June 13, 204
By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer

His batting average is pretty good ---- 1.000, in fact. But he has been to the plate only twice. Consequently, scientists and disaster response officials, while excited that the elusive dream of predicting earthquakes may be within reach, are not exactly sounding the alarm about the shaker UCLA Professor Vladimir Keilis-Borok says will rattle Southern California by summer's end.

And it doesn't help that a hit anywhere in 12,000 square miles stretching from Barstow to Mexico, and from Palomar Mountain to the Salton Sea, will be enough to say the scientist is three for three.

The area is so large that a temblor on any of dozens of faults could fulfill the forecast by the 82-year-old mathematical geophysicist and his team, who say a magnitude-6.4 or greater event will strike inside a nine-month window closing Sept. 5.

A quake on the mighty San Andreas, where huge continental plates scrape against each other, would qualify as a hit.

So would a big temblor along a fault farther east or on the Elsinore and San Jacinto faults that are closer to, and pose more danger for, populated areas of Riverside and San Diego counties.

"He could be right and you would not feel it," said Lucy Jones, scientist in charge of Southern California for the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena.

Or a quake could strike the Elsinore Fault and topple a large number of structures, Jones said.

That fault slices through the cities of Lake Elsinore and Temecula, on a path running under the lake and along Interstate 15, and veering close to Pechanga Casino. In San Diego County, the fracture crosses Pala Indian Reservation and splits Julian.

What are the chances?

Because of the wide area covered, the forecast is not terribly useful, officials say.

It would be one thing if the forecast indicated, say, downtown San Diego needed to be evacuated for a narrow window of time, said Deborah Steffen, director of the San Diego County Office of Emergency Services.

As it is, the forecast is so general, millions of people in four counties ---- Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino and Imperial ---- would have to evacuate for the better part of a year to avoid all possible injury springing from a quake within the prediction's parameters, state and federal officials say.

"The prediction area is too geographically broad to be of much societal use," wrote Charles Groat, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, in an April 22 letter to California's congressional delegation.

And the prediction covers a region so shaky that, even if it comes true, many may question whether it was just chance.

"The earthquake he is predicting has a 10 percent to 15 percent chance of occurring in any nine-month period," Jones said. "Within the area covered by his prediction, there have been nine of them (quakes of the forecast magnitude or greater) in the last 70 years."

Two notable shakers were the 7.1-magnitude Hector Mine in October 1999 and 7.3-magnitude Landers in June 1992. Both caused a lot of shaking but minimal damage because of their location far from Southern California's largest cities.

Because the last big one hit five years ago and big quakes strike on average every seven years, it would not be surprising if another rolled through this year, said Tom Rockwell, San Diego State University geologist and leader of the Southern California Earthquake Center's geology group.


TWO FOR TWO

Still, Rockwell said, "They are 2-for-2. They did predict an earthquake in Central California and they did predict an earthquake in northern Japan."

In June 2003, Keilis-Borok and company predicted a magnitude-6.4 or greater temblor along a 310-mile-long stretch of the California coast. The magnitude-6.5 San Simeon quake Dec. 22 fell, though barely, within forecast parameters.

In July, the team forecast a magnitude-7 or greater quake in Japan. And Sept. 25, 2003, a magnitude-8.1 Hokkaido temblor shook the island nation.

Still, 2-for-2 wasn't enough to win the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council's endorsement for the team's bold foray into the shaky world of seismic forecasting.

Japan is so unstable the Hokkaido quake had a 30 percent chance of occurring randomly anyway, the council said in a March 2 report. San Simeon, on the other hand, was more impressive: Its mathematical chance was rated 2 percent to 5 percent.

"The Keilis-Borok methodology appears to be a legitimate approach in earthquake prediction research," the council concluded. It's just that there have been far too few tests, it said.

"Most scientists are saying, 'This is really interesting, but let's see how it turns out,'" said Bernard Minster, UC San Diego seismologist and Southern California Earthquake Center board member.


'TAIL WAGS THE DOG'

That's not to say scientists aren't paying close attention. They are, Jones said.

Scientists thought they were making progress in the field of quake prediction, only to stall out in the 1970s. With little measurable advances in the years since, Jones said, it would be encouraging if it turned out the UCLA team was on to something.

"It would be a significant advance if this, in fact, does work," Rockwell said.

The project's Russian-born leader, Keilis-Borok, is confident the team is.

"Earthquake prediction is called the Holy Grail of earthquake science and has been considered impossible by many scientists," Keilis-Borok said in a statement. "It is not impossible. We have made a major breakthrough, discovering the possibility of making predictions months ahead of time instead of years, as in previously known methods."

In high demand since making his prediction, Keilis-Borok was unavailable for an interview the past two weeks.

The professor's method relies primarily on recent quake patterns that he says are indicators of a larger one to come. The team scours records and maps for clusters of small- and medium-sized quakes in a particular area, and watches to see if increasingly more and larger temblors occur over time.

"We call our new approach 'tail wags the dog,'" Keilis-Borok said.

The approach is not entirely new, said John Vidale, interim director for the UCLA Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

"It's sort of a new recipe of the old ingredients," Vidale said.


IT'S ALL ABOUT RESULTS

The recipe is a step forward from the recent tendency to predict quakes within five-year windows, Vidale said. He said the team's work will help steer the scientific community in the direction of more precise and, eventually, quite useful forecasts.

Some scientists are not sure the team is taking the right approach.

"There is science behind it, but it is inherently a pattern recognition approach that he is taking," Jones said.

But the bottom line will be whether the approach produces results, Minster said.

"It doesn't matter how you predict earthquakes if you are successful," he said.

Even if the 6.4 does not come to pass and Keilis-Borok fails to go 3-for-3, disaster response officials say the forecast will have reminded Southern Californians of the danger they face constantly.

"Whether we have the earthquake that he's predicting or not, his prediction has raised awareness. And that's a good thing," said Bonnie Reed, program supervisor for the Riverside County Office of Emergency Services.

"We're making it another learning opportunity," Reed said. "We're really pushing the preparedness aspect, the planning aspect ---- what to do in your home, what to do at work, what to do in your car."

"We tend to forget that we live in a seismically active land," she said.


IN DENIAL

Steffen, the San Diego County emergency services director, said residents across that county tend not only to forget, but to be in denial because other areas have been hit harder in recent years.

"San Diego County, like all of Southern California, is earthquake country," Steffen said. "We've been very lucky compared to L.A. and other areas. That doesn't mean we're any less seismically active."

According to earthquake center records, large temblors rattled the San Diego County region in 1800, 1862, 1894 and 1986 (Oceanside). And the San Jacinto and Elsinore fault systems, which cross Riverside, San Diego and Imperial counties, recorded sizable shakes in 1890, 1892, 1899, 1910, 1918, 1923, 1937, 1954, 1968 and 1982.

The last major shaker on the Elsinore, the fault that poses significant danger to Southwest Riverside County and North San Diego County, struck May 15, 1910, toppling chimneys in Wildomar and Corona. It registered a magnitude 6 on the quake strength scale.

Scientists say the Elsinore fault is capable of going off again at magnitude 7, giving it the potential to cause widespread significant damage. On average, said San Diego State's Rockwell, the Elsinore gets hammered by a magnitude-7 quake or larger once every 400 to 600 years. And the last one that size occurred near Pala 300 to 400 years ago.

If the hammer falls, damage could occur in Lake Elsinore, Wildomar, Murrieta, Temecula, Ramona and Julian, and on the Pechanga and Pala Indian reservations, Rockwell said. Most structures should withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake because the area has built up over the last two decades with strict building codes in place, he said.

"New houses tend to do very well in large earthquakes," Rockwell said. "As long as they are not built on the fault, they should do reasonably well."

A big one affecting communities in Riverside and San Diego counties is inevitable, whether it comes from that fault, another one farther east or still another scientists don't now know exists, Jones said.

"We know that it is going to happen one day," Reed said. "It's not if, it's when."

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (909) 676-4315, Ext. 2616, or ddowney@californian.com.

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