A small earthquake

I had the luck to escape from the infernal continent – of the USA that is – to San Francisco where July and August are the cool months, like the eastern fall, brilliant and warm by day, chill and spooky in the evening when the white fog comes moving in with the speed of a freight train.

I was sitting in my hotel room, turning the pages of the newspaper with some complacency because the paper crackled. In New York, just now in the 90s, humidity 98 per cent, reading a newspaper is like trying to read a towel. I turned to the back page which has a half-page map of the United States painted in eleven colours – a weather map, going from white to clotted-blood brown. White, there is none, is for places under ten degrees Fahrenheit. The clotted blood is for temperatures over a hundred.

Well, except for slivers of yellow near the Canadian border, the whole map is scarlet, in the 90s. The deep South, through the south-west is clotted. New Orleans 101, 105 in Dallas and they might as well have painted Arizona and Nevada and Eastern California black. Phoenix 110. The great jolly tourist trap of Las Vegas, 112.

This is not a heatwave. It's just about eight degrees worse than usual everywhere and in five states of the deep south, it's not the heat that's the disaster, but the most prolonged drought in 50 years, causing the death of over a million chickens, half a million cattle, ruination to the corn, the maize crop and much damage to cotton, peanuts, the staples the farmers live by.

There is no foreseeable break. The fall there is always bone dry. So for the past month, the Department of Agriculture has mobilised trains and trucks and, finally, the transport command of the air force to fly from the Midwest into South Carolina and Georgia and Tennessee and on down to the Gulf hundreds of thousands of bales of hay for feed in places where the ground water does not exist and the top soil has blown or drifted away and left an horizon of sand and weed.

The southern drought, which is pictured most nights on national television in cameo interviews with farm families, is harrowing and pitiless in its afflicting details but since there's very little that you and I can do about it, I'll say no more. Except to notice that this is no time to report much interest of one's Southern friends in the large issues that the papers and the telly hammer away at these days and nights, like America's soaring trade deficit or, what is topic A everywhere, whether President Reagan will give in to Congress and Mrs Thatcher to the Commonwealth on the question of imposing drastic sanctions against South Africa.

In a smaller way, we are all, I suppose, in the dog days, inclined to turn away from other people's burning issues and concentrate on our own local troubles and the escape hatch, even from them, of holidays. Out here in San Francisco, and just as much in all the communities that lie along the 400-mile coastal stretch down to Los Angeles and south again to the Mexican border, there's another concern indigenous to Californians. And what is that?

Well, I was, as I say, sitting here reading this new, crackling paper, minding my own business doing no harm to man, woman or beast, when the large lampshade, I was sitting under, wobbled. It does this when the fog and the wind come in, in the late afternoon, but I noticed that the window behind the lampshade was shut. Another lampshade on a desk on the other side of the room also trembled and then, I won't over-dramatise this true report by saying the upholstered armchair I was sitting in trembled, but it suddenly seemed to have a respiratory system. It breathed in and out for about three seconds, then nothing. The shades were still, the armchair was a dead or inorganic armchair again.

Very weird. I knew what it was. I looked at the walls, I looked down out on to the little park on the top of Nob Hill. Young men and women lying half-naked in the sun. Children bouncing around like grasshoppers. An old Chinese gravely performing his slow-motion exercises under a tree.

Next morning the paper mentioned it as casually as it recorded the weather forecast. Just one of a score of aftershocks from the earthquake that rumbled through an inland town a couple of weeks ago, crumbled a wall or two and sent groceries and other produce tumbling from the shelves. The following morning, one more routine headline, 'Another Quake Jolts Eastern Sierra'. It woke up and briefly alarmed people living in the small towns in the eastern foothills of the Sierra.

The town worst hit, no casualties, by the late July earthquake was Bishop, which is a small town, a jumping-off place for tourists camping in the Sierras or motoring off to the great national parks of Yosemite and Sequoia. The people of Bishop are furious because the media had no sooner heard that the July 21 quake registered 6.1 on the Richter scale than the reporters and the camera crews went tumbling in there, or rather went first up to a tiny village where they'd heard that 50 or more mobile homes had been knocked off their foundations. Must have pictures of that! Then south to Bishop to get one regulation picture of the littered groceries and bottles and such.

The result was that at the height of the tourist season, the trailer park was only half full. The brave, back-to-nature campers departed in a hurry to get away from nature in the raw as soon as possible. The Bishop residents didn't stop short at blaming the telly crews to whom, as we all know, no news is so juicy as the news that makes a preferably frightening picture. The people were also mad at the United States Geological Survey which, after announcing the 6.1 magnitude which is no big deal, happened to add that there was a good possibility that the Eastern Sierras might have to brace themselves for a 7.0 quake which could be a very big deal indeed.

You know that the Richter Scale measures the energy transmitted by ground motion. Each higher whole number represents a ten-fold increase in that energy. So that if the 6.1 quake had been followed by a 7, the second quake would have been nine times more violent than the first. The famous, or notorious, San Francisco earthquake of 1906 registered 8.3 on the scale and destroyed half the city – not from the quake so much as the bursting of the gas mains and the subsequent enormous fire.

One shopkeeper in Bishop moaned, 'Why do they keep telling about the big one that's coming? Why don't they just keep quiet?' I don't believe there's an answer to that one. In spite of innumerable television specials and interviews with the seismologists based in California who keep on saying that in the past 20 years or so much has been learned about the behaviour of earthquakes, but there's practically no way of telling where or when they'll start to behave.

People are so brainwashed by the marvels of technology and applied science in so many walks of life that they would be equally furious if the Geological Survey didn't warn them that most earthquakes produce aftershocks in scores of cities that lie along the main fault.

There are two faults that run through California but the main one that everybody knows about is the San Andreas Fault that starts way out to sea, just north of the northern border of California. Then it runs inland in a curving line across the Coast Range down through greater San Francisco and on across the Sierras and down again inland, coming near Los Angeles and south towards the Mexican border. This famous fault runs, in all, for about 700 miles. The last considerable California earthquake hit inland through the San Fernando Valley in Southern California in 1971. It did a lot of damage and killed 65.

In the past two, three years, there have been one or two small quakes, but many scores of measurable aftershocks and the truth which nags at Californians from time to time is the general agreement of expert seismologists here, both at the US Geological Survey and at several universities, that a really devastating major earthquake is long overdue. They don't know this from the pricking of their thumbs but from exhaustive surveys of the cyclical pattern of big and little quakes in California over the past 150 years.

A study begun in 1976, soon after a vast portion of southern California rose about a foot, has just been published by the University of California. It's called 'Waiting For Disaster'. It concludes that there is a 50 per cent chance of 'the big one' in the next 30 years. Whether it will happen next week or next century, nobody knows but Californians have been advised to have old buildings reinforced according to prescribed methods, to store food and water, to know where their family is at any given time and then to go about their lives.

You might gather from all this that the 25 million Californians live from day to day in a state of siege. Of course, they don't. After every little quake, they talk about the big one and then go about their business and hope for the best, just like Europeans after a terrorist bombing. Distance, it seems lends distortion. If you're a European, you may well have a lurid picture of what it's like to wait in California for disaster. If you're an American, seeing the scenes of European terror from thousands of miles away, you shudder and cancel your European trip.

Like a man, his wife and two children here who, after the Libyan raid, turned in their plane tickets and hotel reservations and settled instead for a holiday in Yosemite. Last weekend, on the way there, they collided with a truck. The only survivor was the daughter who is paralysed for life.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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