TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110689/p18

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 9.4 KB | 182 lines

                y╞                                                            NATION, Page 18

Is California Worth the Risk?


Absolutely, 30 million residents will say -- and they're no
different from Americans who smoke, drive, hang glide, eat
apples or fly DC-10s

By Richard Lacayo/Reported by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and
Dennis Wyss/San Francisco


    There should be plenty to talk about this week at the
annual conference of the Society for Risk Analysis. (Yes, there
really is one.) The 800 or so actuaries, social scientists,
lawyers and psychologists who are expected to attend will gather
in -- what better place? -- San Francisco. They need only step
outside their hotels to see a city that has become one vast
society for risk analysis. All around the Bay Area these days,
amid the tumbled roadways and jolted buildings left by the
earthquake, people are asking themselves: Is it crazy to live
on a fault line?

    Though that question is never entirely out of mind in
California, it usually just withers in the sun, overwhelmed by
the seductive arguments of the natural beauty and friendly
climate. But now the palpable and sometimes painful memories of
the Pretty Big One, as the locals are calling the recent quake,
have lent a certain sharpness to the prospects of further
shake-ups. Last week scientists were telling Californians that
the state faces a 50% chance that another quake as strong as the
recent one could happen "at any time" during the next 30 years.
"And that means tomorrow," says Don Anderson, director of the
seismological laboratory at the California Institute of
Technology.

    Even so, few are rushing to catch the next plane east. In
Santa Cruz, near the epicenter of the quake, county officials
are awaiting the judgment of geologists as to whether homeowners
should be allowed to rebuild on the fractured hillsides, where
landslides may now become a perennial headache. Many residents
are nonetheless eager to rebuild. True to their reputation for
mellowness and impregnable cool, Californians are generally
unfazed by the fault-line threat.

    "The earth shakes and rolls under my feet," shrugs novelist
Wallace Stegner, a 40-year resident of Los Altos Hills. "It's
never particularly alarmed me." Brokers insist that San
Francisco's booming real estate market has not subsided.
"Obviously the quake was a drawback," concedes Katherine August
of First Republic Bancorp, which specializes in loans for luxury
homes. "But I don't think it will have a lasting effect on the
market. We closed one deal the day after the quake." Says
pollster Mervin Field: "Sure it shook people up. But look at the
World Series game that was interrupted at Candlestick Park. A
few minutes after the quake, you had 58,000 people chanting
`Play ball! Play ball!'"

    Is this the same California that has been sensitive to the
risks from every kind of environmental threat? Three years ago,
the state's voters approved Proposition 65, a law that mandates
warning labels on any substance found to carry a 1-in-100,000
lifetime risk of causing cancer. As a result, cautionary
notices now appear on gasoline pumps, in hardware and grocery
stores and on the walls of Napa Valley wineries.

    In fact, Californians are no different from other Americans
when it comes to risk. The national temperament seems to have
a fault line all its own. On one side of that psychic divide,
Americans shrug off demonstrable threats: they build houses on
eroding beaches, speed without wearing seat belts, go hang
gliding and expose themselves to the cancer-causing rays of the
sun. On the other side, they suffer a bad case of the jitters
about the smallest threat to personal well-being. They flee from
apples that might bear a trace of Alar and fret about radon,
nuclear power and DC-10s.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested that "the test of a
first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed
ideas in the mind at the same time." If so, America has
developed a perverse sort of genius. Yet both national moods --
the urge to deny risk and the urge to insist that we can protect
ourselves from it entirely -- may be traceable to the same
unfailing optimism. In a culture that has long fancied itself
a New World paradise, disasters seem impossible either to
imagine or to tolerate. People expect to conduct the pursuit of
happiness along a road that is straight, well lighted and free
of bumps.

    But as they swing between imperturbability and panic,
Americans leave many experts wondering how to get society to
gauge an acceptable risk. Almost a decade of dwindling public
confidence in the Environmental Protection Agency, which was
treated like an unwanted appendage by the Reagan Administration,
has led to a proportionate rise in the attention given to claims
made by private consumer and environmental organizations that
focus on food safety and risks to health. Dan Howell, the
director of the Americans for Safe Food project at the Center
for Science in the Public Interest, says that groups like his
are flourishing. "Our membership is double what it was a few
years ago," says Howell. "New local organizations are emerging
across the country. Consumers rely on consumers' groups as much
as on the government."

    The alarms raised by consumer groups may prove to be a
mixed blessing. Some experts complain that a generation that
faces fewer real health threats than did their grandparents has
become hypersensitive to relatively minor perils. Biochemist
Bruce Ames of the University of California, Berkeley, points out
that naturally occurring carcinogens in many foods -- cabbage,
broccoli and oranges -- are much more potent than traces of
man-made pesticides. "Most of us are more secure with respect
to basic survival than we were a generation ago," says Ann
Fisher, manager of the EPA's Risk Communication Program. "We're
now in a position where we look with fear at what might once
have been thought of as less serious dangers."

    Experts on risk perception generally agree that people tend
to be less concerned about dangers they incur voluntarily, like
cigarette smoking and fast driving. They are more resentful of
risks they feel have been imposed upon them, like the threat of
mishaps at a nearby nuclear plant. They are more sensitive to
risks they can control -- for instance, through laws that ban
pesticides or require safety warnings -- than they are to those
they feel they can do nothing about -- like acts of nature.
"People choose what to fear," says Aaron Wildavsky, co-author
of Risk and Culture. "What can you do about an earthquake?"

    There is evidence that it takes repeated batterings to
shake people's tenacity. Natural disasters do not often occur
in so predictable a manner. Mary Skipper is getting ready to
replace her mobile home near Charleston, S.C., in a spot hit
hard by Hurricane Hugo in September. "I know this is a flood
plain," she explains. "But something like Hugo may never happen
again for another 100 years."

    Californians cannot count on the same lengthy intervals
between disasters. After a moderately powerful quake shook the
area around Whittier in 1987, a University of Southern
California survey of 235 people in Los Angeles County found that
most of those questioned were not interested in leaving. But 30%
said they might make plans to go if another quake of the same
magnitude shook them.

    "Applied to San Francisco, it means that a second quake
there in a year or two would have a much greater impact. We
could expect to see a significant out-migration from
California," says geographer Curtis C. Roseman. "One quake
doesn't do the job."

    To say that Californians have been willing to tolerate the
risks arising from life on a fault line is not to say they have
been indifferent to them. The recent quake was comparable in
magnitude to the one in Armenia last December, which killed
25,000. "A substantial contributor to the much lower death rate
in California was that California was conscious of the risk and
made significant investments as a precaution," says M. Granger
Morgan, head of the department of engineering and public policy
at Carnegie-Mellon University. But after last week, earthquakes
are going to be viewed as a much more persistent risk than they
were before. That will force many communities to choose which
risks to take seriously. Says Bruce Bolt, a seismologist at the
University of California, Berkeley: "If you have only a certain
amount of dollars to spend on risk mitigation in a particular
area, do you spend it on seismic upgrading or on asbestos
removal?"

    Californians are starting to calculate their risks a bit
differently. Rene and Tony Donaldson live near Stanford
University. Their $425,000 home escaped major damage in the
Pretty Big One, though the tremors did smash their collection
of American Indian pottery. "Now I know why California Indians
didn't have a pottery tradition," Rene says with the deadpan
cool of a real Californian. "In the future we'll collect baskets
instead." But the Donaldsons are also looking into quake
insurance, which they turned down when they bought their house
four years ago. And while they are still determined to stand
their ground, they have a new sense of how it can shift under
their feet. Says Rene: "Now when I go out for a run and go under
a freeway overpass, I look up and say, `Not now, please' -- and
speed up."