O.C. residents pack Newport Beach hall to talk tectonics and tremors with seismologist Lucy Jones

Dr. Lucy Jones became one of the first Westerners allowed to conduct research in China after it changed policy to welcome foreigners in the late 1970’s. She and her colleagues hoped promising data suggesting hundreds of lower-intensity foreshocks might have been a precursor to a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that damaged 90% of the buildings in the city of Haicheng would lead to a breakthrough affecting people on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

“I dedicated my life to saying I was going to predict earthquakes and save those of us unfortunate enough to live next to the San Andreas fault,” Jones told about 100 people who filled the Friends Room of the Newport Beach Public Library on Avocado Avenue Wednesday.

Yet she and other scientists could find no statistically significant pattern connecting foreshocks to the likelihood of a major earthquake. After decades in the field of seismology, and taking into account current research on the topic, she’s grown to accept the likelihood that there simply isn’t a reliable way to determine when the next catastrophic tremor hits.

“Magnitude is determined during the earthquake and not before,” Jones said. “If that’s true, prediction is impossible. I’m still saying ‘if.’ We’re still arguing over this stuff.”

That’s not to say the work of Jones and other seismologists has been fruitless. Her research helped make California’s modern earthquake advisory system possible. And thanks to precise mapping of the San Andreas and other faults, scientists and policy makers know where earthquakes are most likely to take place, and what kind of damage they might do to surrounding communities.

“I was seeing it being used as much as it could be,” Jones said of her early work. “And I shifted towards looking at impacts because I was recognizing that even if I gave you great probabilities, if you don’t understand what’s happening in the earthquake you’re not going to make the right decisions. ... Political and economic systems have as much to do with how you talk about any of this.”

She noted that modern building code requires new buildings to have a calculated 90% chance of withstanding a major shakeup; that, conversely, means regulations allow a 10% failure rate. Yet it would only add about 1% to the cost of construction to design structures that should have a 100% chance of staying up, Jones said.

“Recovery is often worse than the disaster itself — the time, the disruption of our communities,” Jones said. “We live in Pasadena. We just had 6,000 neighbors lose their homes, and it’s going to be a long road to recovery. And how much we can work together is a really big part of what happens next.”

Jones went over a variety of tips to help people prepare and respond to an emergency. She said the most important steps people can take before, during and after any disaster is to get to know their neighbors so they can plan, coordinate and better ensure each other’s survival.

As a city consisting of relatively new construction that’s located away from the most active portions of the San Andreas fault, Newport Beach is less likely to fall into a catastrophe in the wake of a high magnitude tremor, Jones said. But local residents still had plenty of questions about disaster response and niche topics pertaining to coastal communities like liquefaction and the risk of tsunamis. The latter, thankfully, are not common in the area due the the particulars of tectonics beneath the sea floor of the coast of Southern California.

“I was impressed at how engaged the whole audience was, both the size of the audience and the interesting questions,” Jones said while mingling with attendees after her presentation. “And you laughed at my jokes!”

Jones’s presentation capped the library’s Spotlight on Science lecture series. It will be the last event hosted in the Friends Room before Witte Hall, a new 300-seat auditorium, opens to welcome even more curious people interested in exploring and better understanding the world around them.

“We had an amazing season, actually,” The Newport Beach Public Library Foundation’s director of Programs, Kunga Wangmo-Shaw, said. “Almost every single program sold out, which kind of told us our community really wants to come into the library and listen and meet these people.”

“What we’ve learned is that there is a real hunger for science literacy,” the foundations chief executive, Jerold Kappel, added.