Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
With funding from the SSA, taber spent a total of seven days investigating
these two events. His experience was highly discouraging. He had “con-
siderable difficulty” during this investigation “in securing such data, some
people refusing to give us any information, and others giving us incorrect
data, probably thinking it none of our business; and that the apparently
trivial things we were asking about could be of no possible value.”
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taber
got around this problem in a creative way, using drugstores as his primary
indicators of the distribution of intensity. As he explained, there was a drug-
store roughly every half-mile throughout the affected area. “these stores are
all on the ground floor, and they all have many bottles of different shapes
and sizes similarly arranged on shelves.” One couldn't ask for a quicker
means of measuring relative intensity than counting overturned bottles. In
this way he was able to locate the epicenter of the strongest July shock at the
prominent fold in elysian Park. the folds and faults in this area were known
at the time as obstacles to prospecting in the surrounding oil fields. taber
saw their significance differently. this was a spot where mountain building
had occurred “on a grand scale” for millions of years, and it did not look
likely to stop in the near future.
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Meanwhile, Los Angeles's population was growing fast. In the SSA's
Bul-
letin
taber stressed the need for geologists and engineers to work together
to track earthquakes and their damage. together, they could rationalize in-
surance premiums and devise proper means to protect the swelling city.
“the society has not had the assistance of those people who would be most
directly benefited by it,” taber charged. “Instead of being helped by the
people of this state, we have had chiefly opposition.”
thanks to this “os-
trich policy,” taber argued, American seismology was “behind other coun-
tries which we are accustomed to regard as backward and uncivilized.”
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As
so often before, the scientific study of earthquakes was being invoked as a
measure of civilization, yet one that now threatened to class the Japanese
ahead of Americans.
taber's research in 1920 was aided by several Los Angeles engineers who
helped collect felt reports and evidence of damage. Indeed, it was becom-
ing clear that the SSA's tactics had shifted. they were no longer counting on
a permanent observing network of ordinary citizens. Instead, the society
was pinning its hopes on one small segment of California's population:
engineers.
engineers had a unique perspective on earthquakes in a fast-growing,
water-starved region like Southern California. As Diana Di Stefano has re-
cently noted, industrial workers in this period were not necessarily tools of
the “capitalist exploitation of nature.” In some cases, they were the most
