The big one is coming to California, seismologist Lucy Jones says cheerfully
America's foremost earthquake expert, seismologist Lucy Jones (Gina Ferazzi/Los AngelesTimes)
"I'm an inherent optimist," says earthquake expert Lucy Jones. Sitting in her bright, tidy office at Caltech, the world-renowned seismologist does not betray a shred of irony at this admission, despite how surprising it may seem coming from a woman who asserts in no uncertain terms that Southern California is headed for a devastating magnitude 7.5 to 8.2 earthquake — it's only a matter of time, she says.
Her new book "The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)" shares Jones' unlikely combination of realism and optimism. "Natural hazards are inevitable," she writes, "the disaster is not." It's up to us, she explains, to prevent and mitigate disaster, overcome our fear of the unknown, engage with policy makers and connect with one another.
By writing this book, she says, "I'm trying to empower people," tracing the lessons learned from human error — and triumph — in response to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and floods. Organized chronologically, the book moves from Pompeii in the year 79 to Tohoku, Japan, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.
Lucy Jones holding her child during an interview after a 6.1 quake struck near Joshua Tree in 1992 (KNBC)
For years, when any part of the earth shook, the media called Jones, who holds a doctorate in geophysics. "Why talk to a seismologist after an earthquake anyway? I'm not going to help you rebuild your house. None of my information really connects to how the earthquake directly affected you," she says. "But I give it a name and I give it a number and I give it a fault and I make it understandable. There's that deep, desperate need" to quell our fear of randomness, she says, to find pattern and meaning in events — to find story. "It gives it a narrative," a fundamentally human way of understanding the world.
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