Oakland Geology

Lately I’ve been going through my bookshelf and revisiting some memorable titles by and about geology, from the 1830s to today. Today I want to share three standout books of particular relevance to Oakland readers, all by the late Philip L. Fradkin (1935-2012). They constitute his “earthquake trilogy,” published between 1998 and 2005. They all concern our particular place between the Pacific and North America plates. They’ve stuck in my mind for decades and still inform my approach in this blog.

Fradkin offered this explanation of the trilogy on his former website:

As a journalist and resident of California since 1960, I am quite familiar with disasters, having observed all types and having been a victim of fires and floods. I wrote in The Seven States of California that there were three ways to deal with such disasters: leave the state, take up religion, or live one day at a time, the last being my personal preference.

So I set out to explore the splitting of the earth’s crust, my designated batter for exploring the effect of nature on humans, first in a general overview and California-centered book, Magnitude 8, then in a wilderness setting, Wildest Alaska, and finally in an urban setting, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906. In this manner my Earthquake Trilogy unfolded.

As he hints, his treatment goes beyond mere earthquakes to explore the ways we carry on our lives on a planet capable of dealing us death and wholesale destruction. What follows is based on reviews I wrote long ago somewhere else. Both the books (all still in print) and the reviews have held up well.

^{Palm oases mark the San Andreas fault trace near Indio.}

Magnitude 8: Earthquakes and Life along the San Andreas Fault sets the gold standard for treatments of California’s seismic side: the geology, geography, history and political significance of our earthquakes. Fradkin presents not just the familiar cautionary facts and arguments, but also the peculiar sardonic attraction of California’s all-but-official state hazard and the effect of earthquakes on its landscape and inhabitants. He visits the fault’s full length, from Shelter Cove to Bombay Beach and beyond. Like me, he’s more curious about the fault than fearful of it, while aware of its constant threat. He was the same kind of day-at-a-time Californian as me, although I unlike him would not build my house practically upon it.

My review

^{Phil Stoffer stands by the creeping San Andreas fault near San Juan Bautista.}

Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay explores the relations between landscape and culture in America’s most dangerous locality. Fradkin called this his most personal book. Lituya Bay is a rugged fjord in remote southeastern Alaska crossed by the Fairweather fault, whose frequent earthquakes launch huge masses of glacier ice and rockslides into the water causing colossal tsunamis. The bay’s entrance on the stormy Gulf of Alaska, barred by a glacial moraine, is navigable for only minutes at slack water in good weather. Nature looms there, and the human presence is precarious. Even the book’s geologists feel the chill along the spine, and the ghosts of the bay, witnesses to repeated catastrophe since ancient times, reach surprisingly far into our world. Fradkin went there “to explore the dread,” my phrase in Deep Oakland. I too have visited Lituya Bay, and our cold Pacific fog reminds me, like him, of that perilous place. The great natural forces so heightened there are great here, too. Our local libraries do not have this title, but it’s precious to me.

My review

^{In 1906 the San Andreas fault ruptured here, near Fort Ross.}

The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself is a sweeping, definitive survey of the iconic American urban disaster that delves into how the city’s movers and shakers responded. As Fradkin’s publisher put it, “after the shaking stopped, humans, not the forces of nature, nearly destroyed San Francisco in a remarkable display of simple ineptitude and power politics.” The aftermath is the subject that scares me the most when I think about the Hayward fault, and there are important lessons for Oaklanders at all levels of citizenship. Both in 1906 and after hurricane Katrina in 2005, the bedrock of human nature fractured in very similar ways. What happened there will happen here some day. Fradkin’s journalistic presentation of original material brings the great quake to life from beyond the veil. He has the best stories, including many no one else has found. The Internet Archive maintains a copy.

My review

A theme that crosses all three books, one I barely touch on in my own Deep Oakland, is that while we can venture into wild nature expecting its dangers and tasting its corresponding thrills, wild nature is just as capable of visiting its dangers on us at home. Earth and civilization are not separate things, and both are prone to break along known fractures. These are books to study when you’re ready for the next level.

The Hayward fault, as many have noted, is the most threatening earthquake source in the Bay area. It won’t necessarily produce the largest possible quake in these parts, but in terms of likely damages — dollars and lives — it’s number one. And it’s ready to let loose, maybe as you’re reading this post. HayWired, the scientific planning scenario for a magnitude 7.0 event on the Hayward fault, estimated that a quake of that size would cause $82 billion in property damage and business disruption alone, and that was in 2016 dollars. The entire Bay area will feel the shaking.

Oakland’s location makes us the Bay area’s most vulnerable city to the next major Hayward Fault earthquake. And besides the shaking there’s also the fires. The HayWired scenario estimates that widespread fires after the M7.0 earthquake, “more fires than can be fought by available firefighters and fire trucks,” will destroy tens of thousands of homes in a matter of hours and add another $30 billion to the damage total. The entire nation will feel the earthquake’s economic effects.

I spend a lot of time circulating in Oakland’s neighborhoods, in every part of town. We have thousands of cool buildings here, of all vintages, and I appreciate them all.

But I’m also aware, probably more than the average person, that wherever I look in Oakland, it has a big label in front that says “BEFORE.”

I have a lot of pictures of charming homes, well maintained, in picturesque neighborhoods from the flats to the Fan to the high hills.

I also have pictures of rundown homes I don’t share, and memories of shabby scenes I didn’t photograph, where charm lies next to squalor. There are more of those than the postcard-worthy shots.

Too many of our old buildings are too old. While I dearly cherish our architectural heritage, too much of our housing is past its prime and beyond the capacity of its owners to renovate to current building standards. When the next version of the great earthquake of 1868 strikes, our neighborhoods of long-past-expiration housing stock will be largely destroyed by shaking and runaway fires, despite all efforts to declare them “architecturally rich” and enclose them in “historic districts.” That decrepit heritage will be cold comfort to the thousands of residents displaced at that time.

Oakland has a special responsibility for earthquake preparedness. We owe it to our neighboring cities, to the rest of the state and to the nation at large. A city-sponsored retrofit program for soft-story buildings is starting to make progress. It will help a lot of charming old buildings survive and keep their residents housed. But I’ve always felt that the city should be promoting new earthquake-resistant housing with as little hindrance as possible, throughout Oakland. We don’t have to have big towers everywhere. Lots of smaller projects that liven up monotonous neighborhoods belong in the mix, too. Each one replaces a vulnerable spot with something better.

Another consideration is that as California keeps heating up and drying out, people need to live where the climate is good instead of sprawling out over good farmland, imprisoned in cars and air-conditioned spaces. We owe it to the world to make room for more Oaklanders.

As for some of the fine old structures among us, I’ve also always felt we should give them nice funerals as we lovingly dismantle them. We do not need to repel the past to let it go. The key is to place ourselves where the future becomes present.

While I was writing Deep Oakland, I added a throwaway sentence that seemed to strike a chord: “Nothing is permanent to a geologist.” Even the strongest buildings will eventually fail. Change, not stasis, is the order of the world.