But Yeats, an emeritus professor in geosciences at Oregon State University, has been mapping fault lines for more than 40 years and can tell you when a quake is overdue. And he can tell you what areas of the world are most likely to suffer the greatest impact when one occurs.

Robert Yeats has led public workshops in earthquake-prone areas around the world.

So it wasn’t a fluke when Yeats told a reporter from Scientific American last year that Port-au-Prince straddled a time bomb, not a week before a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated the city. Yeats drew his conclusion from decades of mapping fault zones around the world and from understanding that when builders ignore geological processes, things can go horribly awry.

“I don’t have any second sight. It’s something anyone working on this problem would be aware of,” says Yeats. “It’s just a question of, ‘Do you keep that to yourself, or do you tell people about it?’”

Yeats has crafted a good portion of his career around telling people about it. Consider it his personal mission, but Yeats isn’t into doom. He’s wants to make sure that people recognize the danger and do something about it.

That’s why he wants people to participate in the Great Oregon ShakeOut, the first statewide earthquake drill on Jan. 26. Yeats helped champion the event to increase the public’s awareness of what a major earthquake would be like. But his involvement runs even deeper than that. The ShakeOut might not have come to Oregon at all if it hadn’t been for OSU researchers, including Yeats, who in the mid-1980s were among the first to suggest that Oregon is subject to massive subduction zone earthquakes.

79 and Active

Yeats, who is 79 years old and still active in earthquake research, has played a key role in the field. His technique of using oil-well data to map faults in three dimensions has provided the Northwest with a more detailed look at the extensive, active fault network in the region. It also gave Yeats a niche in mapping faults worldwide: No one had used the wealth of oil-well data to identify volatile seismic areas.

His outreach work has been passionate and consistent for more than 20 years. He has written books about earthquakes for non-scientists. He’s taught students from California to the Northwest about earthquake risk. He’s advised governments and community groups. He’s made sure his findings and practical advice have received news media attention.

Meanwhile, Yeats’ protégés have made groundbreaking discoveries. To date, he has mentored more than 50 graduate students. Among them is OSU professor of marine geology and geophysics Chris Goldfinger, whom Yeats advised during the latter’s graduate studies at OSU. Goldfinger has used Yeats’ mapping techniques in part to demonstrate that the Northwest has experienced repeated, significant earthquakes over the past 10,000 years — and that we will experience them again. Goldfinger also models the paths that tsunamis could take if they strike the Northwest coast after a major Cascadia subduction zone quake.

“A lot of scientists stay detached from the meaning of what they do, and from the outcome. Bob didn’t have that barrier,” says Goldfinger. “I like the personal model that makes everything tie together and be more relevant to what you do every day. And Bob’s still doing that.”

Another of Yeats’ former students is Andrew Meigs, OSU associate professor of geology, who is carrying on Yeats’ 30 years of work in the Pakistani Himalayas.

Yeats finds hope for the future in OSU research on earthquake and tsunami awareness. “OSU is really a leader in this arena,” he says. It leads to practical applications: tsunami evacuation plans and earthquake resistant bridges.

Yeats has been so important to his students that 30 of them donated a total of $500,000 to create an endowed professorship in his honor.

Get Ready and ShakeOut

Saving lives is what the Great Oregon ShakeOut is about, and that’s why it’s important to Yeats.
On Jan. 26, thousands of people throughout Oregon participated in a drill to help them understand how to prepare for, respond to and recover from a catastrophic earthquake. The National Science Foundation, Federal Emergency Management Association and U.S. Geological Survey sponsored the event.

For Yeats, though, it isn’t enough. He wishes every Oregonian would participate. But considering that the last major Northwest earthquake occurred more than 300 years ago, it’s not only easy for people to overlook the threat, it’s nearly impossible for them to conceive of it.

At the Cascadia subduction zone, the Juan de Fuca plate dives beneath North America (illustration courtesy of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries

“We had a really bad one in 1700, but that was forever ago to most people here,” Yeats says. Jan. 26, in fact, was the 311th anniversary of that big quake, which was so strong, it is believed to have altered the physical makeup of the Oregon and Washington coasts to a stunning degree. Written records from Japan, which was hit by a 30-foot tsunami, and geological evidence on the Oregon Coast detail its severity.

And that’s what Yeats wants people to understand. Severe earthquakes like that don’t just happen once in a region. They happen repeatedly, and the key to minimizing damage and casualties is realizing that the Northwest is a region rife with seismic activity — and being ready for it.

In other regions, the threat may feel real because large earthquakes have happened more recently. Californians have photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which led to a fire that devastated the city. They have images of the Cypress Street Viaduct collapsing in 1989’s Loma Prieta quake branded into their memories. They have their own experiences with waking in the night to shaking. It’s why more than 6 million California residents were expected to participate in their ShakeOut.

1971, San Fernando Valley

California earthquakes, in fact, were instrumental in Yeats’ transformation from geologist to messenger. In 1971, he was teaching at Ohio University after working as a petroleum geologist for Shell Oil in southern California. In February of that year, a catastrophic earthquake struck the San Fernando Valley, where he had thought of relocating his family. “It just shows how fate works,” Yeats says. “If I had moved there, my wife and children would have all been there, in their house. And possibly in danger of losing their lives.”

It made Yeats think of all the mapping data he and others were amassing for the oil industry, and using it to determine where the most volatile fault lines were throughout the world. For the next three decades, mapping faults in three dimensions became Yeats’ specialty. It carried him to a department head position at Oregon State in 1977 and around the world, from New Zealand to Afghanistan to Japan.

But Yeats began to wonder if publishing papers and discussing his findings with the scientific community was enough. “I realized what we did — mapping faults — people needed to know about, whether it’s the citizens of Port-au-Prince or the Oregon Coast,” Yeats says. “Because we have a hazard there, and we have to take it seriously and do the preparations necessary so people won’t get killed.”

Once the scientific community understood that there was an earthquake hazard in the Northwest, a conclusion in which Yeats was instrumental, he began to educate the public. He sent the message through news releases and talked to reporters about the potential for Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes. In the mid-80s, he was raising public awareness of earthquake problems in a region that was relatively quiet, unlike California.

Yeats created an undergraduate course at Oregon State called “Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest.” He taught students how the Northwest’s earthquake vulnerability was discovered and how society responded to that threat when it came to state legislation and to the practical aspects of daily life such as building codes and insurance premiums. The class also taught students how they could respond individually and within their communities to the threat.

Eventually, his notes turned into a book of the same name, published by the OSU Press in 1998. “The book, now in a second edition published in 2004, focuses on getting people to do simple things,” Yeats says. “Bolt older houses to the foundation. Make sure there’s a wrench near the intake valve on your gas meter. Have a disaster plan.”

Although Yeats wrote the book for students, it reached a wider audience: legislators, high school principals, local officials and emergency managers. And it’s still in print, just as his class is still being taught online and in the classroom. Yeats recently gave a copy of the book to the city manager of Bend, Ore., a city that straddles an active fault line.

In 2001, Yeats published the even more ambitious, “Living with Earthquakes in California.” The book describes how California admitted to its “earthquake problem” and helps communities and individuals to prepare.

Yeats also talks to local groups and consults with cities all over the region about infrastructure and new development projects. He’d like Oregon to catch up with California in terms of seismic awareness. “Oregon has upgraded building codes, but we still need to do what California has done and make an inventory of unsafe buildings. Oregon has not done that,” Yeats says.

2011, Cannon Beach to Kabul

But towns in Oregon, such as Seaside and Cannon Beach, regularly conduct tsunami drills with elementary school students. Statewide, and the Department of Geology and Mineral Industries is taking the lead in raising earthquake awareness. “I’d say the general person on the street is aware that we’re in earthquake country. When I first came here, that wasn’t the case,” Yeats says. “Oregon’s had some real leadership, but we have a long way to go.”

Yeats says he can get through to some people, but alerting the public to a potential danger isn’t the same as telling them about a danger that has a date, time and place. And telling people doesn’t mean they’ll listen. It’s a dilemma he’s faced throughout his professional career. It’s human nature, Yeats says, to be unable to appreciate a threat that seems abstract, or that might happen centuries into the future. It’s a little like the children’s book character Chicken Little warning that the sky is falling.

“You ask people the same questions you’d ask the president of Haiti a week before the quake: ‘You’re on a fault running outside your city. It’s going to go. It’s going to kill a lot of people.’ But they say, ‘Is it going to happen during my term of office? You’re not sure? Thanks for your time.’ Can you blame them?” he asks.

Yeats persists in this frustrating mission because, he says, “People are responsive, but the general public has to be reminded, and you have to keep reminding them.”

His latest book, Active Faults of the World, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. The book is part of an international collaboration to create an online worldwide active-fault database. With it, Yeats hopes he can help prompt officials in other earthquake “time bomb” spots — Kingston, Jamaica; Tehran, Iran; Kabul, Afghanistan; Karachi, Pakistan — to take precautionary action. He hopes his message reaches people before it’s too late.

Researchers at Oregon State University – who in the mid-1980s were among the first in the nation to suggest that Oregon is subject to massive subduction zone earthquakes – have helped define the faults placing Oregon residents at most risk, supported efforts to boost building codes, and more recently have studied earthquake disasters all over the world to identify what makes the difference between tragedy and survival.

“It’s been a long struggle to convince Oregonians that these risks are real, that it will happen here and we have to prepare for it,” said Bob Yeats, a professor emeritus of geology at OSU and international leader in earthquake science and history. “Earthquakes can’t be predicted with any precision, but they can be prepared for, we can save lives, and the Oregon ShakeOut is a great thing to help raise the awareness of what we should do.”

That preparation, OSU experts say, should be reflected in everything from personal knowledge to homeowners analyzing the risk areas in their own residences, disaster plans, community infrastructure, well-enforced building codes, zoning considerations and better public awareness of risks.

Yeats wrote a book published in 2004, Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest, which outlines in more detail many of the same issues that will be explored in the Great Oregon ShakeOut.

The catastrophic event a year ago in Haiti provides perhaps the most vivid illustration of earthquake disasters, and a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in southwest Pakistan on January 19 was a reminder of the Earth’s near-constant tectonic activity. But these events are just some of many and can have markedly different results.

• In 2003, an earthquake of magnitude 6.6 occurred on a strike-slip fault near Bam, Iran, which was constructed largely of aging mud/brick structures. Almost 90 percent of the buildings were destroyed and almost 40,000 people died, nearly one out of every four residents.

• A few days later, the San Simeon earthquake in California hit on a reverse fault with magnitude 6.5. No buildings with even partial seismic retrofitting collapsed, and only two people died.

“We saw essentially the same thing with the recent 7.1 earthquake in New Zealand, where they have strong building codes and no one died,” Yeats said. “And of particular interest for us in Oregon should be the Chilean subduction zone earthquake last February, which was huge at magnitude 8.8 and is quite similar to what we may expect on the Oregon Coast during its next subduction zone quake.”

According to Scott Ashford, professor and head of the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at OSU, Chile is actually a case of what Oregon should aspire to.

This image shows the general motion of Pacific Northwest landforms as the terrain is squeezed and moved by tectonic forces. (Graphic courtesy of Rob McCaffrey, Bob King and Suzette Payne, Portland State University)

“Because it has had subduction zone earthquakes with much more frequency than the Pacific Northwest, the buildings, roads and infrastructure in Chile are actually more earthquake resistant than here in Oregon,” Ashford said.

“There was loss of life in Chile, but all things considered they did pretty well in maintaining what I think of as their lifelines, the roads, bridges, power supplies and other things that you most urgently need in a disaster,” he said. “We haven’t made the progress in that area that we should, and I think we’re already starting to forget some of the lessons and awareness we had just a year ago after the Chilean quake.”

Ashford said a good first step would be to assess all of the state’s vulnerabilities in the event of a major earthquake, and then prioritize which areas to tackle first with whatever funding can be made available.

Things could be worse, and in many parts of the world they are. Later this spring Yeats will publish another book, Active Faults of the World, which will explore the many cities around the world which have the potentially disastrous combination of poor construction practices, heavy population and major, active earthquake faults. Ranging from Kabul (Afghanistan), to Karachi (Pakistan), Istanbul (Turkey), Tehran (Iran), Caracas (Venezuela), and Kingston (Jamaica), there are many more tragedies waiting to happen.

The good news, OSU researchers say, is that Oregon, like Chile, does not fit that desperate category – but that’s not saying there isn’t room for improvement.

“As this statewide drill illustrates, we’re just now beginning the type of widespread, public education about earthquake risks and preparation that we’ve needed for a long time,” Yeats said. “That should continue permanently, but there’s also more that could be done.”

Among possible improvements, the OSU researchers said, might be:

• Crustal faults in Oregon, aside from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, should be better identified;

• It could be required that the sites of proposed construction be evaluated for earthquake fault and landslide hazards, as is done in California;

• The landslide risks associated with earthquakes should also be better considered in housing, road and infrastructure decisions;

• More attention should be paid to “lifeline” infrastructure such as electricity and gas supplies, water and sewers, roads and bridges;

• Existing programs of seismic retrofitting should be encouraged and expanded;

• More work could be done with LiDAR sensing technology to identify faults and landslides, which is available in Western Oregon through the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries;

• Efforts should be expanded to educate not just residents but also tourists on the Oregon Coast about the risks and disaster plans associated with subduction zone earthquakes and resulting tsunamis. Many of those who died in the Chilean earthquake were tourists on summer vacation.

Although the subduction zone earthquake issues have gotten most of the recent headlines, Yeats said, the risks from crustal faults in the Pacific Northwest should not be underestimated. The Corvallis Fault runs right underneath a local high school and through residential areas. The Portland Hills Fault runs through downtown Portland. It’s not known whether either of these faults is active or not.

Similar crustal faults underlie both Tacoma and Seattle, the other two major urban areas in the two states, and in one case near Seattle a major public works facility is being built right on top of a fault.

“There are people all over the Pacific Rim who understand and have prepared for earthquake disasters they know will happen,” Yeats said. “Now we’re gaining a better understanding of those risks here in Oregon and Washington. There’s still a lot to do, but it’s a good start.”