4.

PACK YOUR LUNCH

The Big One. Has to be, I think. The earthquake Los Angeles has been waiting for. I become aware of the rising tide of noise around me—sirens, car alarms, screams. A lot of other dazed drivers, some holding bloody heads, cradling bashed ribs. No point in hanging around, no help is on the way, no ambulances can make it through.

We walk miles through the city. My arms ache from carrying my son. His weight increases with the hour. I pass him from arm to arm, using a Gable grip, and even carry him for miles on my shoulders.

“My dogs are barking,” I joke for about the seventh time to my wife, who no longer even smiles at me.

The damage actually isn’t too bad in most of the places we pass. Broken windows, a few sagging doors, but not the absolute carnage I had feared. The city swells with sirens, and in some places there are collapsed buildings, rubble, bandaged heads and dazed voices. But it’s not devastation. For the most part everyone seems okay.

People stand in clusters, talking, even laughing in relief. A few cars crawl along, trying to pick their way home. A shopkeeper is handing out water on a corner; he has cases piled high behind him. This is the friendliest I’ve ever seen Los Angeles.

It’s dark when we finally arrive at our house. The pavement is cracked, and it looks like a corner of the house has settled, but surprisingly, not even all the windows are broken. My neighbor, Greg, had turned off the gas.

We walk up the steps and unlock the door. Inside, I can faintly see the mess, pictures fallen off the walls, glass strewn across the floor.

My wife hits the light switch. Nothing. We pause in the gloom, suddenly reevaluating our whole evening. The whole next week.

“Do we have any flashlights?” asks my wife.

—

Surviving is often nuts and bolts, food and shelter. On any typical camping trip, with the right ten items, it’s fun; without them, you can die. It can be that simple.

What are the immediate dangers you face? What are the probabilities? What’s going to happen when the North Koreans detonate an electromagnetic pulse and turn off all electronic devices forever?

For the moment, I live in Los Angeles, and the size of the city is mind scrambling. It’s five hundred square miles and nearly eighteen million people. Compared to New York, it’s a highly developed suburb that stretches to infinity in every direction.

I have never been through a big earthquake, but of course that’s what you think of when you think of California. I called Jonathan Stewart, a professor of civil engineering at UCLA, to discuss the issue.

“Well, if you want to talk about probability, the southern segment of the San Andreas Fault, a big, dirty fault, is well overdue for a large earthquake. That fault, especially in the Salton Sea, is primed and ready to go—it really should have ruptured by now.” The professor’s voice was calm, clinical. I wanted my prophets a little scarier.

The San Andreas is a slip fault, meaning that the tectonic movement is two plates slipping past each other, as opposed to a subduction zone, where one plate slips underneath another.

“Let me make the math easy,” Professor Stewart said. Please, by all means. “Say the fault builds up two centimeters a year—meaning that the fault is stuck, it’s not moving, but the plates on either side are sliding two centimeters a year. That level of stored energy builds up, in the tension. Over a hundred years, two hundred centimeters, or two meters, of slip is built up, and then that can pop loose, releasing all that built-up movement. That’s the earthquake.”

I was following this so far. The longer it has been since the last release, the more energy is building up and the bigger the eventual quake will be.

“In 1857 a good chunk of the San Andreas ruptured down south, and of course in 1906 was the big one in San Francisco, when the whole northern part of the fault ruptured,” he said. From the academic standpoint, the faults should give way every 150 years. But the southern part of the fault, in the Salton Sea, hasn’t ruptured in three hundred years, so it’s ready to pop. And if a big event started down there, it would most likely continue up through Los Angeles. It all sounded very ominous.

“The likelihood of that event is pretty good, in our lifetimes,” he said.

“How big a quake would it be?” I asked.

“We can infer that 1857 and 1906 are kind of the upper bounds of what we’re worried about; the best guess for magnitude is 7.8.”

On the Richter scale, in case you forgot, each number is a ten-fold increase—so a quake of eight is ten times bigger than a quake of seven, in terms of magnitude of energy released.

The recent Chilean and Japanese earthquakes were much bigger, but they were from subduction zones (where one plate is going beneath another); that’s where you get the truly massive quakes, with the ocean floor going under the continental crust. The United States has those as well, from up in Mendocino through Seattle, and in Alaska—the big quake in 1964 in Alaska was from a subduction zone.

“Of course, 7.8 is the best guess, a low 8 is possible, 8.1, 8.2. Anything bigger is pretty unlikely.” Which is big, but not an extinction-level event.

Professor Stewart had taken part in “Shakeout,” a giant exercise that started in 2008, the biggest earthquake drill in history. It’s now repeated yearly, albeit on a lesser scale. With a 7.8 or an 8.2, the Big One won’t necessarily be the catastrophe you thought it was going to be. Of all the agencies involved, and of all the discussions, it became clear that the major casualty was going to be the grid. Utilities. Water and power.

“For most Californians in their one-story houses, there will be a lot of shaking—you’ll know about it—but afterward, you’ll walk outside and look at your neighbors and say, ‘That wasn’t so bad.’”

Some tall buildings will come down, and people will die. But the thing that keeps city managers up at night is that the quake will certainly sever all or most pipes and power lines. Water, power, and sewage will be cut, and it might take months to get them back up. Think about that: a month without the toilets working. Good God, what will happen in some of these apartment complexes?

“The reason it’s worrisome is the size of the area affected—the whole of Southern California, all of San Diego up through everything into Los Angeles. That’s a lot of people.” Like, thirty to forty million?

Think about having no toilets in your house for a month. Think about that happening in your whole city. Think about what that means in terms of disease. Just think of the smell. Poor sanitation kills more people around the world than anything else. Estimates suggest that six thousand children a day die of diarrheal illness from bad sanitation.

According to Professor Stewart, Los Angeles city planners have been aware of the vulnerabilities of the water system for a long time. All the aqueducts come in from across the San Andreas, so they built dams to create reservoirs on the city side of the fault, such as Pyramid Lake along Interstate 5 and the Los Angeles Reservoir in the San Fernando Valley. But there are concerns about contamination in the event of a quake, sewage lines mixing with water lines.

There are a few things you have to do for your house—make sure it is bolted to the foundation and won’t just slide off, and make sure that the gas has an automatic shutoff. But after that, it is just about water. Make sure you have enough water. A gallon a day per person, for a month.

When I bought a big blue water storage barrel from Amazon, my wife thought I was a little kooky. When I bought a second one, she just sighed. But I think she was also quietly pleased.

Look at it like this: are you going to sue the government for negligence after you run out of water and die? The situation in Los Angeles probably wouldn’t be quite life or death, but it would suck. You might have to go wait in line for eight hours a day to get water from a National Guard truck. The hot sun beating down on thousands of parched Angelenos? Sounds delightful.

For my friends who live in Los Angeles: this is going to happen during your lifetime, so make your life a little easier. Have a month’s worth of food and water in the house. For sanitation, I have five-gallon buckets and a short walk to the ocean. If I lived inland, I might seriously consider a cheap chemical toilet as a backup.

Professor Stewart signed off with the cheery “California is proactive, compared to nationwide. A lot has been done. On the East Coast, they have no clue where the faults are.”

The East Coast has been hit by major earthquakes before, just not in a long time. And huge portions of major cities like Boston and New York have been built on landfill. In a quake, landfill is a “liquefaction zone,” and it can turn into something like water—buildings can sink.

The final step in my due diligence was to have a structural engineer evaluate the house I was renting. I got in touch with Casey Hemmatyar, a managing director of the Pacific Structural & Forensic Engineers Group.

Casey had been a structural engineer for twenty-seven years, always involved with earthquake-resistant design. Earthquakes, because of their nature, are challenging disasters to plan for.

“The unique nature of earthquakes is that you don’t get even one millisecond of warning,” he said.

I started to pepper him with questions about liquefaction, about my house, about where to go . . . He held up his hands. There were too many unknowns.

Casey said that when evaluating a structure, there are some twenty variables that he looks at. He uses maps from the U.S. Geological Survey and complex software from FEMA that evaluates distances to active faults. Depending on the distance from the epicenter, Casey takes into account the structure itself, soil conditions, and a whole raft of other inputs.

“Two properties on the same block can have totally different behavior during an earthquake. One might have ten percent damage and the other might have a hundred percent damage,” he said. Strong and stiff doesn’t mean less vulnerable. Buildings need to be flexible, to be able to move with the earthquake. The real analysis he does is expensive, anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars, and hospitals are required to get it.

He looked around and grinned at me. “You’re okay, here. It’s not as bad as I thought. This is a wood frame house, right?”

“I think so,” I said, but then my conscience twinged—is that right? I’d been living there about three years. I hadn’t given it a lot of thought. I tended to view Los Angeles as a place I was visiting.

“Wood is the best for a low-rise building; it flexes a lot,” he said.

“Should I try to get outside, during the quake?” I asked. The official word is that no, you shouldn’t try to run outside because you’ll get injured by flying glass or by falling debris. Stay in your bed. But if the building is coming down? I’ll risk it.

Casey shrugged. He didn’t love these specifics. Everything is dependent on everything else. He surveyed my yard.

“Here it doesn’t hurt you to get outside. But downtown, you have to be careful.” Downtown means skyscrapers, and you’d be worried about stuff falling on you.

“In a war, during an aerial attack, there are certain locations that are safe. An earthquake is not like that: everything depends!” He laughed.

So you’ve got to go with California’s recommendation to “stop, drop, and hold on.” Get under a sturdy table and hold on to it. That way, when the table bounces across the floor, you bounce with it.

“There are two levels of preparedness: personal and societal,” Casey said. The personal one is pretty easy: have that month’s worth of food and water. Most of the single-family dwellings in Southern California are going to be fine. Societal preparedness is about local government and regulations, and is harder. Just to protect yourself doesn’t solve the problem—your kids still go to school; you still drive on the freeways over bridges; you still want to go to the movies.

Casey told me that most of the essential buildings, such as hospitals, prisons, and airports, will be fine because the government monitors how they’re built.

“The problem we have here in LA is the middle, all those unretrofitted buildings on Wilshire—old masonry with no reinforcing, or insufficient reinforcing.” He was talking about buildings that were designed and built prior to the 1970s—all those offices and residentials and restaurants.

“They’re not going to perform,” Casey said.

What a pleasant, dry euphemism. He meant that they will be coming down and crushing everyone inside, blackness, chaos . . . not perform.

We walked around looking at my house, and Casey said it would be okay in a moderate earthquake. If a 1 means the building would be totaled and a 5 means that it would be undamaged, he gave me a 3, or maybe a 3.5. Not bad, I thought, relaxing.

“Your house is okay from a structural aspect, but there are nonstructural concerns. Make sure all the bookshelves are bolted to the wall . . .” Luckily, I had already done that in my son’s room, which earned me some brownie points with Casey. He beamed at me. “What a good father you are!” he exclaimed. I blushed.

Then my wife called out, “Honey, remember that those rooms in back [our bedrooms] were built in the 1920s, and then the rest of the house was added on . . .”

Oh, shit. And the walls were masonry, I remembered now, because I had made several nasty messes hanging curtains and pictures. I’m not what you might call handy, but usually I can hang a curtain.

Casey’s smile faded. We began tapping on the walls, listening.

“These are usually going to be concrete masonry blocks, they’re the cheapest, and if it’s from the 1920s . . . It’s good that you don’t own this house,” Casey chuckled. Having a bathtub overhead, that didn’t matter much. But the masonry without reinforcing was a problem. This had been a little one-story beach cottage in the 1920s. It was highly unlikely that it had the proper rebar in it.

Casey looked at me and silently shook his head.

So we moved.

—

I decided that one month’s worth of food and water was a start. I made my lists: candles and flashlights, tons of spare batteries, line, string, and so forth. I had all my camping gear, but I bought new water filters, tarps, tents, ponchos for the go bag.

For those of you who don’t know, the go bag (or the bug-out bag, or the ditch bag) is a small bag filled with essentials that you grab on the way out the door. It’s always ready, and so are you. When I worked on boats, we had our passports wrapped in plastic and a water jug in the ditch bag, so if the boat was sinking, you grabbed that on the way to the life raft. This is a survivalist staple. Having a go bag is usually a good idea, something small already in your car, a bigger one in your home. It’s easy to get sucked into wanting a bigger and bigger bag (do I add a tent? water filtration?), but try to keep it reasonable.

The more I planned, the less comfortable I felt. My situation was not a good one for a lengthy disaster. I don’t mean weeks stretching into months. That’s fairly scary. But the real humdinger is when government and society collapse, when a catastrophe of such severity hits that it shatters the man-made world.

Some of the survivalists call it long-term grid-down, or TEOTWAWKI, a desperate acronym for The End of the World as We Know It, what happens after a widespread nuclear war, a massive comet strike, The War of the Worlds. No more sweet US of A. The postapocalypse, the stuff of so many movies and books, a place where we’ve all spent time: Mad Max, The Road, Resident Evil. There’s usually a lot of fantasy mixed in with theory.

A great friend of mine told me a piece of family history: “My grandfather was a Jew in Berlin, and he waited and waited to get his family out; he got my father and his siblings out two weeks before the Nazis closed the borders.” The Nazis officially closed those borders in 1941. If his grandfather hadn’t finally gotten off his ass, we probably wouldn’t be friends.

Could I give up everything and walk away to follow an instinct, a gut feeling, or even an obvious risk? Could you do it right now, leave everything and go try to look for work and support yourself, maybe in a city where you don’t speak the language? Head for the mountains?

Los Angeles is an immense, fragile, vulnerable city. The vulnerabilities are in plain sight. Fifteen million souls, balanced like a dewdrop on a spiderweb. How fragile are these systems? Have we waited too long? The climate change science is right there, whether you believe it or not. The earthquake warnings are out there. Like the song says, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

So is it time to go? And if so, where?

A lot of “survivalist” thinking means building a retreat somewhere deep in the woods, off the grid. A hidden bunker. Survivalist books contain endless pages on the different guns, the massive freezers, generators, razor wire—all based on an unspoken dose of self-hating fear (“don’t let your neighbors see your preparations, they’re potential looters”).

The more I read, the more I thought, the more hopeless it all seemed. Maybe I was in better shape than when I started—I could lift more weight—but what did it matter? Even if I could afford a proper panic room in LA, or a retreat in Montana, what if it’s not what I expected? What if the fallout winds blanket Montana with four inches of fresh radioactive powder? What if we’re in New York on a business trip when the bombs start falling? Are you gonna live the rest of your life in the bunker?

When the end does come, it will most likely be from a completely unforeseen cause. A meteor that NASA’s forward scattered radar missed (or even one we know about—how would we stop it? Bruce Willis?) slams into the Earth and the ash blocks out the sun for a hundred years. The NORAD computers decide that all humans, not just the Russians, are the real enemy, and launch the nukes. Human beings are notoriously bad at acknowledging the unforeseen, even personally: check the current divorce rate, something like 40 percent. As much as we game scenarios and plan, the “Black Swan” problem will bite us in the ass.

The Black Swan is more or less the intellectual property of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a stock-market quant who wrote a book with the same name. The concept refers to the societal blindness of pre-seventeenth-century Europeans who, having only seen white swans, would say, “A good man is like a black swan,” implying that no truly good men exist. Of course, there are black swans, in Australia, and when they were discovered, the term gained a new notoriety: now referring to the existence of the unforeseen. Taleb refers to any extreme unexpected event as a Black Swan, and he makes the excellent point that afterward, everyone can retroactively “see it coming”—this event led to that event—but really, there is no way to predict a Black Swan because of the complexity of the system.

Taleb reiterates a point made famous by Bertrand Russell about the life of a domestic turkey. For the turkey, every day gets better, and it comes to see humans as trustworthy food providers. Then Thanksgiving comes. That day is a Black Swan for the turkey. All of its experience and knowledge actually hurt the turkey’s survival chances.

We’re just a bunch of domestic turkeys. Sorry.

Intuition is set up for understanding small, simple systems—things that primitive man might encounter on the plains of Africa. You’re wired for hunting and gathering, for small social interchanges, and to be afraid of predators—not run a nuclear power plant or manage an investment fund. Your intuition, your gut reaction to a single person might be accurate, but your gut won’t help you identify trends in big systems.

So in the real world we are guaranteed to be surprised by the Black Swan cataclysm. We won’t see it coming, at least as a society. But some individuals might do okay—there are always those guys who guessed right, or who were in the right spot to see what was coming down the road.

Maybe, just maybe, I can be that turkey with excellent situational awareness.

I’ve spent nine years writing about mixed martial arts (MMA), a rapidly evolving combat sport, fought in a cage where fighters can punch, kick, and wrestle. Without a doubt, the more well-rounded fighters, with more options—the fighters who can wrestle well and kickbox well—are the ones who have real success. You’ve got to be able to do everything in MMA. It makes sense: you want a strategy, but you also want to be like water, flowing with the fight, seeking out cracks and weakness. Never be a slave to the game plan.

As far as the survival-retreat plan goes: the military strategists love to paraphrase an old German strategist, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, who was probably poaching his instructors when he came up with the nugget, “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” Or, as Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

I was surprised by how many people I talked to in LA had the same escape plan: get down to the marina and steal a boat. People in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, miles away, talked to me about having four-wheelers so they could come down the beach, all the way to Marina Del Rey, and steal a yacht out of the harbor.

Now, I’ve sailed around the world, more or less. Some of these people had never been on a boat. With the right wind, I could steal a yacht and sail it right out of the marina without a problem. It’s definitely something I’ve thought about. But it’s by no means a gimme—there are thousands of people who live overlooking the marina, and many of them have boats. They might stop you. And what if the tsunami trashes the marina entirely? Then what?

We’ve talked about stress hormones and dissociation, but mostly in the short term. In seconds, minutes. What about days and weeks and months of denial? This can’t be happening.

Without a doubt, the single biggest long-term problem facing you in a true apocalypse is adjusting your reality. Getting through denial, this can’t be happening . . . that’s the bitch of the bunch.

The horror of Armageddon is of course, unknowable. We don’t really know what would happen to people in the event of a zombie apocalypse, or if a superflu kills 99 percent of humanity. But we do have accounts of the worst, most unthinkably horrible thing that ever happened in modern history: the Holocaust. In Terrence Des Pres’ wonderful, terrible book The Survivor, he analyzed accounts by and interviews with hundreds or even thousands of both Holocaust and Soviet gulag survivors.

He found newcomers to the camps had the highest death rate. Des Pres lists lack of information and grief as primary killers, but most new prisoners died “from prolonged terror and shock; from radical loss, both of identity and of faith in the capacity of goodness to prevail against the evil surrounding them.” The adjustment period, before you can come to grips with the new reality, is the most dangerous time. For the newcomer to the camp, mortal danger lay in “the horror and irreparable hurt felt by the prisoner when he or she first encounters the spectacle of atrocity. Moral disgust, if it arises too abruptly or becomes too intense, expresses itself in the desire to die, to have done with such a world.” The shock of being thrown into a concentration camp might be similar to the shock at seeing your town overrun with zombies or aliens. If you witnessed some unbelievable, mind-bending, world-shattering event, this spectacle of atrocity might kill your spirit, and the body would quickly follow.

If you could survive long enough, Des Pres found, you might recover your will to live. From all his interviews, he set the recovery time at anywhere between a week and several months. Criminals did better, because they were used to breaking the rules. In the camps, if you followed all the rules, you were dead in a month. Criminals recognized the face of this camp social order; they could recognize “us against them”—to the death—earlier than law-abiding citizens. They were in less denial about the changes to their reality.

You have to find a way to survive that adjustment period of shock and help others get through it. You have to find a way to limit denial.

The place to start is with the opposite of denial: acceptance. If you have the imagination to accept that aliens are invading or that the dead are walking, then you’ll have the imagination to accept that this earthquake is indeed the Big One. The more you can accept that things have changed, the less time you’ll waste on denial and “milling” (disaster-speak for checking in with other people and doing nothing) and the sooner you will take action. If the shit really hits the fan, I’ll take a semi-decent plan right now over a good plan in ten minutes or a perfect plan later. The faster you can accept that everything has changed, that everything you’ve worked for all your life is now gone, the better off you’ll be during the apocalypse. I’m not talking about actually redefining reality; I’m talking about adopting an attitude—“What’s right in front of me?” It’s about looking at what you see without preconceptions. If you start limiting your emergency plans to only what you think is likely, then you’re screwed.

All my preparations may be for naught, as I will statistically probably be one of the dead rather than one of the living, but that’s a fact I can safely ignore, because it doesn’t do me any good. So let’s assume, for the sake of our sanity, that we survive, at least for a little while. And if my family did have the tremendous good fortune to survive, say, a meteor storm that destroys two-thirds of the world, it would be a goddamn shame to die because I don’t know how to hunt for food.

Be as ready as possible, be ready for anything: climate change, zombies, the undreamed of. Relying on a bunker is a weakness. Worse, it’s a mental crutch: the evidence might be saying get the hell out, but you’ve put so much time into this bunker that you stay when you should have gone. Prepare by readying your mind and body, the things that will always be with you. Sitting in a bunker with a sweaty shotgun in your hand is paranoia, but learning the skills to be self-reliant is common sense. I had learned some basic stuff that I knew would come in handy—stay fit, be strong. But in the unknown world that loomed on my horizon, there was a lot I didn’t know.

I could fix that.

—

We live like gypsies, camping out in our own house. I’ve rationed us out to one MRE a day for each of us. I have food and water for almost two months at this rate.

Without power, news has been slow to trickle in, and the rumor mill is wild. My neighbor Greg spends a lot of time out walking, and he talks to the National Guardsmen who drive the water trucks in—most people are having to get buckets and wait in line for about six hours to get drinking water. Not us. There’s been a riot in East LA, where the trucks took a week to show up.

Greg tells me that the Guardsmen are saying big earthquakes hit all over the place—Washington, DC, Rome, Beijing, and London. Here in Los Angeles everything is pretty calm, as people knew what to do. But in some places there is a lot of fear, a lot of prophecy talk. The End of Days.

At night, we read by candlelight. My son wanders around the house, wearing his own headlamp and shining it into my eyes. The Department of Water and Power is running emergency power lines into various parts of the city, but we don’t have electricity here. We cooked and ate everything in the fridge we could.

Although the overall mood has been good, at times almost carnival-like—everybody is on vacation—I know there are some lurking problems out there that are compounding daily. The ocean is starting to stink of sewage, and people are dumping their garbage in there too. It’s only been a week, but already the trash is piling high in the alleys. The supermarkets have given away all their food and water, and I’ve heard that there’s a giant crowd of people begging at the intersection of Washington and Lincoln.

The city is starting to feel like a time bomb.