Abhishek Shetty: UCLA must do more to prepare students for the threat of earthquakes

“Locked, loaded and ready to roll.” When a seismologist speaking about a fault line has to take on his alter persona of a cowboy about to shoot from the hip, it might be best to pay more attention.

That was how Thomas H. Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center described the San Andreas fault on May 4 at the National Earthquake Conference. While seismologists have issued a number of doomsday warnings over the past decade, every year with no calamity brings us closer to the possibility of an imminent one.

The danger is right in our own backyard. At its closest point, the San Andreas fault is about 40 miles away from UCLA. The last large earthquake to hit here was the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994, which damaged Royce Hall’s towers and rotated four spires on top of Kerckhoff by six inches. Although all of the buildings on campus will be retrofitted by 2019, the damage in 1994 was a result of the administration being unprepared. In case of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, students can’t afford to be similarly unprepared.

If an earthquake were to happen along the San Andreas fault, Paul Davis, a professor in the department of earth, planetary and space sciences, said that he thinks ​it would be of a magnitude of about 7.8 or 7.9. In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survery predicted that this could kill 1,800 people, injure 50,000 and cause $200 billion dollars in damage in Southern California.

The odds of a large earthquake, while relatively low, cannot be ignored by both the UCLA student body and the administration. It’s vital that students be aware of how to react if one were to happen. This responsibility is delegated to the UCLA Office of Emergency Management, which hasn’t been able to reach out to enough students.

And it definitely needs to. Art Kirkland, director of the Office of Emergency Management, admitted that he was surprised at how many people on campus were unfamiliar with the basics of earthquake preparedness.

It wouldn’t be difficult for the office to brief students during New Student Orientation, the only time of the year when nearly all incoming undergraduates are forced to listen to safety tips. The office has unsuccessfully attempted to educate students this way. “We don’t do New Student Orientation just because we haven’t been able to get into that,” Kirkland said, although the office has asked to be in the New Student Orientation. The fact that earthquake safety isn’t a feature of the program is inexcusable, considering that it is objectively more essential for students to know about than the needless details of our USC rivalry.

Additionally, the office should widely advertise its annual Great ShakeOut program to the student body. Right now, earthquake preparedness for students on the Hill comes under quarterly Community Emergency Response Team courses offered by the On-Campus Housing Safety and Security Education Committee in conjunction with the Los Angeles Fire Department. A more effective way to target students on the Hill would be by reaching out to the housing governments with information about both these safety programs.

The office also gives presentations on safety to employees and academic departments on campus. These include important information, such as avoiding making 911 calls after an earthquake unless there’s a life-threatening emergency. It also sets up a table during Graduate Student Orientation for students to come by and speak. But these groups aren’t representative of the entire student body. It’s imperative that every student knows what to do when an earthquake hits.

Senior Media Relations Officer Rebecca Kendall said in an email that discussions on earthquake safety would be more effective once students move into their residence halls. But knowing how to get underneath a desk or next to an interior wall doesn’t require knowledge of the residence halls. Surely, earthquake safety is important enough for New Student and Transition Programs to create at least a ten minute window for the office to inform incoming students about it.

Even all the tips California students know of might not apply specifically to life at UCLA. For example, getting underneath a desk is one of the most common of these tips. However, the desks used on the Hill are too small for a larger than average individual to fit underneath. The residential buildings on the Hill are retrofitted to withstand earthquakes, but no system is 100 percent safe. Students still need to know what steps to take to avoid falling objects or getting thrown to the ground and risking injury.

People are also naturally inclined to think that the outdoors are safer during an earthquake than indoor locations. Contrary to that belief, the UCLA Office of Emergency Management mentions on its website, “There are few open spaces in the Westwood area far enough from glass or other falling debris to be considered safe refuge sites.” This is something that students wouldn’t know about from high school earthquake preparedness education. Falling glass from tall buildings is one of the risks from going outdoors during shaking. Students, for their part, need to know exactly what to do in case of such a disaster.

The administration can’t sit back and hope that an earthquake won’t strike, nor can it pretend that students are sufficiently aware of how to respond to an earthquake. This is one time we should heed the doomsday warnings.