No joke. In normal times, you’d be wise to avoid letting Californians run anything. While our artists and businesses are strong at creating culture and technology, our elected leaders typically struggle with everyday issues like managing budgets, schools, housing, and traffic. And in our daily lives, Californians famously flout the rules in favor of going our own way.

But in emergencies, we transform into very different people—calm, competent, and cooperative. You’ve seen it during the novel coronavirus crisis, as Californians in both the public and private sectors have moved faster, more aggressively, and with clearer intent than leaders in Washington.

We’ve moved so fast, in fact, that other states have followed our lead. The strategies of social distancing and shelter-at-home began in the Bay Area, were adopted statewide, and have since been copied from Louisiana to West Virginia, and from Illinois to New York.

Our government agencies, businesses, and unions have led the way in securing necessary medical equipment while the feds have failed. And our state and local leaders have consistently provided the public with timely and accurate information, which cannot be said for the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration.

California was among the first out of the gate with a plan to limit the spread of the virus. Early in March, California banned public gatherings, and closed restaurants and bars except for takeout and delivery—while other big states, like Texas and Florida, dithered. Regular Californians have been relatively diligent about complying with restrictions that keep them at home.

While the president and his allies have lashed out at others, our governor—an ideologically and politically combative man—has studiously avoided blaming others and acted pragmatically. (Even Trump had to concede: “They’ve done a good job, California.”) Despite our reputation as being hostile to business, our state has lifted regulations and rules, on everything from commercial trucking to construction, with great speed.

It’s also worth noting that the most substantive federal response to the crisis—the $2.2 billion bailout bill—was negotiated by two Californians, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin of Bel Air.

Why are Californians so much better in a crisis? In a word: experience. We’re masters of disaster because we’ve had so much more practice with calamities than other Americans.

Indeed, disasters—both natural and man-made—are in our state’s DNA. The California we know was not formed by any deliberate plan, but through responses to our never-ending emergencies: The banking collapses in the years after the Gold Rush first forced us to diversify our economy. Epic floods in the early 1860s begat the system of waterworks that have made the state’s rapid growth possible. Economic depressions of the 1870s produced our current constitution.

The progressive California government we know today is in large measure an accidental product of the biggest disaster in our history. In 1906, an earthquake and fire completely destroyed what was then our biggest, richest and most populous city, San Francisco.

In the aftermath of San Francisco’s destruction, survivors did more than rebuild the city. They constructed an entirely new modern state government for California, with new agencies and commissions, university campuses, and a system for civil defense and emergencies. This early modernization of government and marshalling of expertise turned California into an early capital of American technocracy.

As our technocratic state has evolved, our emergency strategies have advanced too. The State Council of Defense, launched after the earthquake, morphed into the State Emergency Council. Then with 1945’s California Disaster Act and a 1950 agreement, state emergency services were reconstituted into a single state agency, connected to a powerful network of local mutual aid. Through evolution and consolidation, that agency became, in 2013, the Office of Emergency Services, a full Cabinet-level department.

California has honed its emergency response through the trials and many errors of dealing with regular earthquakes, relentless fires, endless droughts, and sudden mudslides, not to mention two of the largest urban riots in our nation’s history. In the process, Californians have come to understand that frequent calamity is the price of living in such a beautiful and open place, and we’ve come to take bipartisan pride in our preparedness.

“California has excellent emergency response infrastructure and experience,” Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist and a former senior aide to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, tweeted recently. “One might say, it’s an excellent deep state of expertise and ability.”

That emergency infrastructure can wither. In routine times, California’s dysfunctional budget process has led to foolish cutbacks in capacity, including the shuttering of 11 state public health labs and three mobile hospitals that would be useful now. But in emergencies, California ignores its fiscal rules and ramps up, with the help of a public highly attuned to disaster.

In California, even disorganized people, like your faithful columnist, have emergency plans for their families. And though we may be careless in other parts of our lives, we bolt our houses to their foundations, and install automatic gas shut-off to prevent fires after earthquakes.

Our culture of preparedness extends to our businesses. From Apple to Tesla, companies have quickly corralled medical equipment and protective gear and shared them with medical providers. Facebook donated a huge cache of masks that it had bought to prepare for last year’s massive wildfires.

California, not generally known for its discipline or practicality, also has been diligent in focusing on what’s necessary. While the federal government bashes the Chinese government, California is chartering planes to get medical supplies from China. While the Trump administration and other states pursue the overturning of Obamacare at the U.S. Supreme Court, California has re-opened enrollment in its health insurance exchange. While governors in Texas and Florida refuse to tap emergency funds, our state government recently beefed up emergency supports for workers, seniors, the homeless, renters, and homeowners with mortgages.

Californians expect—and even want—that intensely pragmatic guidance. While officials in Washington, D.C., and other states questioned whether Governor Newsom was moving too fast and too forcefully, criticism from inside California has dwelled on whether the governor and the state have moved fast enough.

Indeed, Newsom and the state have often trailed our cities and counties in enacting new measures; San Francisco, a place that knows its own history, declared a COVID-19 emergency way back on February 25, before it had any confirmed cases. This “bottom-up” leadership makes sense in California, given our century-long tradition of mutual aid and the fact that our local governments are so experienced with disasters.

In times of emergency, some Californians, including this columnist, have wondered why we can’t move this quickly, and behave this responsibly, in normal times. Why does it take an earthquake or an epidemic to suspend all the budget formulas and insane environmental regulations that make the act of building something such a costly endeavor? Why do we have a state that’s so good at solving disasters but can’t manage everyday problems?

But right now, there’s no time to think about the yin of our highly flexible hyper-competence in emergencies and the yang of our dysfunctional governance the rest of the time.

I, for one, must restock my family’s “red bag” of masks and other emergency supplies that I’ve had stored in my laundry room for earthquakes, but that I’ve just unexpectedly tapped for COVID-19. I’m equipped for this disaster, but as a Californian, I know there is another one just around the corner.

The post In Chaotic Times, California Offers Leadership appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Of all the lies Californians tell ourselves, one of the biggest is that we hate earthquakes.

The unspoken truth is that we love earthquakes, as well we should.

Don’t give the beaches and the warm weather all the credit. Earthquakes are the other natural phenomena that have made California great. And that’s not merely because the force of so many long-ago temblors sculpted our glorious mountains and valleys.

In this state, earthquakes play as many different roles as our finest Hollywood actors do. Quakes inspire us to dream while grounding us in reality. They teach us indispensable lessons about the land and ourselves. And they shape our culture, provide our lives with meaning, and are one of the few things with the power to bind Californians together.

We would be on very shaky ground without them.

Earthquakes have a reputation for destruction, but in California, they’ve largely been a force for construction and progress. No quake was ever more constructive than the one that leveled San Francisco in 1906. Before that disaster, the city was a small, struggling, and thoroughly corrupt metropolis. After the quake, the city’s governing crooks were put on trial, and the place was rebuilt into one of the most beautiful settlements in the history of civilization. By 1911, the people who gave San Francisco a second life had taken over the entire state, establishing the infrastructure, progressive legislation, and democratic tools (like the ballot initiative) that define public life in California to this day.

Quakes have not confined their magic to Northern California. The disastrous 1933 Long Beach earthquake led to the creation of new buildings—and new building standards—that made possible the rise of modern Southern California. The 1971 San Fernando quake led to even more advances in building.

And sometimes, quakes can give our state a bigger kind of boost. The 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California led to new investment that helped fuel Silicon Valley’s boom. Reconstruction after the 1994 Northridge earthquake helped Los Angeles recover from the riots and recession of the early 1990s.

While the modern American economy is famously unequal and unfair—the benefits are narrowly distributed to the richest among us, while the costs are borne by most of us—the economics of earthquakes work in a far more progressive way. The damage and death, while tragic and traumatic, tend to be limited to a relatively small number of people and places, but the benefits of the money spent on post-quake repairs and upgrades are widely distributed.

Even in bad times or during budget cuts, the federal government eagerly throws money at our state after earthquakes. Why do earthquakes produce such largesse? Because earthquakes can’t be blamed on the usual American scapegoats—the media, poor people, gays, immigrants. They are nobody’s fault. Indeed, earthquakes are one of the few events that can convince the rest of the United States to feel any sustained pity for us Californians; when the ground isn’t shaking, we are envied and loathed.

To keep the funds flowing, it is in Californians’ best interests that we play the part, expressing our fear of quakes, as well as our powerlessness in their aftermath. Our secret affection for quakes must be buried deep.

But it is there. Earthquakes are essential to Californians’ self-regard and self-importance—our sense of ourselves as a people apart, able to survive anything. We proudly reside on moving ground where others dare not—and this has given us the courage to live as we wish and speak our minds.

Both my grandmothers told stories about the quakes they had survived; my Grandma Oops was especially fond of recalling Southern California after the post-Long Beach quake in the spring of 1933—a time of great childhood freedom since the schools, having been destroyed, were closed for months. To try to keep students from falling behind, radio stations broadcast math and spelling lessons, and even tests for parents to administer.

Of course, many other places around the world—from Japan to Italy, China to Mexico, Turkey to Indonesia—can experience earthquakes even bigger and more damaging than ours. But California stands out for having built its culture on the earthquake, quite literally.

In describing the standard motion picture, Samuel Goldwyn once declared: “We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and builds up to a climax.” Hollywood has embraced the earthquake as the backdrop for stories of togetherness and romance. At the end of the romance-turned-disaster plot of the 1936 classic San Francisco, about the 1906 earthquake, Clark Gable and the rest of the cast march back into the city while singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In the popular, if tasteless, 2015 film San Andreas, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and his co-stars flirt and even make out with each other as an earthquake and tsunami lay waste to California. In our state, apparently, mass casualties are a real turn-on.

Earthquakes are often described, incorrectly, as a California curse, a fly in the Golden State soup, the dark side of a place that is otherwise sunny and bright. To the contrary, the sudden earth-shifting of quakes is essential to California’s appeal—the sense that here, everything can change in seconds.

Our state’s great 20th century chronicler, Carey McWilliams, wrote that “the state is always off balance, stretching itself precariously” and possessing a “notorious lack of social and political equilibrium.” All our shaking was precisely what makes us special. “California is no ordinary state,” he wrote. “It is an anomaly, a freak, the great exception.”

While earthquakes reflect our unsteadiness, they also can keep us relatively sober. The idea of the “Big One”—the massive earthquake that we are told will change everything—is one of the most successful pieces of propaganda in state history. Our foreknowledge of that quake has moved generations of Californians—typically a “live in the moment” lot—to do long-term planning, reinforce and rebuild infrastructure, bolt our homes to their foundations, and prepare for emergencies well in advance. The dangers of earthquakes also prevent us from building risky buildings in risky places.

We Californians could be better prepared (only 13 percent of homeowners have earthquake insurance). But—without the prospect of big earthquakes—would our feet ever touch the ground?

Indeed, the big quakes this month near Ridgecrest provided reminders that Californians are buoyed rather than chastened by quakes. At Dodger Stadium, when the upper deck swayed, people didn’t cower in fear—they applauded, as if this were just another ride in the theme park that is California. And the game continued without interruption.

The comedian David Spade captured the moment in a tweet: “All kidding aside. Rules for earthquakes. Stop… drop… then instagram yourself and be super dramatic. Sit back and count likes.”

I experienced the 7.1 quake on July 5 while eating dinner at that iconic California roadside restaurant, Pea Soup Andersen’s, in the small Santa Ynez Valley town of Buellton. There, as the earthquake rolled gently through the room, a few diners said, “Wow,” and watched the chandeliers sway for 30 seconds before returning to their meals. It was a small interruption, the same as if a fire engine or a small band had passed by.

Of course, more devastating quakes have shaken us more thoroughly, and to great action. In recent weeks, while pondering our state’s failure to address our housing crisis, I’ve found myself wondering if an especially damaging quake might inspire our state and local governments to lift anti-housing regulations and allow us to build enough homes to meet our needs.

We shouldn’t pray for earthquakes as solutions for our problems. But we ought to be grateful for them. The lives of Californians are so full of disorienting change. Our neighbors may move away, and our families may leave us. But earthquakes, like the most loyal of friends, always come back to visit.

The post Why Californians Secretly Love Earthquakes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This question often has been answered by referencing Mexico. Political scientists often link Mexico City’s devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake on September 19, 1985, to the end of the PRI’s seven-decades-long rule of the country 15 years later. Their argument is not that the party was responsible for the loss of some 10,000 lives, but rather that the disaster exposed the incompetence and corruption of a regime that until then seemed to control everything. While the government of President Miguel de la Madrid looked hopeless, if not helpless, ordinary citizens took the lead in rescuing survivors and helping the injured. It was this unexpected bottom-up movement of people that presaged the eventual demise of the then-ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).

Today, the question of earthquakes and politics is again alive, with two new terremotos, including a 7.1-magnitude quake on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 disaster, devastating Mexico as the PRI again clings to power. The response of ordinary citizens has been reminiscent of the 1985 quake: Tens of hundreds of young people in hard hats spontaneously joined the rescue operation, digging into rubble with bare hands and forming long lines to carry away pieces of concrete and mortar from collapsed buildings.

Despite the parallels, however, predictions of a political earthquake are overblown. Mexico’s quakes may shake the earth, but their political power has long been overestimated. The story of Mexico City quakes, past and present, reminds us that such events make slow impacts, and only damage political orders that were already weak and cracked. And for all the civic action that a tragedy may produce, the impact is temporary.

As a longtime resident and observer of Mexico, I have waited in vain for decades for an autonomous civil society to emerge there. The 1985 earthquake certainly didn’t produce it—nor was the quake the main catalyst for the end of the PRI’s rule.

The unraveling of Mexico’s one-party system really began with the economic crisis of 1982, which shook the country far more than any movement of the earth. The collapse of the peso was followed by high inflation, a deep recession, and a widespread sense of despair. There had been a lesser crisis and currency devaluation in 1976, but it was soon hidden by important off-shore oil discoveries and massive foreign borrowing. After 1982, there were no such band-aids. It was this moment that broke the unwritten contract between the PRI and Mexico’s middle classes.

This contract was simple. A broad political class, which controlled the peasantry, labor unions, and civil servants through the PRI, had brought the country three decades of steady economic growth nicknamed the Mexican “miracle.” In exchange, the growing urban middle classes spent more time vacationing in Acapulco than engaging in politics. Occasionally dissident groups appeared, even armed guerrillas in the mid-1970s, but they were either crushed or co-opted by the system.

The lack of economic growth was far more unsettling. Without it, the ruling political elite was unmasked as self-serving and corrupt and the middle classes began demanding a voice in the country’s affairs.

The demands grew in 1988 when the PRI resorted to fraud to insure the victory of its presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, over his left-leaning opponent, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Ignoring pressure for greater political freedom, Salinas instead chose economic reform, which included privatization of major state-owned companies and utilities and, later, negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.

Darker days followed. When an armed group known as the Zapatistas took up arms in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, the rebellion won popular sympathy simply for daring to defy the regime. Three months later, Salinas’s hand-picked successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was murdered. Weeks after his PRI replacement, Ernesto Zedillo, took office, a new economic crisis erupted and, with it, fresh middle-class anger at the regime.

With his back to the wall, Zedillo sought to release political pressure by permitting genuinely free elections, with the result that in mid-term elections in 1997 the PRI for the first time ever lost control of the Chamber of Deputies. Then in 2000, to the fury of PRI party dinosaurs, Zedillo refused to step in to block the victory of the conservative National Action Party’s presidential candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. The impossible had happened: the PRI had been ousted peacefully. The earthquake was merely one small part of a generation-long transformation.

Fox occupied the National Palace in Mexico City’s Zócalo, but he did not inherit the near-absolute power enjoyed by PRI presidents since the 1930s. His party did not control Congress and, as the traditional vertical structure of government fell apart, state governors exercised greater independence and labor unions slipped from central control. The coherence of PRI rule, however perverted it may have seemed to many Mexicans, vanished. As new centers of power emerged, powerful drug cartels which controlled the traffic of cocaine from Colombia to the United States posed a growing threat to the nation’s security.

In the 2006 presidential election, Fox’s party candidate, Felipe Calderón, was the narrow victor, but his leftist opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed fraud and his supporters blocked Mexico City’s streets for months. To assert his power, Calderón declared war on the drug cartels, with disastrous consequences. The estimates of the number of people killed or disappeared during his six-year term range between 60,000 and 100,000, most of them as a result of territorial wars between rival cartels. These gangs also set out to terrorize the population, bombing nightclubs, hanging bodies from highway bridges, and even leaving the heads of victims outside some schools.

The perception of a breakdown in law and order was one explanation for the PRI’s return to power in 2012: The PRI may have been corrupt, the saying went, but it knew how to govern. It also benefitted from the undisguised support of Mexico’s dominant television group, Televisa. Even then, its presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, was hardly given a national mandate. Because Mexico has only one round of presidential elections (unlike, say, Brazil), Peña Nieto won with just 38.2 percent of the vote, with López Obrador again in second place and Calderón’s own party candidate trailing in third.

At first, Peña Nieto’s boast that he was leading a “new PRI” seemed to carry some weight, above all when he dared to break the exploration monopoly of the country’s oil giant, Pemex, and to challenge the near-monopoly of the telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim. But while a different approach to the drug war resulted in the capture of several leading capos, including the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the number of cartels has multiplied. Further, the old ogre of corruption returned: Peña Nieto’s wife bought a mansion with the help of a prominent businessman, and several PRI governors were caught enriching themselves. For many Mexicans, there was nothing new about this PRI.

Then Donald Trump appeared, with his insults toward Mexicans and his threat to build a wall along the common border. Peña Nieto tried appeasement, inviting Trump for hombre talks in Mexico City, only to find Trump resuming his flailing of Mexico immediately upon his return home. Given blossoming anti-American sentiments, Peña Nieto had no choice but to refuse to pay for any border wall, but he did persuade Trump to engage in talks to renew NAFTA rather than denounce the treaty.

On the eve of this September’s earthquakes, polls showed Peña Nieto’s approval rating at well below 20 percent, lower than any Mexican leader on record.

Will the seismic tremors push Mexico into another political earthquake? There’s reason for skepticism. This Mexico City earthquake, and the earlier major quake in southern Mexico, were less devastating than the 1985 quake, with the number of dead in the low hundreds, not the thousands. While some 40 buildings collapsed in the capital, including the wing of a packed primary school, the city as a whole remained intact, and Mexican authorities were better prepared than in 1985.

Once life returns to normal for all but the earthquakes’ victims, the issue consuming most Mexicans will be next July’s presidential elections. The political earth may again move because the current front-runner is the perennial leftist candidate López Obrador, known throughout Mexico by his initials of AMLO. Because his promises of sweeping economic and social reforms have alarmed the private sector and middle classes, the other three main parties are determined to stop him. But can parties of left, center and right agree on a “unity” candidate? If they fail, as seems likely, López Obrador could win with an even smaller percentage of votes than Peña Nieto won in 2012.

If the actual earthquakes and their aftermath reinforce public disenchantment with the political establishment, AMLO, with his cultivated image of the political outsider, could benefit. But even if by next July the disaster has been largely forgotten, and even if most Mexicans oppose him, enough voters may still opt for the unknown variable of a populist with a radical new message to elect him. And at that point, a new cycle of Mexican political instability will unavoidably begin.

The post Mexico’s ’85 Earthquake Didn’t Start a Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As we both fell to the floor, sliding around, he grabbed my arm and kept trying to reassure me, “It’s OK, Olga Didi” (older sister). A heater on wheels with a propane tank came rolling toward us, and I kicked it back, slithering to get under my desk—my “go to” place in the event of an earthquake. The shaking stopped, and we went outside with Ram, my cook.

The earthquake happened four hours before a big early birthday party for me—I’ll turn 90 in June. We were expecting 600 guests, including many people who made long bus trips from other parts of Nepal.

My first thought was for the children who live in the J and K houses, the two children’s homes in Patan run by the Nepal Youth Foundation, which I founded in 1990. These 60 boys and girls range in age from 2 to 16; some of them are orphans or were abandoned by their parents, some were child beggars, and some are disabled. Thankfully, all the children survived the earthquake, along with the foundation staff and their families.

For 25 years, I’ve divided my time between Nepal and Sausalito, California. I first visited Nepal in 1984 when I was 60 and about to retire as a research attorney at the California Supreme Court. I was overwhelmed by the stunning scenery and friendliness of the people—and especially by the children I encountered. They had so few material possessions, yet they were the most joyful, funny, amiable little kids anywhere on earth. Their most fervent wish was to go to school someday.

Totally unexpectedly, I discovered a country and a cause to which I would devote the rest of my life. I formed the Nepal Youth Foundation in 1990; since then, the organization has provided education, health care, shelter, and freedom from servitude to more than 45,000 children.

In the immediate aftermath of the quake, about 50 people took refuge at my house, including 19 girls who came to my home from West Nepal to perform their incredible local dances at the birthday party. These girls were once trapped in the Kamlari system—sold into domestic slavery by their desperately poor families. Since 2000, NYF has liberated over 12,000 of these girls and paid to educate them, giving their families piglets to compensate for lost earnings. Recently, the government agreed to cover these costs—but we continue to provide former Kamlari girls with training and mentoring. I was worried about the girls, but we thankfully managed to find them. They were quite traumatized, and some were crying. But within a few hours, they calmed down. They napped in the sun and felt safe—together and in an open space.

That night, the girls helped Ram to prepare the Nepali staple dinner of dal bhat and tarkari (rice, lentils and vegetables) for the big crowd. For that meal, Ram used cabbage from my garden. I’m worried that food and water may become a serious problem; our water filter operates on electricity. There has been no electricity since the quake, and the Internet connection is spotty.

There have been more than 80 aftershocks, some of them quite severe. Everyone who wasn’t injured in Kathmandu spent the afternoon outside—and hundreds of thousands of people slept outside all night.

My house has a large garden with a high wall around it. There was a crowd of people camped in the empty space on the other side of my wall, and every time the earth shook, a great shout went up.

Almost everyone at my house slept outdoors, including two families with newborn babies. The former Kamlari girls also slept outdoors on mats until it started to rain and they ran inside and spread out on the floor of my living and dining rooms. I told them that, as a California girl, I wake up two or three times a year in a shaking bed at my home in Sausalito. I just put the cover over my head and go back to sleep. They told me later that when the aftershocks began on Saturday, they thought about what I had said and went back to sleep.

The girls left on Sunday for the 14-hour bus ride back to Dang in West Nepal. That day, I wanted more than anything to see the kids, but CNN called for interviews, and by the time I finished with them, it was dark. The children have been camping out at the empty lot next to the J and K houses. I understand the little boys view this as an adventure, but I am sure many of them are shaken by the experience.

Some of the alumni, who are now college graduates, have returned to the J and K houses—not only because they view them as their homes, but also to help the “uncle” and “auntie” who supervise the kids.

I returned home to California on Wednesday night. The international airport is open, but (tragically) the airport for domestic flights is not operational. The devastation in rural areas, where 80 percent of Nepalis live, is overwhelming and there is no way to get relief to most of them.

I am so sad to be leaving at a time like this, when so many people I care for are suffering. But I think I will be more useful working from California to raise money for the relief effort.

Because NYF is on the ground, we know where the greatest needs are in Nepal right now. The hospitals are jam-packed with the injured and lacking in beds, medical equipment, food, and medicine. On Monday, NYF bought 200 mattresses, and bedding and delivered them to one of Nepal’s main government hospitals. We also bought $30,000 worth of surgical supplies for the most advanced and efficient public hospital in Nepal.

NYF has also established a shelter for patients who are ready to be discharged from the hospital but have no place to go because their homes are destroyed, there is no transport, and their relatives can’t come for them. Doctors are desperate to discharge these patients because seriously injured people are lying in the corridors or outside, waiting for a hospital bed.

We have a beautiful facility we constructed right outside Kathmandu a few years ago to rehabilitate malnourished children. We began moving discharged patients into it on Tuesday afternoon. Some of these patients will need ongoing care, so 40 former bonded girls we are training as health assistants are coming down from Northern Nepal to work in the facility.

Looking ahead, we already know there be a massive demand for skilled construction workers. NYF has experience in job training and construction projects, and we plan to train 1,000 people in construction skills that incorporate seismic safety, mostly in villages where the majority of the destruction occurred. In addition to allowing them to earn a livelihood, this will enable people to rebuild their own homes. NYF will provide them with supplementary funds to purchase steel rods and concrete so that they can replace their mud homes with solid structures.

Hundreds of schools have been flattened. Using our experience in building more than 100 schools or schoolrooms, NYF also plans to rebuild 50 of these devastated structures so that children can resume their education.

We’re certainly not the only group that has sprung into action to help in the aftermath of this catastrophic earthquake, but we are trying to address the most pressing needs. The scenes of destruction all around Nepal are sickening. My heart goes out to so many people here who have lost so much. Now we have to do what we can to help them recover from this devastation.

The post The Destruction in Nepal Is Sickening appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the thing about earthquake preparation: If you’re not a worrier, there are always more important things to do than gather earthquake supplies—like go to work or walk the dog. And being prepared requires answering a paralyzingly large number of questions about what your plan should be, what kind of supplies you need, and where you store them.

I didn’t get serious about those questions until about four years ago. After doing some reading on earthquakes, I realized that the “big one”—an 8.0 magnitude or bigger earthquake on the San Andreas Fault—is inevitable, and my family should be ready.

My job also played a part. Through my work producing exhibitions for natural history museums, I’ve learned to appreciate the power of elemental forces of nature. When you’re an urban dweller, it’s easy to think about nature as being “out there.” After all, the streets are paved and water always comes out of the tap. But the impact of a serious natural disaster (like a catastrophic earthquake) could be magnified in a densely populated city like L.A.

In 2006, my wife and I moved from Beverly Hills to Hancock Park and bought a four-unit building with our friends. We each moved into an apartment: my wife and I, another couple, and two single people. One evening about three years later, I organized a meeting on earthquake preparedness. The six of us gathered in the building’s garden with a bottle of wine and came up with a plan. Our first step was to agree to split the cost of having the building foundation bolted and reinforced to withstand earthquakes.

Then we started gathering supplies. Based on what I read online, it seems likely that water service will be disrupted after a severe earthquake. So we bought two 40-gallon water barrels that we keep in a storage area in the back of the yard. We also keep five-gallon jugs of water in each of our apartments and garages.

We decided to store most of our supplies in the detached garages behind the building, which are single-story, lightweight but well-braced structures. We labeled containers “earthquake supplies” and put in everything we thought we might need, including an espresso pot and the right kind of coffee. I must confess that the espresso pot was one of the first things we put in the kit.

The containers also have canned food, a first-aid kit, a stove and fuel, a bucket privy, a hand-cranked radio, and tools (crowbar, fire axe, and shovel) for clearing debris. The building’s gas meters already had automatic shut-off valves (which prevent gas leaks and fires after a quake), but we added a valve wrench next to the meters in case they need to be manually shut off. I also purchased several fire extinguishers that we keep near the garage doors.

It took us several months to get the kit together. And we improve the kit each year. My neighbor even found a fold-up solar panel charger online; if we lose power after a quake, we’ll be able to charge our cell phones and computers.

I encouraged my neighbors to keep a backpack in the garage with a change of clothes, money in small bills, and extra medicine (if needed). I’m careful to keep the gas tank of my car fairly full, so we can get around if gas stations aren’t working. My wife and I also keep water and good walking shoes in our cars, so we can make it home if we end up stuck on streets that are impassable.

When we first moved to Hancock Park, I noticed that many people on our block were Orthodox Jews who mostly interacted with other members of their community. Initially, I wanted to organize the block, but it seemed too hard to make connections, so I focused on my own building. But in the last few years, the neighborhood has become more diverse. Slowly, this mix of Orthodox Jews, gay couples, and yuppies have gotten to know each other. My neighbors are friendlier and more open than they were even a few years ago.

I believe in neighborhood fabric and see earthquake preparedness as a way to get people talking to each other. Whether or not we live in separate worlds, I’m confident that my neighbors will come together and cooperate if disaster strikes. People would go house to house to check to see if anyone was hurt or needed immediate help.

My plan now is to distribute literature on earthquake preparedness around the neighborhood—pamphlets, supply lists, and other guidance. We can tell our neighbors, who mostly live in four-unit buildings like ours, how cost-efficient it is to cooperate on earthquake preparations, and invite them to come over to our place and see what we did.

Last week, when the 4.4 magnitude earthquake hit, I braced for a big aftershock. It didn’t happen. And—though I didn’t think about it or discuss it with my wife—I had a sense of calm. It’s reassuring to know we have what we need to make it through a major disaster. If the big one happens and we lose power, my neighbors and I can still drink espresso and charge our phones.

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But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t hurt. Earthquakes only last a few seconds but can cause damage that will never be fully repaired.

It was before dawn when the shaking started. Within seconds, my wife, my two young kids, and I were huddling under the hallway doorframe in our upstairs apartment in West Los Angeles. Furniture skidded across the floor and dishes crashed in the kitchen as we waited for the shaking to stop. There was nothing to do but hope that the ceilings and walls would hold up.

They did. And we carried our 3-year-old boy and 6-month-old girl down the outside stairs, side-stepping the splattered ceramic tiles that had fallen from the apartment building’s roof.

On the street, we conferred and commiserated with our neighbors, including the couple next door whose car top was crushed by our dislodged chimney. The quake’s epicenter had been 25 miles away, in the north-central San Fernando Valley, but our block had been rocked by the seismic wave, and, just a mile southeast of us, a Santa Monica Freeway bridge had collapsed at La Cienega Boulevard.

At that moment, we thought that we, and everyone in our immediate area, were OK. It was reassuring that nearby buildings and utility lines were still standing. But we also could hear a hissing sound from across the street—a suspected gas leak that the L.A. Fire Department would check on later that morning.

At first glance, we had escaped. Upon closer inspection, we hadn’t. When we went back upstairs a few hours later to straighten up the apartment, we discovered that the living room floor had been separated six inches from the wall. There were cracks in the walls of most of the rooms. The apartment itself appeared to be tilting. Back outside again, we noticed that one side of the building seemed to be bulging or swelling. Something was wrong.

For seven years, we had been renting this second-floor apartment in a charming and affordable 1930s “Spanish-style” duplex on Sherbourne Drive in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood. But after the quake, it would no longer be home. Soon, our building and (if memory serves) three others within 100 yards became officially uninhabitable, “red tagged” by government inspectors.

My family was “dislocated.” Several weeks after the quake, FEMA sent a $2,700 relocation stipend.

For the first few days, we stayed with relatives. Then we managed—through a friend—to land a new rental. It was a house in nearby, upscale Beverlywood, an “off-the-grid” curvy, hilly neighborhood of single-family properties with back window views of Century City and downtown. The house was for sale and the realtor wanted people living there until the market settled.

Getting our stuff to the new place was harrowing. With no time to organize, we packed and carried boxes downstairs to the truck. Two strong young guys, dispatched by the moving company, helped us pull small appliances off the shelves, clothes from the closet, bathroom supplies from the cabinets. It felt like an evacuation.

All that day, aftershocks rattled the building and my nerves. There would be more than 11,000 Northridge earthquake aftershocks in 1994, more than 400 of them palpable. Work began quickly on both residential and commercial buildings. Heroic, round-the-clock efforts repaired the Santa Monica Freeway bridge in 74 days.

Infrastructure can be fixed. Human beings are more difficult to repair. Though the region was healing, my family faced uncertainty and insecurity. We were comfortable enough in the Beverlywood house but knew it was transitional. That wasn’t all. Our income was down, since all the chaos and moving had made it hard to concentrate on building our businesses (mine as a union-side labor relations consultant, hers as a clinical psychologist). And we were ringing up debt paying for—among other things—additional rent, daycare, and help at home with the kids.

A couple months after the quake, the house we were renting was sold, and we were forced to move again. My wife and I argued about what to do. Could we afford to rent a house or should we scale back and settle for another apartment? This time, we spent days looking for a place before finding a single-family, three-bedroom home on a large lot in Mar Vista (west of Sawtelle, north of Venice). The second move was less frantic than the first, but still costly and exhausting.

The earthquake had messed with our lives and our relationship. Not that everything—including our marriage—had been fine before. At the time, we seemed to be managing, but in retrospect, there was disruption, chaos, and stress. Despite couples counseling and other remediation, we never quite recovered.

Could our marriage have lasted if not for the conflicts triggered by the quake? There is no way to know. The earthquake exposed cracks and fissures in us. We separated less than two years later.

Memory is selective, particularly when reconstructing a narrative or ranking the pivotal events of one’s life. No matter how I cut it, the Northridge earthquake always ends up near the top of my list.

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Nowadays, nearly 3 million motorists cruise up Highway 39 every year. In addition to providing a thrill for joyriding tourists, the highway gives the 500 people who live nearby a way to get to their homes. It provides firefighters access to the Angeles National Forest, and it’s the entrance point for three flood control dams.

In 1978, a major landslide destroyed part of the highway’s upper section, isolating the lower 27 miles from the Angeles Crest Highway. The road still hasn’t been completely repaired—and various government agencies and special interest groups are to this day wrestling over whether to finish the job, which is estimated to cost $50 million. In 2011, Caltrans, which owns this stretch of road, asked both the U.S. Forest Service and Los Angeles County to take over the highway and assume responsibility of its $1.5 million annual maintenance cost. (By comparison, the median cost of maintaining a 30-mile long, two-lane highway in the U.S. is about $180,000.) Both have “gracefully declined to take on this responsibility,” one manager for Caltrans told the L.A. Times in 2012.

Highway 39 and the threat of landslides is just one example of the costs—financial and social—that natural disasters exact on different regions of California. The Rim Fire in Yosemite in August 2013 covered a gargantuan 400 square miles, but two others were even bigger: San Diego County’s Cedar fire in 2003, and the 2012 Rush fire in Lassen County. California budgets roughly $170 million for firefighting alone. There are also major floods and even the occasional hurricane (known in the West as a cyclone) or volcanic eruption.

And, of course, there are the earthquakes. Experts say there is near certainty (to be accurate, a 94 percent chance) that a magnitude 6.7 earthquake will rock California in the next 30 years, and a 46 percent chance of one 7.5 or greater, with Southern California the likely center. There is only about a 4 percent probability of a magnitude 8.0 or greater earthquake likely in Northern California or the Pacific Northwest, but the toll in lives would be in the thousands and in money, hundreds of billions of dollars.

The sheer variety of disasters makes California unique within the United States. Yet when viewed globally, the state is something of a disaster microcosm. Other parts of the country and world share California’s struggles with the costs of disasters. New Orleans and the East Coast are still rebuilding after the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. The Colorado floods in September were the largest in centuries—recovery is expected to take years and cost more than $2 billion. Japan and parts of Asia are still recovering from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011 and dealing with costs exceeding $122 billion.

Although mega-disasters grab the headlines, even natural hazards that go relatively unnoticed by the press can impact communities. How many people have heard of the fire and repeated floods of the past few years suffered by the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico? Or of last summer’s mid-August floods in China and neighboring parts of Russia that killed more than 85 people and displaced nearly 900,000? Or the snowstorms in 10 regions of the Andes in early September that sparked a state of emergency, killed tens of thousands of animals, and affected 100,000 people?

Even very small natural events can wreak havoc. The rather puny eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland in 2010, for example, disrupted global air traffic to the tune of about $5 billion. Increased population density makes people especially vulnerable in a natural disaster, and globalization spreads and multiplies the effects of a disaster far beyond the local site of the disaster itself.

Disasters, large and small, connect California’s different agencies, governing bodies, and citizens with one another. They also connect the state—scientifically, economically, and strategically—with the rest of the world. California scientists have worked with their colleagues around the globe to greatly increase our understanding of the geologic processes that cause disasters. But protecting ourselves from the inevitable disaster requires that we not only have a scientific understanding—we also need to have a broad and communal, even an international, response. Scientists provide impartial facts, but they cannot be alone in helping to prepare for, and recover from, disasters. To rebuild devastated communities, we also need engineers to propose and implement technical solutions, financiers to manage costs, and negotiators to balance the realities of political, economic, religious, and cultural values. We need people who are responsible for collecting and responding to input from diverse stakeholders and who will ensure that recommendations are agreed upon, communicated, and implemented.

California has done this with its extensive earthquake preparedness programs and with the U.S. Geological Survey’s California Volcano Observatory. But in all too many disaster situations, the links among scientists, engineers, community leaders, public health officials, and others are not as strong as they should, or can, be. This was tragically revealed in the events that unfolded before and after the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, when 309 people died and six scientists and a government official ended up convicted of manslaughter for downplaying the threat of tremors days before the disaster. We need to forge better connections among people working in different fields as well as to every citizen who potentially lies in harm’s way.

It starts with more international collaboration among everyone—not just scientists. Japan, Italy, New Zealand, Chile, the Philippines, and Iceland have extensive experience in volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Australia, China, and Africa have experienced many floods and droughts. Their experiences can inform California and U.S. disaster workers. But the United States has been a world leader in the science, engineering, and policy practices of natural disaster response, and should continue to devote resources to ensuring that leadership. The many players and decision-makers involved in prevention and mitigation of and recovery from disasters of all kinds in California are a microcosm of those needed on the global stage.

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So it wasn’t a mystery to me what was happening that early morning on February 9, 1971. I knew immediately it was an earthquake. I was on the top bunk of a bunk bed in the room I shared with my older sister, and I woke to the sound of screaming. At some point, I realized I was the one who was screaming. But somehow, I felt as if I were observing myself from a third-person point of view. I thought, “This is it. This is the Big One. We are going to get swallowed up by the earth, and we are all going to die.” I was 13.

The bed was locomoting parallel to the wall for what seemed like an eternity. The bookshelves on metal rails lining the opposite wall were flying off their brackets, and the dresser seemed to be walking toward us. A small bookcase at the foot of our bed slammed into the door so hard it sheered the doorknob off.

My family lived in Sylmar on a lower-middle-class block of tract homes somewhere between the Olive View and VA hospitals. It was the kind of neighborhood where some people (including us) had an enormous amount of junk in their driveways and more cars or car carcasses than seemed reasonable for a single-family dwelling.

Our part of town was already multicultural then, although that wasn’t what we called it. There were white folks, Mexicans, Asians, and probably some others. My mother learned to make enchiladas and taquitos from Mrs. Tellez, the lady across the street. She, her husband, and maybe their Chihuahua came from La Paz. My sister and I pretended to be the Beatles with the Japanese-American kids up the street. (It was coolest, of course, to be John. My sister, who is left-handed, always wanted to be Paul. I’m left-handed too, but for some reason I thought George was more interesting. Nobody wanted to be Ringo.) It wasn’t a tight community by any stretch of the imagination, but we knew our closest neighbors and had at least a nodding acquaintance with most everyone else on the block.

The foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains were the ever-present backdrop to our daily dramas. It was a quietly imposing landscape–steep hills outlined against an arching expanse of blue sky, the L.A. basin below, and us gloating above the smog line.

I climbed out of my bunk and my sister jumped out of hers, and we rushed to the door, now knobless, to find we didn’t have a way to get out. We screamed for my parents, who were already trying to open the door, but there were books and furniture blocking the doorway. Eventually, we escaped from the house. My father, mother, brother, sister, and I walked over scads of debris–stuff that had been knocked over or dumped out of cupboards and closets, including broken glass, record albums, clothes, bits of furniture–and we freaked out during each aftershock, thinking the house would collapse on our heads and bury us before we got out. But we did get out, miraculously without a scratch, even in bare feet and pajamas. In hindsight, it felt as if we were all protected somehow by a force field–like we were superheroes with special powers that kept us from harm.

Once outside, we started looking up and down the block to see who else had come out. We checked in with our immediate neighbors, and they were okay. So we looked a little further afield to see who hadn’t come out of their houses. One family down the block had survived the quake but refused to come out of their house, no matter what the rest of us said.

We were lucky to live in single-story houses with more asphalt, lawn, ice plant, and ivy than tall shade trees that could have come crashing down. I stood in the driveway, cold, in my bare feet, looking up the empty street at the foothills. The sky was pink with the sunrise and the air was still. It was quiet–except for the odd whiny howl emanating from dogs around the block. Turns out some of them broke loose from their fenced enclosures and never came back.

The first couple of days after the quake we spent sleeping in our cars in the driveway, too scared by aftershocks to be inside the house. My sister and I lucked out and scored the back of the station wagon. I got pretty hysterical when my dad first went back into the house to survey the damage. But soon we all went in to see what was left. I won’t describe all the dirty details–like what happened to the 25-gallon tropical fish tank (let’s just say: so much for the fish and the carpet) or to the scores of old baby food jars full of nuts and screws and nails that had been stacked to the rafters in the garage–since we’ve all had to clean up an unpleasant mess at some point, right?

We were lucky. Nobody on our block died or was seriously hurt. Things got organized pretty quickly. It wasn’t long before the water trucks showed up in the parking lot of the Alpha Beta grocery store down the street, the Andy Gump portable toilets were brought in, and everyone figured out how to shut off their gas so nobody’s house blew up.

Still, a couple of families on our block took off right after the quake, and we never saw them again. I always figured they must have been from some other part of the country because real Californians just live with earthquakes. You develop a kind of earthquake machismo once you’ve ridden out a largish one. (“That was a 5.5? Big deal.”)

No, it wasn’t the earthquake that drove me out of Sylmar, a place that had one bowling alley and zero movie theaters. If one of your biggest entertainments is climbing fifteen feet up a tree in your front yard to spy on your neighbors, you don’t have to be a genius to know there’s probably a lot more of the world to discover. So, like one of those dogs that saw a broken fence as its lucky break, I bolted after I graduated from high school and didn’t look back. College took me to Berkeley, a job took me to Washington D.C., and frustration took me to New York City.

I didn’t know what was eating at me on the East Coast. I had wonderful friends, interesting work, a great apartment. I didn’t have to bolt my bookcases to the wall, and I could finally put knickknacks on living room shelves without fear of breakage. But at some point I realized the landscape looked puny to me (a weird thought for a provincial in a major city). Everything seemed too close to allow for any real perspective on it. I longed to look out and see an ever-expanding vista-like when you drive down Interstate 5. I guess I was one body in the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but I needed to do it in California. As it happened, family concerns finally brought me back west, this time to Oakland.

A few weeks ago, during a visit to L.A., I decided on a whim to cruise through Sylmar. Oddly, it hadn’t changed much. My old elementary school looked the same. The Vons we shopped at was still there, and so was the Jack in the Box where I had my first job. (But like everywhere else Jack’s bouncy head is gone. Do kids now even know what a jack-in-the-box is?)

There’s a nice park where the VA Hospital used to be, right at the base of the foothills. As I strolled through the park, overcome by an unexpected nostalgia for that landscape, I realized I’d never really left Sylmar behind. I learned there’s an internal geography that doesn’t leave you–and that earthquakes never keep real Californians from coming home.

Vanessa Whang is the director of programs at the California Council for the Humanities.

*Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.

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But when a 5.8 magnitude tremor hit yesterday just a few miles away from my new home in Charlottesville, Virginia, I realized that something had changed. When a fellow traveler in the library turned to me during the shaking and exclaimed, “This isn’t safe. I’m getting out of here!” I could feel a kind of civic pride swell up in me, one that I had never really known I had. I was a Californian, an Angeleno by adoption. Weren’t my middle names San and Andreas? Wasn’t I sure-footed on swaying earth by virtue of baptism in the SoCal sunshine?

Joan Didion once wrote that the self-assurance Californians exuded in the face of their tectonic misfortune was “less equanimity than protective detachment.” But there have been few times I’ve ever felt more attached to California than during Tuesday’s rumble in the Mid-Atlantic.

It’s no secret that the specter of the Big One and memories of quakes past form part of the Bear Flag Republic’s collective identity. Living with quakes is a tax paid for the beaches and balmy weather. Surviving them lends a reputation for ruggedness to citizens of a spaced-out and superficial place. Even if Northridge produced as much as $43 billion in damage, these things can still simply be shrugged off. Quakes bring credibility that money can’t buy (unless the cash arrives in the form of federal disaster relief).

I suppose that calling a place home means taking it warts and all–you just don’t realize you’ve got a thing for the warts until you’re gone, and they’re gone. In past periods of exile, I’ve met who-knows-how-many LA ex-pats who declared they couldn’t stand driving anyplace but their native town. LA’s traffic, at least, gave LA’s drivers respect for each other’s time. “Why doesn’t anyone out here know how to swing three cars through a yellow light on a unprotected left turn?” asks the LA ex-pat. It doesn’t matter where “out here” is. It’s not one of the Golden State’s overcrowded and pot-holed avenues, funneling frantic road warriors and making pedestrians head for the hills. So it’s just not the same.

But that’s a pose. I must admit that not long after the shaking stopped here in Virginia, the feeling of superiority began to leave me. In truth, my library companion, despite her desire to get out of here, wasn’t anywhere near as panicked as I thought she should have been. She may have been savvier than she seemed. An aging library full of books–probably the highest concentration of potentially flying objects this side of Roswell–wouldn’t be safe, right? I guess she had a point. Trying to exit stage left before the twenty some bookshelves between us and the emergency exits had a chance to prove they were up to code? Maybe a good call, in retrospect.

I admit, about twenty seconds in–after I could finally believe that this aspect of the California dream would stalk me across country–I took a good hard look at the desk in front of me…and opted to weather the storm upright and in-chair. Californians don’t really go crawl under their desks, do they? Isn’t this our take on the stiff upper lip?

This is when I realized that, after being drilled for years, my sense of belonging outstripped my good sense. The instinctive feeling that I was earthquake-prepared, and that this was as much a badge of my West Coast roots as wearing sunglasses indoors, just meant I was prepared to go down with the ship. My steely demeanor and inadvertent smirk masked a garden-variety pride. The pride, I’ve heard a proverb runs, goeth before the fall.

But even that pride was wounded when I listened to the stories in the air when after finally stepping outside. “My cat slept through the whole thing, and he is supposed to be my early warning system!” Or, “They made us evacuate the building, but we couldn’t even use the elevator!” Lamenting inconvenience after escaping potential catastrophe? These Virginians could have been in a scene from Clueless.

Which made me afraid to even open my mouth. Pull the California card? That didn’t seem like a winning hand. Even admitting my origins might have seemed like gloating, like pulling out a postcard of Malibu to folks who had invited me to Virginia Beach. The thrill of “going home” for a turbulent sixty seconds had made me feel less anonymous and more comfortable in my new digs, but now I wanted my anonymity back. Childhood drilling didn’t seem to have instilled the right reactions as much as affectations. I wasn’t going to come out looking smooth, just smug. That’s a pretty poor way to represent.

The whole earthquake-complex, it should probably be said, seems a little perverse in general. Freud might say it’s compensating for something. Yeah, most folks who have lived on the Pacific remember a tremor or two. But the reason residents so easily seize upon the quake as a collective symbol is because it’s been institutionalized in schools, the workplace, TV announcements, and architecture. The quake is a common point of reference less because of shared seismic experiences than because of our pervasive attempt to shelter ourselves from the tremors. We shouldn’t forget that our unpredictable Earth produces real suffering. In light of the lives lost around the world in recent years–from Java to Japan, Phuket to Pakistan–chuckles about East Coast unease echoing from San Diego to Eureka seem not only off base, but cynical.

I think I need a new favorite California wart in which to invest my pride. Maybe the smog.

Colin Kielty is a doctoral student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy of macten.

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