After the escalation of earthquakes, experts explain in detail infrastructure issues and prevention plans

A wave of earthquake incidents this year has rocked the greater Los Angeles area.

Fifteen earthquakes have occurred in Southern California this year, nearly double the average annual amount. While the record high is due in part to better technology for tracking and disseminating news of earthquakes, Southern California has a number of gaps that must be addressed in preparation for more catastrophic events.

Yasmine Garcia, a third-year psychology student and Los Angeles native, said she felt confident and concerned about the region's earthquake preparedness.

“I feel like a lot of buildings are prepared for earthquakes, especially the more recent ones,” Garcia said. “There are buildings that are not prepared for earthquakes, and I don't really know how they are going to fix that – especially the houses – because you would have to evict residents to renovate them.”

As residents are alerted to a record number of earthquakes in real time and through social media, their fears may also be growing. But these concerns could be exacerbated by digital platforms – which record even the smallest earthquakes and the geological makeup of the region.

According to the Desert Sun, more frequent notifications — due to improved earthquake detection technology, alert measures and social media — can create unnecessary anxiety, as people can feel that every minor event signals danger. Therefore, the record number of detected earthquakes may not indicate an actual seismic threat, according to the same source.

In addition, the Los Angeles Basin, a low-lying area surrounded by mountain ranges, could increase how strongly seismic waves are felt in nearby areas, said Allen Hosker, a research professor of geophysics at Caltech and director of the Southern California Seismic Network. Residents. That's because the basin is filled with soft, loose soil and sediments, which amplifies certain seismic frequencies, according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

Despite often exaggerated perceptions of earthquakes, city and state officials have worked to improve the city's infrastructure and legislation in preparation for future earthquakes, which could have catastrophic consequences. For example, the Earthquake Early Warning System, introduced by the local government in 2019, can detect warnings and relay them to the public before tremors reach certain areas in California.

Other initiatives include enhancing the resilience of the city's infrastructure. The Ahlquist Act, amended in 1994, requires that all hospital buildings in California meet stringent seismic safety standards by 2030. This requires retrofitting, or the process of strengthening buildings to better withstand earthquakes, or demolishing noncompliant structures.

Despite recent efforts to extend the compliance deadline to 2040, the state, due to public safety concerns, has stuck to its firm deadline.

However, significant gaps remain. About 6,000 buildings in Los Angeles still need seismic retrofitting, according to the Los Angeles Times. Forty-two of these buildings are located near campus around Beverly Hills, and about a third of them are located in liquefaction zones where homes could completely submerge the ground if affected by an earthquake, according to the same source. Neighborhoods outside designated risk areas may also face risks.

Los Angeles is home to more than 12,000 soft-storey buildings — structures with a much weaker first floor — and nearly 2,000 concrete buildings, both of which may lack the steel reinforcement needed to withstand severe shaking in the event of an earthquake, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In addition to soft-storey and concrete buildings, older structures are also a cause for concern, said Jonathan Stewart, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and co-director of the Center for Natural Hazards and Resilience Research at UCLA.

“We have a very large inventory of old structures, and we have to either replace them, which is very expensive, or modernize them or look at them carefully,” Stewart said. “A lot of them (the buildings) still have a long way to go, but there has been some real progress over the last five years or so in that company.”

Los Angeles must also prepare for subsequent natural disasters that could result from an earthquake, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. For example, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake led to gas leaks and collapsed structures that sparked city fires, as well as broken water pipes that cut off the city's water supply, according to the UC San Francisco History Library.

The same thing could happen today, Husker said. Property damage and fires can be especially dangerous in Southern California, where drought is common. In theory, an earthquake that intersects the San Andreas Fault, an 800-mile-long fracture in the Earth's crust that extends across much of Los Angeles, could rupture pipelines that supply 80% of the city's water and cause catastrophic consequences during fire season, Hosker added. .

While there is no clear indication of how the larger number of detected earthquakes will affect the future, Stewart said earthquakes and other natural disasters are inevitable, and the city must prepare for them long before any official warning.

“What early warning cannot do is it cannot transform a fragile structure into a resilient structure,” Stewart said. “People in vulnerable structures are not safe because they have 20 seconds of warning.”

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