The Great ShakeOut- Dennis Mileti

Interviewer:  OK, Dennis, and how are you connected to the Great Southern California ShakeOut?

Dennis Mileti:  I worked with a colleague at the Office of Emergency Services to create a chronology of emergency response and victim and public response to the earthquake for the first seven days after it occurs.

Interviewer:  OK and can you perhaps go into a little more detail about your role in shaping that response.

Dennis Mileti:  Absolutely.  We imported every single known policy and program the State of California has in place.  And all that’s been learned about how human beings as individuals, as victims and as organizations behave after major disasters and catastrophes from half a century of research in the social and behavioral sciences.  We took those general conclusions, merged them with California’s policies and programs and use that as our basis for the scenario we wrote.

Interviewer:  What has made this scenario so unique?

Dennis Mileti:   This is without a doubt the most comprehensive, most interdisciplinary, most detailed scenario for any natural or technological disaster that’s ever been written.  And it really should serve as a prototype or a starting place from everything else that comes after it.

Interviewer:  Dennis, you’ve spoken to the fact that this is a unique scenario.  Have you learned anything new in working on this?

Dennis Mileti:  Yes.  We were able to discover in the process of writing the scenario many of the things that transfer to every other kind of disaster from an emergency response and victim and public response point of view.  But some unique things came out that were surprises.  And they include that people on the east end of the San Andreas Fault are going to be on their own longer than they’ve ever imagined.  And that most emergency response, if not all of it initially, will be performed by the victims themselves.

So we learned lessons that it’s important for local communities on the east end to take to heart to get their citizens ready because they need to be ready and self-contained.  We also learned that there’d be some unique emergency response needs.  For example, fires in the Los Angeles area will become so large we need emergency responders to think through how they’re going to respond to that when it occurs. 

We’ve also learned that the water pipes are going to get so busted up and be broken for so long that we’re going to need for Departments of Water and Power to come up with innovative ideas and approaches about how to solve that problem.  We didn’t know those things before we wrote the scenario.  And those kinds of organizations are already giving very serious thought to solving those problems.  I don’t know if they’ll be able to but at least they’re aware of them.

Interviewer:  OK.  So Dennis, will this bridging of the social sciences and the physical sciences make a difference in the communities preparation for a potential even of this magnitude?

Dennis Mileti:  Well, I’m a sociologist so I can really answer that question based on scientific data.  And it depends entirely on what you mean when you say “community”.  If you’re talking about the public, the bottom line is what has the public get ready for events that in their heart they don’t really think are going to happen.  And if they do, happen to someone else, is ongoing communication.  You need to sell it the way they sell Coca-Cola. 

So having one scenario at one brief period in time probably won’t accomplish much except it’s part of an ongoing, unrelenting, never ending stream of communication.  So it’ll accomplish some good in that regard.

In reference to political systems and the passage of laws, the California Seismic Safety Commission did a timeline, tracing 100 years of Seismic Safety Legislation in the state.  From 1906 to 2006, 99.9% of those laws were passed in the three months after major earthquakes, not before.

So I wouldn’t expect to many laws to be the result of the scenario.  However, if one looks at all the new partnerships that have been forged.  As for example, water companies are beginning to explore agreements with other water companies about getting pipes they might need after the event.  About how government agencies and scientific agencies are now partnering with the public and private sector, a great deal of good will come from mixing the social and behavioral sciences in this scenario.

Interviewer:  All right, Dennis, you’ve had the opportunity to work on a particular facet of this scenario.  As you step back and look at the scenario as a whole, what inspires you the most?

Dennis Mileti:  What inspires me the most is the level of cooperation between different sciences and engineers, and the coming together of just a mass of volunteers to work on this.  It was an avalanche of people who wanted to work on this.  The best people in their disciplines came to give freely many of them, in fact most of them, to produce this.  And then the interest it’s created in the emergency response community, the private sector and with organizations that need to deal with earthquake disaster loses.  So it’s created a great new network of people coming together and working together.  That’s the key to solving this problem.

Interviewer:  All right.