NATION, Page 18Is California Worth the Risk?Absolutely, 30 million residents will say -- and they're nodifferent from Americans who smoke, drive, hang glide, eatapples or fly DC-10sBy Richard Lacayo/Reported by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago andDennis 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,
