From violent and unpredictable shaking, to power outages and the breakdown of cell phone communication, society will come to a chaotic halt when the next big California earthquake strikes.
The only thing that stands to protect against chaos is preparedness, said UCLA researchers who are participating in the ShakeOut drill being held all across Southern California tomorrow starting at 10 a.m.
In the scenario proposed by ShakeOut, which has 5.1 million people now registered as participants, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake will theoretically erupt along the Southern San Andreas fault.
“We are going to become our own first responders,” said Mike Stajura, UCLA doctoral student of community health sciences. “Necessary resources may not be around in the case of a major emergency, so we need to be as self-sufficient as possible.”
With a ShakeOut drill, people will participate by meeting, practicing and discussing how prepared they are as individuals, as communities and as massive organizations like UCLA.
“Use the ShakeOut as an opportunity to educate ourselves and be prepared,” said Debbie Weiser, UCLA doctoral student in earth and space sciences. “Our response is not expected to be perfect but ShakeOut will give us a chance to find holes and take the steps to improve.”
UCLA will be testing out some of its emergency abilities for ShakeOut as well.
“A few minutes after 10 a.m. of the 13th, we will be testing out Bruin alert and everyone will receive text message or an e-mail,” said Jack Powazek, assistant vice chancellor of general services.
The outdoor emergency notification system will be activated and the emergency message will be relayed on the AM 1630 Radio Station as well as simulcast on UCLA TV Channel 3. In addition, building coordinators as well as UCLA faculty have been e-mailed and are encouraged to practice the drop, cover and hold on with their students at 10 a.m. tomorrow after the alerts are sent out, Powazek said. UCLA is a largely decentralized campus, with more than 300 departments, each with their own specific emergency plans. There will also be about 16 departments participating in the Shakeout table top exercise, Powazek said.
“We would give them information and through exercise tell them more about the hypothetical scenario on campus and create a response plan as well as make recommendations to the chancellor’s team about if campus should be closed after assessing and reporting damages,” Powazek said.
With the large number of departments on campus, there is a campus plan, but it is largely up to them to formulate plans to match their needs, Powazek said. Each department should have the basic plans such as emergency numbers of individuals to call and designate where to go in case the need to evacuate a building comes up.
In the case of a disaster of this magnitude the main message is that “UCLA will be on their own,” said David Burns, the UCLA emergency preparedness manager.
The campus’s first priority would be to evacuate people if a catastrophic event like the one proposed by ShakeOut did occur, Burns said.
“You need to have a personal plan and you should have at least three days worth of water,” Burns said. “We can provide you with security but food will be a challenge because there will be nothing coming in.”
In a disaster of the planned practice magnitude, cell phone lines would be overloaded in minutes and calling out for emergency help and dialing 911 will be useless, so taking the right precautions to maintain personal safety is essential, Burns said. The emergency templates for the campus are reviewed each year and revised every two years, Burns said.
“The process is that the departments get templates from me, we go over their plans, conduct a gap analysis and make corrections,” Burns said. However, in the past two years only between 75 to 100 departments are sent their templates out of the 300 at UCLA. Plans for certain departments can get rather complicated, Burns said, if there is a department spread out between buildings, they would need a plan to effectively coordinate with each other. In addition, Stajura noted that the building coordinators who are in charge of maintaining and planning for emergencies in their designated building are not always aware of what the departments will be doing. The goal of emergency planning should be to create uniformity so that everyone can communicate their plans to one another, he said.
The Office of Residential Life is one of these many UCLA departments, and will be using the ShakeOut drill as an opportunity to prepare and train their staff members in some earthquake safety basics.
“Since most students will be in class at 10 a.m. on Thursday morning, we will be focusing on training the housekeeping staff,” said Rob Kadota, assistant director of residential life. “We will be talking to them about their roles and responsibilities and helping to make them aware of potential hazards and build awareness about their surroundings.”
In terms of the realities of what would happen in a real ShakeOut-like scenario, Kadota echoed the sentiments of Burns and Powazek in that students need to be prepared to self-sustain. In the case of a disaster of that magnitude, where the residential halls would be operating on emergency circuits and UCLA would most likely be cut off from normal food and water deliveries, Kadota said they could sustain 10,000 people for three days at most. Compared to other organizations, UCLA has many resources and many shelter opportunities nearby, but each person needs to have a plan.
“Students need to make sure they have adequate grab-and-go kits,” Kadota said.
The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) at UCLA, which is a registered campus organization comprised of students, staff, and faculty offers courses for anyone in the community to take free of charge to learn about emergency preparedness and learn essential skills. Stajura, the volunteer coordinator for the UCLA CERT program said all campus organizations should work closely to prepare the entire Bruin family and use ShakeOut to talk, plan and practice their response to the highly probable event of a major earthquake.