long as enough students and teachers were enrolled in the region. There were six large earthquakes between 1987 and 1991, and regional interest in earthquakes was high. Unlike the other five CSU CALEEP regional centers, we were isolated from major state or university earthquake research centers. People wanted information about earthquakes, and we were the only ones around.

With the onset of major earthquakes, the demand for lectures and field trips increased. I began to meet people who worked in emergency response agencies. Our university budget was a bit richer in the late 1980s, and I was fortunate that the department and the dean of the college recognized the value of our slowly expanding outreach efforts, and gave me some credit for HEEC activities.

The year 1992 was a turning point. A series of magnitude 7.2 earthquakes struck Cape Mendocino, causing at least $60 million in damage, injuring more than 350 people, generating a modest tsunami, and prompting a federal disaster declaration. The quakes focused the attention of scientists and the state’s emergency management system on the North Coast and the threat of a nearby tsunami.

The interest translated into support. A grant from the National Science Foundation allowed us to study the pattern of shaking generated by the 7.2 magnitude earthquake and its two major aftershocks. This work became the foundation for the U.S. Geological Survey’s crowdsourced “Did You Feel It?” website. The Federal Emergency Management Agency also funded what became the California Department of Environmental Conservation’s last earthquake scenario study, and the first to focus primarily on a rural area and include tsunamis. Suddenly, the Natural Disaster Research Center was no longer teaching classes and giving lectures. We were sitting at the table discussing how to study and address potential tsunami risks.

In 1996, the Redwood Coast Tsunami Working Group was formed. The Regional Tsunami Working Group was created as an interim group of state and local agencies and organizations to address the threat of a near-source tsunami described in the scenario. Over the next several decades, HEEC played a major role in the activities of the Regional Tsunami Working Group. The State Emergency Office directed more than $1.5 million in FEMA and NOAA grant funding to the University-Supported Programs Foundation to support the activities of the Regional Tsunami Working Group.

What did we do with that money? Just visit our websites and find out. Almost all of our work is done in collaboration with other members of the Regional Disaster Coordination Working Group, including tsunami hazard mapping, evacuation drills, and annual tsunami drills. We are partners in the new CRESCENT Cascadia Earthquake Center and participated in the first CRESCENT Partners Meeting last month to help guide research priorities for building regional resilience. And a hotline? We’re the only remaining telephone information line—just call 707-826-6020 for a daily report on regional, national, and global earthquake activity.

The biggest challenge for any organization is to continue and pass the baton to the next generation of scientists, educators, and emergency professionals. It is far from clear that the higher education community will survive this challenge. My position at Humboldt was not filled when I retired in 2015, and the current faculty has shrunk to the point where teaching even the minimum requirements for the major is extremely difficult. The current administration has shown little interest or support in our outreach efforts.

But I'm an optimist, and I can always count on Mother Nature to remind everyone of the importance of earthquake education – right?

Note: Visit https://rctwg.humboldt.edu/home and https://kamome.humboldt.edu/ for an overview of HEEC activities.

Lori Dengler is a professor emeritus of geology at California Polytechnic University Humboldt and an expert on tsunami and earthquake hazards. Have questions or comments about this column, or would you like a free copy of the Living on Shaky Ground preparedness magazine? Leave a message at 707-826-6019 or email us at [email protected].

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