Earthquake Scientists Hope That Recent Rumblings Will Lead To More Funding

The San Francisco disaster proved the urgency of work toward mitigating damage as well as predicting when future quakes will strike WASHINGTON -- The physical aftershocks from last fall's deadly earthquake in San Francisco have ceased. But earthquake scientists are hoping that the political aftershocks from that devastating event, and the recent smaller trembler near Los Angeles, persist long enough to invigorate a field that has suffered from more than a decade of neglect since the launching of a major federal program to predict when and where nature's fury will strike next. "We responded to Loma Prieta," says Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), referring to the October quake in California, "but we haven't taken the time to prepare for the next one. We don't focus on the long term in this country; it's a philosophical malady that we must correct." Gore is cosponsor of a bill that passed the Senate one week after the October 17 upheaval in northern California that killed 44 people and caused billions of dollars of damage in a span of 15 seconds. The bill would amend the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, which created a national program of research on the topic, by expanding many of its activities and spelling out the role of each of the four federal agencies that participate in it. The bill is awaiting action in the House, as is a nearly identical version introduced by Rep. Bill Emerson (R-Mo.). The biggest change would be to shift the law's emphasis away from prediction and toward mitigation of the damage that is inevitable after a major quake. As Ian Buckle, deputy director of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research in Buffalo, N.Y., reminded Congress during testimony last month on the reauthorization of the act, "Earthquakes do not kill people, structures do." The current language in the act refers optimistically to the desire to develop "an operational earthquake prediction system" based on the belief that "there is a scientific basis for hypothesizing that major earthquakes may be moderated." But that attitude, fed by a well-publicized 1975 event in which Chinese scientists successfully evacuated a city hours before a major earthquake struck, is no longer held by most scientists. "In the late 1970s there was a feeling that prediction was not very far away," says James Hays, director of the division of earth sciences at the National Science Foundation. "But a lot of promising leads turned out not to be quite so promising." All seismic networks are not alike. And there's not enough money to support all of them. That is the problem facing geologist Arch Johnston, who directs the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at Memphis State University. "The first network along the New Madrid fault was begun in 1974 by the U.S. Geological Survey," as part of the survey's mission to carry out basic science on the geology of the earth, he says. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission began funding networks in the 1970s. But they were interested in learning how earthquakes might affect the power plants they were building." NRC's networks soon grew more extensive, across a broad region covering a half-dozen states. Today there are three regional seismic networks that monitor the New Madrid seismic zone. But a few years ago the NRC decided to get out of the earthquake monitoring business. Without new power plants to worry about, it had little use for the data that was being collected. It threw its $2 million annual subsidy to the USGS, which was launching a 100-site National Seismographic Network (NSN) that would feature the latest in satellite communications. But the NSN is not a substitute for the local and regional networks that will close in 1992 without new funding. The best idea is to build a partnership between regional networks and the NSN, and link them together via satellite," says Johnston. "Then you'd have their $100,000 stations scattered around the country joined to local, more densely sited networks [at less than $10,000 per instrument] in seismically active zones. Everybody likes that picture: It would revolutionize seismology." In fact, says Johnston, that's exactly what a National Academy of Sciences panel on regional networks, which he chairs, is going to recommend in an upcoming report. "We propose a complementary system, at an additional cost of $10 to $12 million, along with $15 million more over five years to modernize the obsolete system that currently exists," he told Congress last fall. "And we think that USGS should handle it because they are already well along with their national network and because they are the one federal agency with an intrinsic interest in earthquakes." But few people like the price tag. And nobody expects USGS to foot the bill unless its budget is increased. "To be sure," says materials scientist Jim Rice of Harvard, "the regional networks need support. And that's certainly true for the New Madrid networks. But it's a question of available resources. There's not enough money to run them all." --J.M. Earthquake scientists have been quick to congratulate themselves for knowing as much as they did about the conditions that produced the Loma Prieta quake. And it is true that the areas of California along the San Andreas and related faults have been studied more closely than any other part of the country, if not the world. That effort includes the seismic network around Parkfield, Calif., where scientists have been waiting since 1985 to glean information from a moderate-sized earthquake they are nearly certain will occur within the next few years. Their estimates are based on a 22-year cycle of previous quakes at that site. But even saturating the area with $2 million worth of equipment doesn't come close to offering much hope for a useful, short-term prediction, they say. As geologist Frank Press, president of the National Academy of Sciences, notes: "The closest thing we have to a well-instrumented network is the Parkfield experiment. But that will only give us one point [of information]. They'll have to wait another 22 years for more data." Of course, Parkfield is only one tiny spot on the vast map of the United States. Many other parts of the country with varying geological conditions have also experienced massive and devastating earthquakes, and the reasons behind those disasters are only dimly understood. "We have not yet reached the point where we are able to make short-term predictions of earthquakes," Dallas Peck, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, told Congress last month. Noting that the most detailed information was available about California, he added, "For other regions of our nation, we are unable even to give satisfactory estimates regarding the frequency of events in the past, much less forecasts of how soon these events may recur in the future." The reasons for that ignorance are tied to the sorry record of support for the program, known by its acronym NEHRP (pronounced Knee-Herp), that was launched with so much hope in 1977. The money is distributed among four agencies: the USGS and NSF historically get the lion's share, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) getting less than 10 percent to coordinate the program and the National Institute of Standards and Technology less than 1 percent. In constant 1989 dollars, funding for the program actually peaked in its first year, and has dropped by nearly 40 percent since then. Even in actual dollars appropriated each year, the program's funding rose almost imperceptibly over the first several years, reaching a high of $68 million in 1985. For the current year the administration proposed $63 million, with Congress ultimately appropriating $68 million. The stagnation during the 1980s was due in part to a Reagan administration policy to oppose federal support for any research that could arguably be financed by the private sector. That included work on mitigating the effects of an earthquake through improved engineering designs and techniques, along with strengthening building and safety codes. That philosophy, which percolated through all federal agencies, was especially crippling to scientists and engineers at NIST's Center for Building Technology (CBT). "As you know, CBT has been under siege for years," John Lyons, the new director of NIST and a former director of CBT, told Congress last month. "We were zero-funded in the president's budget for four years, then half-funded for another four years. The 1991 budget, in fact, is the first time since 1981 that the president has proposed full funding for the center." Asked whether his agency received all it had requested for 1991, Lyons replied, "It's like the cowboy that keeps getting knocked off his horse. We're just trying to get back on so we can go for a ride." But even basic research funded by NSF and USGS felt the lash of that policy, agency officials acknowledge. The dearth of funding has meant major delays in setting up complementary national and regional networks of seismic monitors to learn more about the characteristics of the earth and the forces that generate earthquakes. In a hearing on the subject last November before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Hays said that cuts in NEHRP have had "a very serious impact. For example, we had hoped to have 100 stations by now in the National Seismic Network, and we have 18. And we had hoped to have 1,000 PASSCAL [Program for Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere] sites well under way. Instead, we have 35 under construction." Peck echoed his comments. "Our research effort has been cut," he told Congress. "We've certainly not been able to do all the things that we were planning to do." One of the areas that has been most affected is a regional network of monitoring equipment strung along an area in southeastern Missouri and southwestern Tennessee known as the New Madrid fault. In the winter of 1811-12 that area was rocked by the three strongest quakes ever to strike the continental U.S., sending out ground waves that collapsed scaffolding around the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. But the characteristics of that intracontinental fault are radically different from what exists in California, and earth scientists in the Mississippi Valley are fighting a losing battle to maintain federal support for an important portion of their work (see accompanying story). "Our knowledge of the earthquake generation process and the attendant seismic hazard in the central U.S. is at least a decade behind the relatively well understood plate boundary fault systems of California and the Pacific Northwest," Arch Johnston, director of the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at Memphis State University, told the committee last fall. "In fact, the USGS has compared our state of knowledge with that of California prior to the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake." Simon Tse has a job he likes, doing business analyses for AT&T Bell Laboratory's marketing division. But it isn't the job he thought he'd have when he graduated five years ago from Harvard University with a doctorate in applied mechanics. "My thesis was a computer model that tried to duplicate the likelihood of a new quake along the San Andreas Fault and the rock mechanics that accompany it," says Tse. "I really liked the work, and I was beginning to know people in the field and get ideas about what I wanted to do." What Tse didn't like were his chances of getting federal funds to support his earthquake studies. "It looked really bad for government support, particularly for a university position," he says. "And short-term postdocs were the only opportunities I found after putting out feelers to the USGS. Of course, I also faced incredible obstacles as a foreign-born student, although I was just about to marry an American citizen." Jim Rice, a professor of applied sciences and earth and planetary sciences at Harvard and Tse's adviser, agrees that the obstacles facing Tse were formidable, and had nothing to do with his ability to do the work. "There's no question that the cuts in funding have driven people out of the field," says Rice, whose work explores the behavior of the earth at subduction zones running along the West Coast, from Alaska to southern California. "Actually, two students who came to me from the applied sciences division are now working in other fields. I guess they felt that it was just too daunting a task to pursue an academic career and find a steady source of funding for their research." In addition to his work on fractures in the earth's crust, which has been supported through grants from USGS and NSF, Rice spends a good deal of time exploring similar stresses on other materials. "The difference in funding opportunities between the two fields is enormous," he says. "Part of the reason is the Defense Department's increased interest in materials science. And it's not just for my work. They also can provide a level of salaries for postdocs that is well above what I can get for people in earthquake science." The differences extend beyond the government, adds Tse. When he thought about the odds of obtaining sustained funding for work that excited him, it was hard to be optimistic about academia. "Startup funds are particularly scarce for academic research," he says. "And even if I had gotten started, I'd probably be facing the same situation three years down the road, when it was time to renew my grants. By comparison, companies are much more flexible about what they are interested in. And for them, my being foreign-born wasn't a problem at all." --J.M. Unfortunately, says Johnston, that knowledge gap is likely to widen. "By 1992," he told Congress, "two of the three regional seismic networks that monitor the New Madrid seismic zone are scheduled to be shut down." The money for their operation will be shifted to USGS to support its fledgling national network, he noted, although that network "is too sparse and crude to have any useful earthquake prediction capability." Of course, politicians can move quickly when they want to. One week after the Loma Prieta earthquake, Congress passed a $20 million supplemental appropriations bill that contained $12 million for USGS, $3 million for NSF, $3 million for FEMA, and $2 million for NIST. Although two thirds of USGS's share went to postquake studies in California, the rest was spread around various parts of the country, including the Mississippi Valley. But that injection of funds provided only a temporary boost for the program. As Peck notes, "the supplemental was a one-time appropriation, and no funds were made available for continued support of any of the projects that we are now funding with it. I don't know what we're going to do with them." President Bush has proposed $73.7 million for NEHRP in fiscal 1991, about $5 million above this year's levels. But the request goes mostly to double FEMA's share of the pie, giving it more staff and more clout in coordinating the program. Despite the widespread criticism about how the Reagan and Bush administrations have neglected the program over the past decade, scientists and politicians also blame the public for their apathy. "I don't think that people realize this program has suffered more than almost any other program in the past decade," says Rep. George Brown (D-Calif.), one of the sponsors of the original act and a long-time supporter of increased spending for both basic and applied research in the field. "And the problem is basically that we don't have enough earthquakes to stimulate enough interest in the subject." Frank Press puts it another way. "Loma Prieta offers us an unprecedented opportunity to focus the nation's attention on the need to do more to mitigate hazards from earthquakes," he says. "The history begins here in terms of whether we will remember the lessons it has taught us and act wisely on them."

Earthquake Scientists Hope That Recent Rumblings Will Lead To More Funding

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