Is the Coachella Valley Prepared for a Major Earthquake?

There are a few things on which every seismologist agrees. First, there’s almost certainly a “Big One” in our future — a super shake-up destined to deliver disaster-movie perils. With local seismic activity running some 300 years behind schedule, it’s safe to say we’re living on borrowed time.

A second point of agreement: It’s anybody’s guess when the sword of Damocles will lose its grip, send the valley trembling, and compel us to drop, cover, and hold on for dear life. The “Ring of Fire” — responsible for roughly 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes — cradles California, and here in the desert, the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults lie cheek by jowl, growing restless underfoot.

That’s the bad news. The better news is that science is, quite literally, breaking new ground in earthquake prediction and preparedness. It may add up to only a moment or two of warning, but in quake time, that can feel like a lifetime.

Are we prepared for The Big One? Probably not, and it’s just as well. Best-laid plans tend to go screwy, anyway. The only real preparation is learning to live with the random danger of  it all. Or, as seismologist Charles Francis Richter once advised a nervous caller on a radio show, “Why don’t you get the hell out of the state?”

Ho-Hum

For two weeks as the New Year dawned in 1985, the Coachella Valley was beset by dozens of small earthquakes along the neighboring San Andreas Fault. The local response? Meh. One unfazed visitor told The Desert Sun she’d considered flying home to Canada, but decided to stay put: “We didn’t want to miss the Skins Game.”

Sounds like a true desert native. After all, who among us hasn’t felt the earth jolt, paused for a beat, then returned to whatever seemed more pressing than plate tectonics?

A few decades later, photographer Knut Egil Wang captured that same stoicism in Desert Hot Springs for a 2015 photojournalism project. When he asked locals about living atop the fault line, one liquor store owner shrugged:  “God sent me here, and he’ll take me back when it’s time. Maybe a gunman shoots me in the store. Only God knows.”

Not So Ho-Hum

Even so, the occasional shake still rattles our nerves. A 5.2-magnitude earthquake near Julian in April — felt throughout the desert, including at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival — was a sharp reminder that even paradise has fault lines.

Tremors are only the beginning. The aftermath of a major quake can unleash fires, rupture utility lines, and topple buildings faster than first responders can mobilize. Escape routes can vanish in minutes, and the aftershocks — physical and emotional — can linger far longer.

Such disasters take a toll on the mind as much as on the landscape and can lead to post-traumatic stress or survivor guilt, that uneasy awareness of having escaped when others didn’t. “PTSD isn’t just about what happened to you,” says Glenn Scott, director of Loma Linda University’s Youth Partial Hospital Program. “It’s about how your mind continues to protect you even when the danger has passed.”

The potential for earthquake damage is higher than ever. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, more areas of California are now considered at risk than in 2018, when the last statewide model was released. In some locations, the likelihood of experiencing a damaging earthquake has risen by as much as 10 percent, while the chances of a 7.0-magnitude event are estimated to be 80 percent greater statewide.

Finding the Fault

The sight of  the tortured San Andreas Fault should be enough to make anyone uneasy. But for one local entrepreneur, these shakes are a moneymaker. Kimberly Renee, owner and operator of Red Jeep Tours by Desert Adventures, has turned the valley’s restless geology into one of  its most popular attractions. 

The infamous fault defines the boundary between two tectonic plates — the Pacific and North American — beginning just 30 minutes south of  the Coachella Valley at the Salton Sea and running some 800 miles north to the Mendocino coast. You can actually see it in Desert Hot Springs, Indio, and the Coachella Valley Preserve, as well as around the Salton Sea, although our stretch of the fault isn’t the earth-swallowing gash of cinema lore. Instead, it manifests in complex geographic landforms — ridges, slopes, layered rock, stream channels — formed by the incessant shoves of  time.

Renee’s three-hour San Andreas Fault tour threads through canyons, a palm oasis, and fossil beds in the Indio Hills. It’s a hands-on geology lesson with a touch of thrill ride. “While you’re out on tour, you will probably feel a quake,” she tells guests. “The teenagers immediately put down their cellphones.”

It may not be 100 percent safe to traipse along a fault line, but you’re not about to tumble into the abyss. For millennia, people didn’t know that, and explanations were far more imaginative than scientific.

Wild Catfish and Unbalanced Elephants

By now, it’s common knowledge that earthquakes are the result of tectonic plates inside the planet sliding and rubbing up against one another over centuries, then cracking to relieve the built-up pressure. But it took a while to get there.

Ancient Greeks, for example, pinned the ground’s shaking on Poseidon, ruler of the seas and god of earthquakes. In Japanese mythology, a giant subterranean catfish generated earthquakes by thrashing its tail. According to Hindu myth, four elephants standing atop a turtle balanced on a cobra caused tremors when any of the animals faltered. Moving marginally closer to science, Aristotle in 330 B.C. proposed that temblors were the result of heavy winds trapped inside caves.

After the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 — one of  the deadliest in history — scholars began abandoning divine explanations in favor of  scientific ones.

The Science of Seismology

In academic terms, seismology was late to the party. No one even tried to measure the earth’s shaking until the 1850s, when Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri, director of the Vesuvius Observatory, suspended glass tubes filled with mercury to detect movement. His sismografo proved its worth in 1872, recording a volcanic eruption and lava flow and paving the way for modern instruments.

A few years later, British engineer John Milne, who was living in Japan, devised the first true seismometer: a system of horizontal pendulums capable of tracing motion. By 1910, his invention had spread worldwide.

Charles Francis Richter and Beno Gutenberg invented the Richter scale in 1935 at the California Institute of Technology. It wasn’t a physical device, but a mathematical method, a logarithmic system to measure an earthquake’s magnitude, or size. Because magnitude is based on logarithms, each whole-number increase represents 10 times more shaking and roughly 32 times more energy release. In other words, a magnitude 6 quake shakes 10 times harder than a 5.

Though the Richter name has endured, most modern reports now use the Moment Magnitude (Mw) scale — the global standard adopted by the U.S. Geological Survey and Caltech. It measures energy release directly and aligns closely with the Richter numbers the public already recognizes.

There Will Be … Mud?

If  Hollywood has taught us anything, it’s that Californians fear giant waves pulling them into shark-infested seas. But desert folk think little of tsunamis. More plausibly, liquefaction may be the way the Coachella Valley crumbles.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, liquefaction occurs when “loosely packed, waterlogged sediments at or near the ground surface lose their strength in response to strong ground shaking.” UC Riverside professor and seismologist David Oglesby told KESQ in 2014 that “just because … the rain doesn’t fall very much doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of water underneath the ground.” The valley sits atop a major groundwater basin. Combined with fine, sandy soil, that creates an ideal environment for liquefaction. As Oglesby put it: “In a very short time you can go from solid soil to essentially mud.”

Retro and Unfit

As a co-founder of Modernism Week in Palm Springs, I’m pained to admit that midcentury modern architecture is on the front line for earthquake damage thanks to its revered features: expansive glass walls, paper-thin rooflines, wide overhangs …

The Wexler Steel Houses — seven residences built by the Alexander Construction Company in 1962 — might hold steady, but concrete-heavy designs could face a rougher ride. “Those buildings from the 1960s could not be built today because they would need steel columns and beams to resist temblors, which interferes with the aesthetics,” says James Harlan, architect and author of The Alexanders: A Desert Legacy. He points to Chicago’s John Hancock Center, with its distinctive crisscrossing X-braces, as a triumph of  structural safety over design purity and a potential model for maintaining our desert’s architectural icons.

But age is just a number. The quality of construction matters most, experts say, and sensitive retrofitting can significantly reduce the risk of serious structural damage. In preservation-minded Palm Springs, restorations often modernize unseen infrastructure while safeguarding a midcentury architect’s original design  intent.

Animal Quakers

Can animals predict earthquakes?  It’s one of those enduring questions that straddles science and folklore. For centuries, observers have sworn by it. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, documentation goes as far back as 373 B.C., when rats, weasels, and snakes reportedly fled the ancient Greek city of Helike days before a destructive earthquake. At a Chinese zoo in 2008, zebras rammed their stalls, peacocks shrieked, and lions that normally slept through the day began pacing minutes before a quake struck.

Scientists haven’t proven that animals can forecast earthquakes, but some suspect certain species might sense vibrations or shifts in electromagnetic fields that humans can’t. Still, hard evidence remains elusive.

The California desert doesn’t harbor many lions, but if  you notice a few restless roadrunners or a jittery coyote heading for higher ground, maybe they’re onto something … maybe.

Truly Groundbreaking News

Geologists and seismologists are moving heaven and earth to improve earthquake predictability, and some rumblings of progress show promise. Because artificial intelligence can analyze enormous data sets, researchers are venturing into a new area of earthquake forecasting.

A team from UC Santa Cruz and the Technical University of Munich recently introduced a deep-learning model known as the Recurrent Earthquake ForeCAST, or RECAST, which uses AI to predict the likelihood of aftershocks. In a 2023 paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, the team wrote that their approach allows “access to a greater volume and diversity of earthquake observations, overcoming the theoretical and computational limitations of traditional approaches.”

Digital Warnings

Scientists can’t predict earthquakes, but technology can now detect them before we feel the first jolt. Ground sensors across California pick up seismic waves within seconds of a rupture, sending automatic alerts to the MyShake app, the state’s early warning system for both iPhone and Android users (available at earthquake.ca.gov).

Stay Unrattled

For those on the opposite end of  the blasé scale, Dr. Juan Gonzalez, a psychiatrist and desert native in private practice since 2019, offers this advice for managing quake anxiety: “Fear of  losing control is mostly a matter of preparation. Have an exit strategy, set a place where your family can reunite, [and make sure] you have enough water. We need to move toward and value order and stability to help us cope.”

There’s no foolproof way to prevent or avoid the unnerving experience of  a world dissolving beneath our feet. So it’s probably best to take a cue from Taylor Swift.

Shake it off …

Live From the Fault Line

Veteran KESQ news anchors John White and Karen Devine recall the twin quakes that rocked the desert in 1992.

A pair of earthquakes on June 28, 1992, marked the most destructive seismic event in local memory. Before dawn, a 7.3-magnitude quake struck Landers; hours later, Big Bear was hit with a 6.7.  The quakes caused $92 million in damage and claimed three lives, including a child who was crushed by a fallen chimney.

John White: I was first introduced to earthquakes with the 1991, 5.8 Sierra Madre quake [below the San Gabriel Mountains] that was felt fairly strongly in Palm Springs. I just waited for the rolling to stop.

The following year saw a lot of seismic activity, starting with a 6.1 Joshua Tree earthquake in April. I was sitting at a stoplight and saw the lights swaying back and forth as my car gently rocked. Turns out, we were just getting started.

On June 28, we were jolted awake by the 7.3 Landers quake. I ran to the hallway to “duck, cover, and hold” with my fiancé. It was the first time an earthquake required me to jump into action; as a result, I left the house in a hurry, forgetting to change my flip-flops. Bad choice of  footwear.

I surveyed the damage in Yucca Valley: There were an incredible number of broken windows and broken water mains that resulted in water flowing down the streets; there was a haze from the dust that had been shaken from the ground.

I drove up Old Woman Springs Road toward Landers until my access was blocked off by a split in the road. As I returned to Yucca Valley, coming down the hill, my car started to shimmy, shaking back and forth. I had heard that if you’re driving, an earthquake will feel like you have a flat tire. It’s true.

Karen Devine: I was jolted out of bed in Orange County the morning the Landers quake struck. I   jumped up, called the newsroom, quickly grabbed my stuff, and headed to the desert.

Power was out for most of  the valley. Traffic lights, too. Our reporters in the field were seeing incredible damage to buildings in the High Desert, including Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, and Landers. People I spoke to on the phone were scared. Most had been asleep when it hit. Suddenly, I heard a noise while standing in an edit bay; I looked out, and BOOM, a rolling quake hit the newsroom. Epicenter: Big Bear.

We sure felt that one, the second one of the day. I specifically remember staring at others in the newsroom, making eye contact, thinking, Are you feeling this? What do we do? Is this building strong enough? I don’t think I took a single breath.

As memory serves, a lot of callers wanted to tell me how their animals knew something was going to happen before both quakes, how their behavior changed. I found that fascinating.

To this day, when we get a 2.0 or 3.0 earthquake, I wave it off in the newsroom as not newsworthy, but I do understand if you haven’t experienced a 7.3, even a 2.0 can be scary. It’s something I will never forget.