man-made causes of earthquakes and their future earthquakes are likely to occur. this event took place at the café bookshop in baltimore. >> thank you for coming out tonight i appreciate it. at the end of 2017 not so long ago we were celebrating, that's probably a bad word for commemorating the anniversary of hurricane candy which obviously affected a large part of the eastern seaboard and i was reporting as it struck. many research became what was my third book superstore and in that book i was looking at how it was that we had gotten so wrong how it was the new sort fields to issue orders and how it was that so many buildings and key pieces of infrastructure

were flooded and ultimately destroyed. in my research i spend a lot of time at the national hurricane center and they kept telling me the same thing over and over again and that was we just are not very good at this. we are not good at forecasting and predicting the storms were preparing on the front end to kind of havoc that has wrecked by these storms and we saw that with hurricane maria and thinking about the infrastructure and how we respond to natural disaster it occurred to me for all this powerful about a hurricane they are nowhere near the most powerful natural phenomenon when you think of the sheer explosive power, earthquakes are exponentially stronger so i started to think how do we

prepare for those disasters and to what degree as a country and a nation are we prepared for that and what i found was kind ofas chilling. still very difficult to predict we have a love of technology we could use to literally get inside a hurricane so we had to be air national guard if they could drop these little technology pieces assured wind speed, pressure and that sort of thing. we had radar and satellite and with all this technology, we can try to predict a hurricane and give people 72, 48 hours of notice with a hurricane and get we still see the profound devastation we saw in places like houston and puerto rico. so all that being said, hurricanes are a no-brainer

compared to earthquakes and that became abundant to me while i was doing my research. we know less about the inner workings of the planet than we do just in gallon trees and while i was researching this book, they all have some kindhif an analogy. there were dark matter or something, anything we know more about and when you think about it, that's where i think the terror comes from earthquake. if you think about this year alone we had 107 earthquakes deemed as significant and most of them you haven't heard about because they happened in places like this pakistan or the canary islands but they are happening

every day. and to think about them is we don't know when or where. according to the u.s. there are 2100 know2100 nodes hold in thed states and for each one of them, we think there are anywhere between ten, 100, maybe even a thousand we haven't discovered yet and when youou think about e last 200 years in the united states every earthquake thatsi s occurred has been on a fault we didn't know about. we know about places like the san andreas but when it comes to default happening we don't know about them until that happens. most than we do know about our west of the mississippi and that isn't necessarily because west of the mississippi is more seismically predisposed but it's because we have done more research and so when youpr talko

the u.s. geologists and seismologists they say if you want to be really terrified to thin,think about earthquake potl in thed, northeast. we don't know anything about that and basically that's because when you think about it, earthquakes are happening 5 miles, 30 miles under the surface of the earth. we don'the know when and where they are going to happen if we can't anticipate them and get technology to measure them so all we can really do is postmortem after an earthquake has happened and so they remain this incredibly unknown phenomenon that we have to sort of guess that we do know the united states is profoundly seismically activated the potential for major earthquakes is happening just about everywhere. as i say in the book unless you live in miami, you are probably at risk. will that happen tomorrow or in 500 yearsrr or 5,000 years, we don't know that we do know the potential is there an and us of

what i wanted to do with this book is set out on the classic american road trip and drive around the united states to get aad sense of how real the seismc hazard is come up wit, but the , how well we are prepared for the earthquake and what we still need to do to be not just sustainable but resilient communities and soso i embarkedn a road trip for about a year and there were some places i knew i needed to get to i knew i needed to get to the san andreas fault zone and one of the closest things of scientific certainty is southern california, the section of the zone would see a major earthquake in our lifetime we know that it's possible and the pacific northwest is primed for in earthquake and would come with a sort of resulting tsunami that could do a lot of devastation. we also know places like salt lake city, very ready and poised

so i knew i needed to get to places like that but what surprised me were these other places you might not expect like memphis, new york city, washington, d.c. so a lot of my research was going to these places and talking to smart people about the work they are doing and understanding the threats and why it's there. some of the things that surprised me was the sort of snowball effect of what this potential has. i have one section of the book i spent quite a bit of time in memphis and some of you may be aware of the series of earthquake in 1811, 1812 when the new madrid fault zone had all sortsor of wonderful apocryphal stories about this but it made the mississippi flow backwards and the liberty bell crack. those are not true that some of the strongest earthquakes happened in this zone in 1811

and 12 and we know that it basically follows the mississippi river and is ready for another series of powerful quakes. this is bad news if you like barbecue and blues if we don't want any of those people to suffer but it's also bad news not only for the country as a wholee but also for the international system of commerce and commodities into something you may not be aware of is the fact that the overwhelming majority of all of our national commerce passes through memphis on any given day. something like 40% of all of the trucking modifications pass as one single bridge in memphis, something like 4 million packages fly in and out of the airport every night in the headquarters and if we want a really exciting night to spend thspent thenight on the tarmac h these airplanes come in from

around the world they stack them up so they all went at the same time from sydney, australia to savanna georgia they all fly in and have something like two and a half million packages in this place called c the matrix. they get redistributed onto the planes and sent out again. ups has the third largest house with about 1.5 million packages and so we are in a place like men debate, and this was a standstill of commerce and when you think about a place like this, the obvious things you think about has contracts, mortgages, pay checks come in your amazon order, ideally you'ryouwere getting your booksn and did a story like this and not from amazon but there's other things might think about, two of the t largest contractors are of the u.s. military and the post office so we not only have

things like again, those packages but edison, car parts, military equipment, pretty much everything you can think of, they are flying through this every single night. so then this going down and taking into account things like the mississippi river still a major conveyance of trade, m things like grain, petroleum, things like that. one of the most fragile of our infrastructure systems memphis going down doesn't just affect them this affects all of us which is why when they designated the foremost source of catastrophic natural disasters listed in earthquake in memphis because of th sort of ripple effect so really interested in how this could be and what the effect would be if it happened.

when you think about infrastructure we need to be asking some good questions about that. every few years the american society ofn civil engineers givs the united states a report card for infrastructure and for about the last nine years we've averaged between a dior d- for our infrastructure and this is because over a series of decades we've chosen to invest in things other than the natural infrastructure and when i say infrastructure, i think about it in two different ways, the literal infrastructure which is the road, bridges, airports, levies and that is also sort of a metaphorical infrastructure which is equally as important. it is our tsunami warning system. it's our weather satellite system and we've underfunded all of these historically over decades so we have this incredible deficit and bees out of booted system. i live in the state of maine in the week and a half ago we had a

big storm and over the course of about 24 hours, 400,000 people lost power largely because you're dealing with this systemf hanging wires on polls assuming everything is going to be fine but we no longer have 19th century whether so you see this result; attention to the idea that it's kept up with our natural environment and we have underestimated the power. the last major earthquake was 1989, the world series which

side yosome of you may recall, s the first truly televised into this catastrophic you may remember awful pancake into the bridge systems and devastating images that came out of that. our collective history and imagination for keeping track of those things isn't very good so we consistently underestimate. if you think the fix example new york city-based witnessed a moderate earthquake every hundred years back was back it was00 fairly regular 100 years e last market is 1883 and so using

this precedent. they say new york city is about 40 years overdue for a moderate earthquake. we can't predict earthquakes and say it's going to happen but based on the historical averages that is true. the kind that has happened every hundred years would create more than september 11. think about that. and it's not necessarily the high-rises, the steel and gas structures, it's the rubble that prevents them fromnd getting places and the effect of the fires created. they have to be confronted with

and we are finding meaningful over time and really scary places and so what they have to do to mitigate it. one of the things that was a surprise and i find utterly fascinating is the way that which it is just changing the face of the hazards. it used to be one of the least in the union.

they had huge amounts of weight in salt water that excess from when that area was covered by a shallow agency. so they bring all of this waste water up and then depending on where you live if you are in a place like pennsylvania argued a place like oklahoma its reinjected into these high-pressure wells and when it is reinjected it changes the pressure underground such that those that were already going up get that little added pressure that they need to really go off and what we see in a place like oklahoma started off as a small earthquake and now they are getting bigger and bigger and what we now know is that small earthquakes often create bigger

earthquakes. they are dealing with these shallow earthquake sound literally like bombs going off. they do minimal damage and cracked foundations and knock a few plates off the cabinet. you are probably aware of this situation but what utterly flabbergasted me in this research was how many ways we

could set up earthquakes. it turns out the species will be really good at setting up earthquakes. we set off 10,000 earthquakes by filling that reservoir and with mining waste atop earthquakes through tunnel building and there was a large apartment complex thatth set off hundredsf earthquakes because of the weight of the building. and as the technology improved they set off more and more earthquakes. what's's happening is that it's

changing and we know even less. so the question then becomes what do we do with this. and over and over again when i talk to seismologists and first responders, this is what they wanted me to come and tell you now. as a household there's so much that we can do. we've invested tens of millions of dollars in the productions. to predict earthquakes so far wr we have been mostly b unsucces

unsuccessful. shipment delay or discarded just because there's other things wet can do. it occurred on the anniversary of the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands and thousands of people. after that happened in mexico the nation instituted a national railhe system where every year n the anniversary they undertake a major drill. everybody pretends it is happening and they practice what to do so in the hours prior, mexicans were practicing what to do. they knew what to do. they also instituted after the earthquake first early warning system in the history of the planet.

i spent some time at the university of california berkeley which is developing what we hope will be the first national early warning system and we practiced. if you think about it, in 30 seconds you can grab a go bag or grab your infant daughter and get under a table, you can stop a train from entering the tunnel, diverse a plane that's about to land, have kids in a classroom take cover under a desk, and those sort of things can be the difference between life and death. one of the things i hope the book will do is start asking these questions what canqu we do to prepare when we know we are going to have a major quake and we don't if it's going to be e. or salt lake were new york city

but we should all be acting as if it is a possible thing. so when it comes to a household there are things we should be doing to be prepared for any natural disaster. most people didn't have water or a weeks worth of food even though we should note that is a likely scenario wherever we live and so having things like eight to go bad for a plan or understanding what we are not going to have inot that scenario that's going to be one of the first things that go. i don't know my loved ones cell phones by heart because a punch itheypunch in their name and its up. god forbid i couldn't call most of the people that are important to me because they wouldn't know how to find a landline to call them so now we know how to

communicate in the event i don't have cell phone technology and knowing where we can meet or what we can do and this is where it comes into this idea of resilience. one of the towns i focus on in the book is a small town in the the peninsula in washington state. it's a working town, and economically modest town mostly blue-collar large immigrant population. they are right in the zone for a tsunami and we know it's one thatho looks like the 2,011th saddamth he. that is an entirely real possibility for the peninsula in washingtonon and so knowing tha, but they decided to do is take action. so a modest town passed a major

referendum for something like $8 million they decided they were going to build a tsunami sheltering station at the top of their school because if they knew they could keep all the kids in their district safe it is this incredibly sophisticated sheltering system with enough food for all the kids and they would drill again and again and got it down to 20 seconds they can get all the kids in the district up in the sheltering system and they know they are going to be safe. they decided that the risk was worth it and i think that as a nation it's beholden to start thinking about it that way. we are good at responding and i think it's a testament to the generosity is ofsi the spirit tt when a disaster happens, we are ready and we show up with first

responders and we call to the benefitne concerts and donate we are good at that sort of thing that we consistently underestimate the power. if you ask the biggest threat they face on a daily basis the average american will tell you that it is either nuclear disaster or a terrorist attack and in fact both of those things are unlikely. but because we lack the sort of imagination, we lack the prepared us along the way and i think that is what we need to be focusing on. we have the potential to invest more in thingsl like the tsunai monitoring systems and to invest in the technology that would allow us to monitort and start o understand what causes them.

we have the technology to institute a system. multiple countrieses including those we might consider second world countries might already have these things. we are giving the power to do the work they need to do. to make sure we don't have these catastrophic disaster scenarios because we've done a lot of work on the front end. it has multiple benefits beyond whether or not an earthquake had said it is investing for the mississippi river and in a better bridge system in memphis doesn't just help in this if and when that happens, it helps commerce and trade and agriculture. we are changing everything about this planet between climate change we are changing things left and right and it's beholden

upon us to create an infrastructure to respond to those changes, so that's a little bit of what i look at in the book and i also hang out with some fascinating seismologists who are interesting and they are just a lot of fun to hang out with, places likepl yellowstone and te hoover dam. there is this film that shows this catastrophic failure the filmmakers approach it. they said absolutely not, it is impossible that would have been.

they could see you are not allowed to film this year. some of you may be familiar with the movie transformers which is about a robot that comes from distant galaxies. to house the megatron they got skippescript approval and i poss to them.

way above the walls and left to be terrified by and focus on the pop-culture figures the most misguided superheroes in the world are superpower is the margin she drinks the more drunk she gets the larger earthquakes she can set off. whyde we fee do we feel about td what we can do and how it is again that we can move forward and think about this in terms of reselling and see and where we go from here. so that is the book in a nutshell if there's any natural disasters it is my favorite thing to talkav about.

thank you all so muchut for coming. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] let me start with a question [inaudible]

speaket [inaudible] people say what do i have to do with the fact it seems to me earthquakes don't look at the a map.hy ofth

what kind of waste they inject into the earth it just seems to me that is the quickest way to create some sort of a legal regime

out. when you look at the nuclear power plant. they decided this place was built without real understanding of the potential and it was eventually mixed with this $10 billion national disaster they said we are not going to do this but that test case basis if you take something like indian point nuclear power plant 20 miles north on the hunt they could have been pointed to by having problems unbeknownst to the people that built it on a very significant fault zone.

do we close this power plant and say listen, damage to this reactor in its worst case could actually result in a mandatory evacuation and so far we haven't. that power plant that is also on the hudson because it is so beleaguered amsouth to close in 2020 to 2022 got the past four to retrofit required so we take one of the most beleaguered power plants and tell them we don't have to have the sort of ritual this renovation to get you up to snuff for these type of events. so that is the case again it's certainly responsibility and that is important to consider and that is the question of as

the planet continues to change a. they did and habits before and we have to start asking some difficult questions. if for instance you live in a place that just became a flood zone that wasn't before, what do you do, do you move or say aren't you going to get flood insurance, do you mandate, these are the hard questions. some communities for instance in washington state literally see it starts to washington for seat and made the decision at their own expense to relocate the entire community so we are starting to see environmental refugees and communities having to ask these questions and i am

about anybody has necessarily to get out the answer. the clustering of what's happening at the legislative level in terms of planning ahead it's different that the levels in states like california probably not a surprise it's happening quite a bit and one positive thing that's come out of the history is with every passing earthquake, we've learned a lot more about one particular thing, whether its schools, the performance of hospitals and with each passing disaster as more and more codes.

one of the things that's interesting is if exists so people can safely exit a building but it doesn't happen after the disaster and this is a big surprise. one of the things we are going to see is hundreds of thousands who were then homeless because yes they got out of the building and that is what we want to have beehappen but then they cannot t back in. do we want peace building codes anthese building codesand some . others said no for instance the city of memphis said he wanted have much stricter building

codes here and they decided the cost-benefit analysis didn't work out, so that is the question are we going to invest in something that may or may not have been in who is going to pay for it, do we want the national code and certainly in the my money when it comes to national spending i want a robust system, i want out there in the ocean and they really wanted national early warning system. one thing they do is look at crowd sourcing and if you all have a cell phone, there is a great function that allows your phone to know the direction it's being held can distinguish

between you dropping your phone or experiencing an earthquake and so there are these out are perfectly in testing right now through a consortium of universities where if you are willing to have it installed on your phone so that it doesn't know it can record these earthquakes so it becomes this early warning system and this is really smart. in a place that isn't los angeles that has a lot of seismometers on the ground in a place like say new york city thabutdoesn't have the monitorig system we have millions of cell phones that becomes an earthquake warning system and they can give the 30 to 45 45 seconds it's brilliant in a place like nepal, great seismic risk, they have about six seismometers in the country that

something like 10 million cell phones, so investing in this kind of technology that is pretty inexpensive we get a ton of bang for the buck and so that is what i would like to see coming a and a very robust infrastructure plan, something that is kind of going backwards and trying to repair the delinquency that we have seen in terms of the investment in the system that is the kind of legislation i'd like to see. [laughter] thank you so much. we've learned more. keep up the wonderful work. [applause]n saratoga

springs new york. [inaudible conversations]