Interviewer: OK, Dennis, and how are you connected to the Great Southern California ShakeOut?
Dennis Mileti: I worked with a colleague at the Office
of Emergency Services to create a chronology of emergency
response and victim and public response to the
earthquake for the first seven days after it occurs.
OK and can you perhaps go into a little more detail
about your role in shaping that response.
Absolutely. We imported every single known policy and
program the State of California has in place.
And all that’s been learned about how human beings as
individuals, as victims and as organizations behave after
major disasters and catastrophes from half a century of
research in the social and behavioral sciences.
We took those general conclusions, merged them with
California’s policies and programs and use that as
our basis for the scenario we wrote.
What has made this scenario so unique?
This is without a doubt the most comprehensive, most
interdisciplinary, most detailed scenario for any natural
or technological disaster that’s ever been written.
And it really should serve as a prototype or a starting
place from everything else that comes after it.
Dennis, you’ve spoken to the fact that this is a unique scenario.
Have you learned anything new in working on this?
Yes. We were able to discover in the process of writing
the scenario many of the things that transfer to every other
kind of disaster from an emergency response and victim and
public response point of view. But some unique things came
out that were surprises. And they include that people on the
east end of the San Andreas Fault are going to be on their own
longer than they’ve ever imagined. And that most emergency
response, if not all of it initially, will be performed
by the victims themselves.
So we learned lessons that it’s important for local communities
on the east end to take to heart to get their citizens ready
because they need to be ready and self-contained. We also
learned that there’d be some unique emergency response needs.
For example, fires in the Los Angeles area will become so
large we need emergency responders to think through how
they’re going to respond to that when it occurs.
We’ve also learned that the water pipes are going to get so
busted up and be broken for so long that we’re going to need
for Departments of Water and Power to come up with innovative
ideas and approaches about how to solve that problem.
We didn’t know those things before we wrote the scenario.
And those kinds of organizations are already giving very
serious thought to solving those problems. I don’t know if
they’ll be able to but at least they’re aware of them.
OK. So Dennis, will this bridging of the social sciences
and the physical sciences make a difference in the communities
preparation for a potential event of this magnitude?
Well, I’m a sociologist so I can really answer that question
based on scientific data. And it depends entirely on what
you mean when you say “community”. If you’re talking about
the public, the bottom line is what has the public get ready
for events that in their heart they don’t really think
are going to happen. And if they do, happen to someone else,
is ongoing communication. You need to sell it the way they sell Coca-Cola.
So having one scenario at one brief period in time probably
won’t accomplish much except it’s part of an ongoing,
unrelenting, never ending stream of communication. So it’ll accomplish some good in that regard.
In reference to political systems and the passage of laws,
the California Seismic Safety Commission did a timeline,
tracing 100 years of Seismic Safety Legislation in the state.
From 1906 to 2006, 99.9% of those laws were passed in the
three months after major earthquakes, not before.
So I wouldn’t expect to many laws to be the result of the scenario.
However, if one looks at all the new partnerships that have
been forged. As for example, water companies are beginning to
explore agreements with other water companies about getting pipes
they might need after the event. About how government agencies
and scientific agencies are now partnering with the public and
private sector, a great deal of good will come from mixing
the social and behavioral sciences in this scenario.
All right, Dennis, you’ve had the opportunity to work on a
particular facet of this scenario. As you step back and look
at the scenario as a whole, what inspires you the most?
What inspires me the most is the level of cooperation between
different sciences and engineers, and the coming together of
just a mass of volunteers to work on this. It was an avalanche
of people who wanted to work on this. The best people in their
disciplines came to give freely many of them, in fact most of
them, to produce this. And then the interest it’s created in
the emergency response community, the private sector and with
organizations that need to deal with earthquake disaster loses.
So it’s created a great new network of people coming together
and working together. That’s the key to solving this problem.