Why We Do Not Prepare For Earthquakes: Steven Eberlein (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Steven Eberlein’s talk titled “Why We Do Not Prepare For Earthquakes” at TEDxPortland 2018 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Story of the Pacific Northwest

Never before in human history have so many people known so much about a risk so large that we’ve never experienced together. But I’ve experienced it, right alongside my wife, which is why this idea is so personal and important to me. I’m going to tell our story at the very end. To begin, I want to tell you a new story of the Pacific Northwest.

The story of the Pacific Northwest begins 3,000 miles away. To be exact, 3,000 miles beneath your feet. Because up from that spot in the core, there’s a massive column of magma, which is rising to two massive plates out at the sea. And those two plates are spreading in opposite directions, but their journey is the same.

Right now, the Juan de Fuca plate is sliding right underneath your feet, in the exact same way that the Pacific plate is sliding beneath Japan. Now, the story doesn’t end there, because that plate, as it dives, the friction and the depth causes it to melt. It becomes a pool of magma. It rises to the surface and creates landscape.

This process created Mount Fuji. This process created Mount Hood. This process created Mount Rainier. And unsurprisingly, this process created Mount St. Helens. This process is called subduction. And subduction is about a lot more than beautiful landscape and occasional volcanic eruptions. It’s also about risk.

The Risk of Subduction

See, right now you’re standing on North America, and North America actually goes all the way out to the ocean, where it is locked with the Juan de Fuca plate. Now, the Juan de Fuca plate is pushing and pushing so much that the edge of North America is bowing, like a ruler being pushed at both ends. And eventually, it collapses. And it starts a domino effect, where all the weak spots along that fault line begin to give way.

And in the worst-case scenario, we have a nine-point earthquake that shatters the infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest. And if that’s not enough, and trust me, it is, bam, it also displaces trillions of gallons of water, which comes towards us and goes all the way across the ocean to Japan. And we actually have Japan to thank for the absurdly precise chronicle of our nine-point earthquake at this precise hour. That is just one of the 43 earthquakes that we’ve experienced in the Pacific Northwest.

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And what worries me is not only that we’re not ready, what worries me is that we haven’t actually decided to get ready. And I think you’re not ready for two reasons. I think reason number one is you think you don’t know what to do. And I find that deliciously ironic, because you just learned in the last 10 years, that the act of subduction, which we see here, can cause destruction like this.

That’s new information to you. But your true culture is founded in the lasting gem of subduction, which is those mountains. These mountains are the reason you stay in Oregon. These mountains are the reason you moved here from the Midwest. And these mountains are part of our cultural warehouse in the form of camping.

Being Earthquake Ready

So let’s take a baby step, y’all. Camping is when you willingly go to a remote place for an extended period of time without any services. We’ve always known how to go camping. We just don’t feel ready for camping to come to us. So listen, being earthquake ready means being ready to spontaneously camp in any of the places you find yourself. Home, work, car. It also means having a hell of a lot more water than you would ever have on hand in Kansas.

And it means being ready to find your family when the bridges are down and the phones are out. Let me ask you all something. I’d like a good show of hands here. How many of you feel that anyone in the Pacific Northwest should probably be ready for this earthquake? Can I see hands? I’m going to ask a second question. How many of you expect people to get ready for this earthquake? Aw, crap.

That that you just displayed to yourself is what I call the common sense gap. When as a culture, you know what the smart thing is, but you don’t expect each other to do it. That’s the common sense gap. And we’ve been here before. We used to smoke on airplanes. Right? Okay.

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Building Permission Structures

So how do we bridge the common sense gap? We bridge the common sense gap by building what is called a permission structure. And here’s how a permission structure works. We’re going to a potluck. And everybody brought pasta salad because that’s all that we ever bring to potlucks. And so it’s all out there. The food’s ready. We’re all there to eat.

And everybody’s waiting, waiting, waiting politely for the first person to finally step forward and start eating. And then what does everyone do? They start to eat with that person because that person created a permission structure. And then suddenly the poor guy over here who’s not eating, we’re all pressuring him. Why aren’t you eating? Did you not get the memo? We are now people who eat. Join us.

That is how a permission structure works. So what you’re going to do after your leave today, you’re going to prepare just a little. Build a little kit. Build a little bit of water. Start putting together that family plan. And then you’re going to do something kind of interesting. You’re actually going to share that information with your loved ones. With your circle.

And you don’t expect the next thing to happen. But this is what happens after you start sharing this information.

All the closet preppers start to come out. No, listen. Y’all are preparing in secret because you think you’re going to get made fun of. Which is a weird cultural phenomenon. But as you repeat that exercise of building permission structures over and over and over, what happens is you have begun to normalize preparedness. And the moment it becomes normalized, it becomes expected.

A New Culture of Preparedness

And as soon as we expect this of each other, we have something new. We have a new culture. Culture is simple. Culture is basically each of us doing our very best to meet each other’s expectations. That is the path to getting ready for this nearly unimaginable earthquake.

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And I want to end by giving you an idea of why this is so important to me. In 2004, my wife and I were living in Sri Lanka. And we were on hand for a tsunami that was created by the third largest subduction zone earthquake in history. And we worked together for one year on the relief effort. And then came back home to Klamath Falls, Oregon.

And what really frightened me about coming back to Oregon wasn’t learning about our subduction zone. It was the worry of this question: Can a culture that has never experienced an event this big change in anticipation of the event rather than after it when it’s too late? And then I learned a little story that gave me a little bit of hope.

Because very close to the epicenter, there is a tribe in the Andaman Islands that shared something in common with us. You see, this tribe had never in living memory experienced an earthquake tsunami event. And in this event, which took 250,000 lives in one day, they suffered zero casualties. And the reason they suffered zero casualties is because they established a permission structure generations ago after a forgotten tsunami. Generation by generation, conversation by conversation, at the moment that they needed it, they knew to go to high ground.

Never have so many people understood so much about an earthquake as ours. But knowledge is not wisdom until it changes you. So, Portland, Oregon, world, all of us are living in different variations of a common sense gap. Never underestimate the will of common sense to reveal itself. It’s just waiting for your permission. Thank you.