building a better bay area moving forward finding solutions. this is abc 7 news. hi there. i'm kristen z. you're watching getting answers live on. ab and we get answers for you in real time. today is the 33rd anniversary of the devastating 6.9 loma prieta earthquake. are we a lot better off today in terms of preparedness infrastructure and warning systems a former usgs. geophysicist will join us to talk about in an alarming new finding about the hayward fault, which is already overdue for big one and now seems poised for something even bigger, but first as public health officials push people to get the new omicron specific covid booster to head off a potential winter surge. there is possibly a new way to

predict the next surge and it uses of all things amazon customer reviews. he's published a paper on the finding and joining us live now to talk about it northeastern university political science associate professor nicholas beacham professor beacham. thanks for joining us. thanks for having me. so your research focuses on the question. can we predict covid cases using amazon reviews of scented yankee candles? what was the origin of that? so i think it began as an internet meme where people would post humorous reviews of these central candles complaining about a lack of smell and would say well covid cases are rising. we think that you know, these are due to people having a nosmi or a lack of smell and blaming their candles. so, you know, i see this tweet, i think oh, i wonder whether this is real or whether it's just, you know, cherry pickings and funny reviews. they collect a bunch of reviews and i do a little plot and find

that new indeed the percentage of reviews that complain about lack of smell or lack of sense seems to be going up right when covid seems to be going up. yeah. here's the graph. so walk us through this. what are we looking at? is this daily weekly and what is this show and what does the red mean in the blue? so this is weekly the red is the weekly number of covid cases in the us. the blue is the percentage of reviews on amazon complaining about lack of smell incentive candles so you can see that, you know the flat line and the red is before covid starts the two and tend to go up and down in tandem with each other. you know, i do some physical analysis to suggest that it's not just a coincidence and it's not just you to seasonality and the striking thing at the moment. is that the candle review

complaints are going up. well, the covid cases are going down. that's at the far right there. oh way interesting because like you said before and i imagine that big peak got huge peak. that's the omicron surge. right was that january? 2022? yeah, okay, and you can see the reviews complaining of no smells kind of it's a lower wave but it's follows the same pattern. it does go up and you're right right now. you're seeing the line going up the blue line. so complaints of no smell, but yes, you're right. copa cases are in a law. they're going down. oh, so what does this divergence mean? yeah, so it's an interesting question the the relationship between the two curves was getting tighter and tighter up through like june or so, and in fact, the reviews were sort of predictive of the covid cases becoming more so as time went on from when i started this back in january, it's june but then sort of strangely the two of diverged. so either something has changed in the reviews or something's changed in our accounting of covid cases, and you know my suspect that people are a little bit interested in this right now

because you know, we know that the official counts are less accurate than they used to be many people aren't reporting covid cases and so forth. so i think there's this this worry that we're under counting cases and so people turn to, you know, fairly amusing and you know, i don't think one should put too much stock in this type of analysis because the data are fundamentally fairly limited, but i think it just shows that people are sort of looking around for other measures to pick up the slack now that the official measures are getting a little bit worse interesting and you're right people are reporting a lot of people not testing so you could actually be seeing an increase in cases or very soon but you're just not picking it up in terms of the cdc numbers, but let's go ahead and put up a couple of the reviews that got your attention that got people talking about it that there was maybe a link look at this. okay. so this was i think from yeah december late december, right? isn't that when omicron was just starting no scent at all. very disappointed okay, and there's another one just to give you an idea for what?

you know, professor beacham was seeing again. this is november a little earlier, but hardly any scent. okay, so you were noticing a whole lot of that around that time frame when omicron was just starting when you started to think maybe there's something more right? yeah to give credit where it's due there were, you know people on twitter and other social media kind of pointing this out and that a couple of waves of people pointing this out and collecting these reviews, you know, the reviews are pretty funny. obviously, the only reason i caught my attention is because they were funny. i thought of the paper that i wrote out of all this is being, you know, fairly funny. so, you know, i think part of it is just watching people yelling at their candles blaming their candles for something that might not be the fault of their candles right arguably anything. did you guys look at other scented products like potpourri reviews on perfume or you know fabric softener. yeah, so i did a little bit of that, you know, there's obviously tons and tons of scented products there. these were some of the more popular ones based on just my perusal, but i'm not an expert

on these things. i did look at perfumes and saw that there was also a bit of a correlation between complaints about perfumes lacking scent and the covid cases. so yeah, i do a few of these, you know checks, but you know, the fact is it could still just be an accident or due to some coincidence or other one has to be a little bit cautious with these sorts of things. yeah. okay, so i majored in political science, and i'm just curious how a political science professor became interested in covid signs. yeah, so i have two affiliations one with the political science department one with the network signs institute here at northeastern and one of the projects that i've been on for the last year and a half has been looking at covid and trying to predict covid using social media data among other data sources. so this is a much larger project is probably why the tweet caught my attention in the first place and this you know is looking at vast quantities of twitter data find trying to find textual traces in that data that correlates with covid i got on

to that project in the first place because i've done a project before this a number of years ago looking at twitter techs and how it predicts presidential polling at the state level. so i've been sort of easing into this and you know when covid comes along quite a few of us in academia sort of got in to covid just because it seemed like a huge problem and there was a strong need for you know more research on this. yes. well, okay bottom line at this point, show the correlation but here's the 64 million dollar question, i guess which is can the reviews be predictive of covid rates and tell us hey in two weeks. this is what we're going to have. if we trust them, i mean they are going up and they have been for the last few weeks. so, you know, i think a lot of models predict that cases are going to go up with the winter wave so that kind of prediction in itself is not too far out on a limb. but yeah, they definitely the two are moving and the reviews have moved a lot sooner than the cases have this time around so,

you know for multiple reasons, i would be you know concerned about both cases rising and the lack of official measurements sort of lagging behind that. alright, so has yankee candle company coming to down this. i'm not heard anything from them. no. okay, do you keep? you know, we i've thought about that there were papers early on about using scented products as a quick test as before antigen tests were frequently available. so i thought you know, i sent a candle was more efficient because you just leave it at the front door and take a sniff. it doesn't run out. i have a couple of these candles mostly as gifts based on this whole sort of meme status. um my children their smells. yeah. i mean look, it's not everyone. gift them, but i do know someone myself who first realized maybe he had covid because he couldn't smell his shampoo and then he got a test and sure enough. okay. so what's next for you in terms of this research? well, i think you know the

larger project that i referred to which is trying to use. social media data not just to predict sort of the national trend which is you know, fairly easy to predict but to try to predict changes in covid at the you know city level the town level the county level using you know, much larger quantities of social data using other signals in the text not just you know people talking about smell but also just talking about symptoms or even whether they're going outside and partying or whether they refer to masks and so forth. so, i think there's a lot more to be done in this sort of area of trying to find these sort of hidden signals that you know can take up the slack now that the official measures are getting worse. well, that was fascinating in a certainly smells promising. i'm sorry. that was my attempt at a bad pun, and it's not even funny, but i do appreciate the great information. good luck with your research northeastern university associate professor and political science nicholas beacham. thanks for your time today. thank you very much. all right coming up next the

loma prieta earthquake 33 years later. today is the anniversary. so we'll take a look back at history to see what we've learned and we'll look ahead to the future to see what risks remain that's next on getting we.

today is the 33rd anniversary of the devastating loma prieta earthquake. the magnitude 6.9 shaker was on the san andreas fault epicentered in santa cruz county, but it crippled the bay area burning down the san francisco's marina district collapsing a portion of the bay bridge and the entire cypress structure in the east bay and it killed 63 people a lot has changed in the past 33 years, but a lot hasn't joining us live now to talk about our preparedness and risk levels is

usgs geophysicist emeritus and founder of a seismic risk assessment app called tumblr dr. ross stein dr. stein. thanks for joining us ross. i know you want to go by ross. glad to be talking to you again. kristen well, welcome back to the show. lomo prieta was certainly devastating in so many ways, but usain was actually as kind or favorable as possible for 6.9 explain that well, first of all, it happened in santa cruz mountains where there was really not much going on besides growing pot plants and in all seriousness what i mean is there were no skyscrapers. there were no giant bridges local to that site. there were no big dams or reservoirs. so if you had asked me put a magnitude 7 earthquake somewhere in the bay area where would have caused the least damage i would have put it in the santa cruz mountains, but away look at the damage we're seeing mostly a lot of it in san francisco, right oakland east bay. why was it so destructive in those areas?

i think it's important to know that because it also help us with the next one. you're you're absolutely right. no one foresaw these scenes of destruction at a great distance and the answer turned out to be that though. this was about his harmless and earthquake as you can produce because it was very clean and very fast and it was all over in 20 seconds. there were waves that went downward bounced off a deep layer of the earth and then came up. in oakland area and san francisco area and what happens there is when those waves come into the very soft spongy sediments of the east bay where the cyprus structure was or the marina district, which is just gold rush landfill those areas shook really hard i see and of course, that's where we saw a lot of the destruction. i guess the big question is because of what happened and the lessons learned and the things that were destroyed in the process right embarcadero

freeway for one. are we in a better place now? well, one of the ironies of this earthquake and of course there was a terrible loss of life and terrible loss of property but ironically because we now understand the vulnerability of the marina district and the downtown financial district, which after all was during the gold rush the a cove yearbook buena cove. so now it's just sand on top of running gold rush ships. we understand the this vulnerability to shaking and because the cyberstructure went down and it was an ugly structure that separated different parts of oakland. we took down the same kind of structure of the embarcadero freeway in san francisco. and guess what suddenly that we discovered how beautiful san francisco was so we actually have inherited or more beautiful city cities on both side of the bay as a result of what we learned right and there's been a lot of shoring up of those soft

story buildings, right which were always vulnerable because of the kind of openness of the bottom, but i want to talk to you about what we really need to know right now and you gave us some key facts that people living in the bay area really need to be aware of you sent us three slides and if you c throut begins with the bay area not quite over the past decade. great, so first of all what you can see here, is that while you and i might think let's just start at that first slide that while this while the bay area appears to be very very quiet. in fact, it isn't we've had thousands and thousands of earthquakes occurring on our active fall. so each one of those reds line red lines is an active fault and each one of those dots is an earthquake that's occurred over the last decade. so we might think that it's quiet, but actually these faults have been very very noisy. and here's what you need to. for every magnitude 7 for every

loma prieta sized earthquake. we will have 10 sixes. we will have a hundred fives. we will have a thousand fours etc. so all these little earthquakes are telling us that these faults are active and could fire off again. okay. so the third one is the one that i find really eye-opening and a little frightening. so we're gonna look closely at that one, which is the east bay could see a 7.5 magnitude quake because of some new understandings about that fall the hayward fault and it's connectedness to a different one. one. tell us about that. so in the last five years a couple of things that become evident one, is that the hayward fault connects and is continuous with the southern calaveras fall. so here's what you need to know faults are dumber than dogs. they don't know their own names. so while we may give them different names, this is one on the same fall. the second is that these are unusual faults in that they're essentially ac/dc.

they both produce larger earthquakes and creep harmlessly. and so we were hoping for some time that defaults that creep are much less likely to produce larger earthquakes, but we now know that's not true. they can produce both and even the places that are creeping can suddenly produce an earthquake and the combination of these two discoveries means that such an earthquake. let's say a magnitude 7 and a half which is 20 times larger than loma prieta is a real possibility not this isn't a forecast. this isn't a prediction. it's the recognition that we have hazards beyond just a repeat of the magnitude 7 earthquake in 1868. 1868 of course, you know they were saying like maybe 150 years or there was some sort of you know, talk about where overdue but that implies there's kind of a set timeline or cycle that these quakes go by is there or is there not really i mean, is

it even proper to think of it as oh it's overdue. well, it's a great question because faults are so irregular in their occurrence of earthquakes that we can never talk about a fall being ten months pregnant. it's very very iffy even to talk about a fault being overdue what we can say instead with more accuracy is it's due many of the faults who do and in those slides. i showed you the earthquakes that have occurred over the last 180 years since the records first began of of, you know, mexican colonialists and then post gold rush this one. yeah. yes, you can see that. we have almost 10 quakes of large size the bay another word. large quakes are in our past large quakes are in our future and i think what's happened? over the last five or ten years despite your absolutely correct statement that caltrans and pg&e and the city of san francisco in

berkeley have worked very hard to make us more resilient. people we're so we've been so engulfed in wildfires and floods and hurricanes that we've kind of willed ourselves to believe that earthquakes don't occur anymore. and so what i want you to see with these little earthquakes that are always occurring every day on these active faults. and our large historic earthquakes is that's not true that unfortunately, we have earthquakes in our future and we still have to be ready for them. well, dr. stein don't go away because we're going to take a short break pay some bills with commercials when we come back. we'll talk to you about the prediction factor whether that is going to be possible and what we can do to protect ourselves and arm ourselves in welcome bac.

we're talking with dr. ross stein on this 33rd anniversary of the loma prieta quake. thanks for making the time to be here. look i want to talk now about forecasting. we do have an early warning

system which gives us a few seconds notice depending how far you live from the epicenter, which is great. you can maybe duck take cover. but what about the holy grail which is being able to forecast the quakes right there companies saying, yeah, we can maybe do it the technology is there soon is it? you know, you know this is what hasn't changed. in 30 3 years is we couldn't predict earthquakes then and we still can't now and you might say well are you guys wasting your time? why aren't you coming up with something useful? and here's the reason why? and the fault is normally moving at an inch a year in the space of about three seconds. it speeds up to 3,000 miles an hour. it's a runaway process and is what we can tell is that anything that's unique that happens right before that begins is 10 miles down and very very confined. so we are condemned to live on the earth's surface not down there right on the between the jaws of the fall.

so it's extremely difficult for us to detect signals that reliably tell us when an earthquake will occur. okay, so that's not in the near future. obviously then we have to be prepared. so i'm going to ask you what we should have in an earthquake kit because anniversaries are always a great time to think about that. that's great. so here is let me start with the three dollar solution to earthquake preparedness, and i don't just mean this tongue-in-cheek. so here's my keys and i have an international orange whistle on it. now. why do i have a whistle? because if i am caught in a collapsed building i can whistle and be heard on the other side of all that concrete and if somebody knows you're alive in there, they'll try to get you and if you can't do that. you know you the chances of you being rescued are dim and you can whistle forever and very loudly and here's the benefit since its international orange. i don't lose my keys anymore. so it's a total win.

okay, so you should on your keychain. you should put one on your kids school backpacks and everything like that. okay, so there's three dollars now. what else should we do? so here is my earthquake. emergency kit and this is what i have in the back of my car and in my home and i want you to notice that what it has on. the outside is a solar cell and it's got a battery in it to charge my phone. we're all gonna cell phones. so in addition to water and masks and gloves and food and the things that you can imagine that you're going to need warm clothes we should all have a solar powered backpack so we can charge our phones and not like be like all those people running around in the airport looking for a place to plug their phone in. okay, i'm not doing the sales business, but i'm really curious where you get something like that. is it easy to find? is it expensive? it is easy to find it's not expensive you can you can buy ready-made kits or you can fill

them yourself and tumblr are we your company right your app? like we have a free seismic risk app and new site and we have an article where we say. okay, here's what's inside our emergency kit so you could just do that yourself or you can buy kit. it's really not hard and it's easy to find a backpack that has a solar cell on it a battery. you can charge your phone. i'm telling people your app in terms of i think that the biggest component that which is to let people know wherever they live here what they're risk is right. that's exactly right. everybody's risk isn't the same. so what you care about i think is your home or your daughter's apartment or your mother's place and you want to know what's the story right there. earthquakes are local you saw the the web of faults that are across the bay area. it depends on where you live. and so you can find out with the app what your own seismic risk is and what you can do to reduce

it. all right, dr. ross stein formerly with usgs and now the founder of the templar app. thank you so much for coming on today to share your expertise with us and help us stay safe. it was great to talk with you kristen you too, by the way on our website abc7news.com. we have lots of resources as well to help you prepare for a natural disaster that includes a video on what to pack in your earthquake kit to continue that conversation. you can visit abc7news.com slash prepare thank you so much for js

today for getting answers. we'll be here every weekday at 3:00 answering your questions with experts from all around the bay area world news tonight with david muir is coming up next and

i'll see you back here at 4. tonight, russia unleashing kamikaze drones on the capitol of kyiv. a pregnant woman among the victims. in the u.s. tonight, news on that suspected serial killer, what they've now revealed. and the freeze warnings in effect for millions. first, those images coming in from ukraine tonight. at least 43 drones packed with explosives raining down on ukraine. that pregnant woman and her husband among those killed. video showing police firing into the air, trying to shoot a drone out of the sky. the russian war plane crashing right into a residential neighborhood in russia near the border with ukraine. britt clennett in ukraine tonight. there is news tonight about the suspected serial killer arrested in california. wanted for at least six murders. authorities now believe they arrested him while he was, quote, out