On Solid Ground

‘Genius’ grant raises hopes for earthquake-safety leader

Brian E. Tucker, one of 24 MacArthur Fellows named last month, traces his career path back to 1970, when a chance nocturnal encounter in a women’s bathroom at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, in La Jolla, Calif., shook up his plans.

Mr. Tucker was then a graduate student in marine biology, immersed in studying the properties of seawater. Working late one evening and facing an early class the next day, he decided not to go home but to sleep instead on one of the beds kept in the women’s restroom. To his surprise, someone else was doing the same thing.

After chatting for a while, his fellow camper, a geophysics professor named James N. Brune, invited Mr. Tucker to accompany him into the southern California desert the next weekend to help measure earth tremors. Mr. Brune, a seismologist, was working on mapping earthquake-prone areas with the idea of helping developing countries like Mexico do a better job of coping with such events.

“This seemed so much more socially relevant to me than what I had been doing that I switched fields,” says Mr. Tucker.

Mr. Brune became not only a friend but also Mr. Tucker’s Ph.D. adviser, and now sits on the board of GeoHazards International, the nonprofit organization Mr. Tucker founded a decade ago to help developing countries minimize the destructiveness of earthquakes and other natural disasters.

The group is small — six people and a $1-million budget — and though it has won respect in seismological circles, it had received little public attention until last month’s announcement by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which awarded Mr. Tucker, who is now 57, $500,000 over five years with no strings attached. That honor triggered a flood of congratulatory messages from friends, acquaintances, and strangers around the world — while also giving a lift to his organization’s fund-raising efforts.

A U.S.-Soviet Exchange

Another milestone on the road to the MacArthur occurred in the mid-1970s, when Mr. Tucker had his first exposure to the difficulties of mitigating earthquake damage in the developing world. Traveling to what is now Tajikistan as part of a U.S.-Soviet exchange program that included seismologists, he saw the effects of a 1949 earthquake that had triggered massive landslides that buried thousands of people under mud, rock, and snow and leveled nearly all of the area’s mud-brick houses.

Splitting his time for the next several years between fieldwork in Tajikistan and postgraduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Tucker saw firsthand both the promise and pitfalls of controlling earthquake damage in poor countries: One house whose Tajik builder had reinforced with tree trunks had survived the 1949 quake intact, but the man’s son said he would not spend the additional money needed to reinforce other buildings — which as a rule of thumb adds about 5 percent to a building’s total cost. Altering such thinking, Mr. Tucker realized, might save tens of thousands of lives.

Mr. Tucker spent most of the 1980s working for the California Geological Survey (then called the Division of Mines and Geology), in charge of its efforts to predict earthquakes and prevent major damage. While the work was rewarding, he began to wonder whether his talents might be needed more elsewhere.

“I saw that California was filled with fantastic organizations working on California’s problems,” he says, including the California Institute of Technology, Scripps, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the California Geological Survey, the U.S. Geological Survey, and lots of private consulting companies. “They’re all tripping over one another to help California. I would talk about this with some of my friends who traveled abroad, and we agreed that the real need was in the developing countries.”

Imbalance of Resources

The subsequent phase of his career has been defined by a stark statistic: While 90 percent of the people most vulnerable to earthquake destruction live in the developing world, their countries receive just 10 percent of the money spent on research and other efforts to prevent earthquake damage.

“Most of the world’s dollars going into making people safer from earthquakes are directed to the United States, Europe, and Japan,” Mr. Tucker says.

And the problem is growing worse, he adds, because of massive population growth in the megacities in Asia and Latin America, in particular, where rising land prices lead to taller buildings, often constructed using shoddy workmanship and designs that frequently skimp on earthquake-resistant measures.

Pilot Project

The difference offered by adequate warning systems, building practices, and emergency-response procedures can be significant.

Earthquakes in Armenia in 1988 and in Loma Prieto, Calif., in 1989 were about equal in magnitude, for example, and both affected similar numbers of people, Mr. Tucker says. But an estimated 25,000 Armenians perished in their quake, compared with just 63 people in Loma Prieto.

Hoping to help correct that imbalance, he left his state job in 1991 to establish GeoHazards International.

With some fellow seismologists who acted as advisers, Mr. Tucker chose Quito, Ecuador, as the site for a pilot program, focusing on educating city officials, business executives, scholars, and ordinary citizens about both the risks of earthquakes and measures that could be taken to mitigate them. The exercise involved imagining what kind of destruction would occur if a major earthquake were to strike near Quito, and then figuring out what steps might be taken to minimize the damage.

“We could have probably written the whole report sitting in our office in California and sent it to the mayor in a month, for one-thousandth of the cost,” Mr. Tucker says. “But instead, we took two years and involved everyone in the society we could” in a seemingly endless series of meetings, including the ministries of health and of disaster response, insurance companies, bankers, and local citizens in a complex brew of science, technology, and politics.

The result: a partial success. Quito’s mayor appointed an official to coordinate emergency management, but because no single group or agency had taken responsibility for following through on the report’s recommendations, very little was done to actually make structures safer.

That experience showed the importance of selecting a local nonprofit organization to help follow through on advice that emerges from the consultation process, Mr. Tucker says — even if a suitable group must be created from scratch.

In Katmandu, for example, GeoHazards International supported the creation of the National Society of Earthquake Technology-Nepal, which has since become widely recognized for its expertise in retrofitting buildings to make them more resistant to earthquakes. Masons from the organization visited Gujarat, India, following the major earthquake last year to help train Indian workmen in such techniques.

Helping Schools

Mr. Tucker says GeoHazards International also decided to focus on schools — a politically palatable choice, since people place great emphasis on their children’s well-being and are unlikely to turn down an offer to help make school buildings safer. The group’s typical practice is to conduct (or have the local nonprofit group conduct) seismic-safety assessments, draft blueprints for needed reinforcements, and help the communities carry out the necessary improvements.

From Quito and Katmandu, GeoHazards has expanded its work into Chile, China, Indonesia, and Mexico, and recently obtained contracts to work in Central Asia and India as well. Its global headquarters is a modest storefront office in a shopping center in Palo Alto, Calif.

“We started in Latin America, where there’s a big need — particularly in small countries in Central America, where an earthquake can affect a huge fraction of a country’s [gross national product],” Mr. Tucker says. “But the biggest need is in Asia” and the Near East, particularly in the megacities of the Indian subcontinent, like Delhi, Islamabad, and Rawalpindi, as well as Istanbul, Jakarta, Manila, and Tehran.

Yet sheer numbers are not the only measurement of risk, notes Mr. Tucker.

“Katmandu is only 1.2 million people, so in absolute terms, not that many people will die” in a major earthquake, he says. “But in terms of the significance to Nepal, there’s a tremendously high risk.”

Mr. Tucker and his colleagues are now developing systematic ways to assess the risk of disastrous earthquakes in cities around the world and to evaluate the effectiveness of various means to reduce that risk.

With its small staff and modest resources in comparison with the scope of the problem, however, GeoHazards needs to work as a catalyst rather than do lots of heavy lifting itself.

“Sitting here in Palo Alto, there are limited things we can do on the other side of the world,” says Mr. Tucker. “Our value is to find and support competent, honest, passionate champions in these countries and give them the resources they need. Very often they’re not asking us so much for financial support. Often just having an objective nonprofit international group come and say that these local people are doing a good job gives them tremendous power in their community.”

Fund-Raising Challenges

Closer to home, the nature of GeoHazards International’s work can make fund raising an uphill climb, says Mr. Tucker.

Much of the organization’s private support has come from the OYO Corporation, a Japanese company that makes seismic and sonar equipment, as well as from several American foundations, including the Cecil and Ida Green Foundation and the Flora Family Foundation.

“We’re trying to serve people on the other side of the world by raising their awareness and by making them prepared for a disaster they’re not really aware of, and that will only occur some time in the indefinite future,” says Mr. Tucker. Missing is that sense of urgency that often pervades nonprofit organizations that deal with concrete, current problems — like AIDS, homelessness, and disaster relief — and that may have an easier time making their case for support.

For the first time, GeoHazards this year hired two development specialists, and has also decided to focus more effort on building an endowment and on recruiting individuals who will pay annual membership fees, to smooth out the gap that occurs between major contracts.

GeoHazards International’s annual budget has grown from $200,000 its first year to around $1-million today, so an additional $100,000 a year from MacArthur won’t be enough to transform the organization, Mr. Tucker says.

A Family Trip

On a practical level, he says, he hopes to use a portion of the MacArthur money to take his wife and two children (ages 9 and 11) away from her job and their school for a year to travel to a dozen of the cities most threatened by earthquakes.

“I’ve spent most of the recent years at home, trying to manage the office,” he notes, with a faint tinge of regret. Because of his family responsibilities, he says, “the longest my trips can be is a week or 10 days. I’ve been feeling that I’m losing touch with what’s really happening in those cities.” A yearlong sojourn abroad, he says, “will reeducate me and refresh me.”

But a more lasting benefit will be psychological, he suspects, validating his credibility when he speaks at conferences or tries to engage colleagues or other potential supporters in his group’s efforts. “It’s tremendously empowering,” says Mr. Tucker of his latest honor. “If I were a tenured professor, having everybody listen to my lectures — then you feel what you’re doing is valued. But I’m in this small little shopping center in Palo Alto, and nobody knows what we do.”

As a recipient of what’s commonly known as a “genius award,” however, he expects to cut a wider swath among his colleagues in seismology and disaster prevention.

“Rather than this kooky, eccentric, small group, we could really be contributing to developing the philosophy and ethics of the profession,” Mr. Tucker says, “and in particular, making the point that we have some sort of responsibility to apply our resources to help these people. That would be the best ending of this story, if I use this opportunity in that way.”

ABOUT GEOHAZARDS INTERNATIONAL

History: Founded in 1991 to reduce death and injury caused by earthquakes and other natural hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions. Its first project in Quito, Ecuador, in 1992 showed the benefits of mobilizing community leaders and using low-cost civil-engineering practices to prevent avoidable natural disasters. The organization now also works in Central Asia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nepal.

Purpose: The organization seeks to raise public awareness of natural disasters, assess their risks, support appropriate building codes and practices, and promote international collaboration among local officials, engineers, and scientists. Its principal focus has been to help neighborhoods construct or strengthen schools and other public buildings using quake-resistant methods.

Finances: The current budget is around $1-million, of which about half comes from contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and other governmental or multinational agencies. The balance comes from gifts from corporations, foundations, and individuals; membership fees; and income from a $2-million endowment.

Key officials: Brian E. Tucker, president; Haresh C. Shah, chairman, Board of Trustees.

Address: 200 Town & Country Village, Palo Alto, Calif. 94301; (650) 614-9050;

Web site: http://www.geohaz.org/index.htm