by Barley Lewis-McCabe
An earthquake is inevitable — you can’t control where or when it’ll strike, but you can control how you respond.
“If an earthquake happens, someone’s gonna be caught with a torch in their hand,” jewelry student Lily Wolf said during an impromptu earthquake drill in the Cal Poly Humboldt Jewelry Lab.
Oct. 16. saw California’s annual Great ShakeOut Earthquake Drill. Shakeout is a yearly statewide earthquake drill that happens on the third Thursday of October. The drill is asynchronous, and people are encouraged to drop for cover no matter where they are or when it is. This coincides with our university’s safety week, placing earthquakes fresh in the minds of students.
Geology Professor Amanda Admire spoke about the unique seismic conditions seen in Humboldt County.
“We live in one of the most seismically active regions in the United States outside of Alaska,” Admire said “We also live along a convergent boundary known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone. So, it has the capability of producing significant earthquakes, but then we also have other faults in the area.”
The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) is where the Juan De Franca plate slides underneath the North American Plate. The CSZ is a part of the Mendocino Triple Junction, which is where three plates — the two aforementioned and the Pacific Plate — meet in Cape Mendocino. This causes a significant build up of pressure which will someday release into a large-scale earthquake that is expected to be catastrophic.
Jewelry lab studio monitor, Sophia Portolese, talked about how the lab handles unexpected threats due to the potentially dangerous nature of the work
“We are really on top of general safety, and safety within the tools that we use every single day,” Portolese said, “I don’t think we think enough about larger hazards that are out of our control. So, I wanted to bring the ShakeOut Drill to the studio.”
Coinciding with the ShakeOut, portolese led a spontaneous earthquake drill which consisted of her walking up to different artists as they worked and asking, “What would you do if there was an 8.0 magnitude earthquake right now?” while weaving through large tables, demonstrating how she’d get low to the ground or under something sturdy.
“When a tank falls over, it doesn’t just explode,” Portolese said. “It torpedoes, and creates almost like a fire tornado.”
The safety measures that we would use in our homes are different than what they do in the jewelry lab, but, according to Admire, doing anything is better than nothing,
“The important thing is we want to build your muscle memory for this,” Admire said. “We can’t schedule them for any specific time. All we can really control is how we’re going to respond to them. So, the more you take time to practice for these events, the better your response will be and the better off you’ll be during one of these events.”
Barley is the photo editor and an untraditional reporter who focuses on social change and stories with a real human impact. If you’d like to reach him for whatever reason email bl258@humboldt.edu.