Securing Your Contents

Yesterday provided an incredible opportunity for me to spend several hours looking around a variety of laboratory rooms here in the San Francisco Bay area.

I got the change to ask several dozen lab managers the following question:  “What would you like to have fastened down in the room to keep it from falling over or getting moved around in an earthquake?”

What surprised me the more that the variety of answers I got was the fact that not one of them seemed to have had given the matter any thought.

It would seem to me, that particularly after seeing the devastation in places like Haiti, New Zealand and Japan, that surviving an earthquake would be foremost on everyone’s mind.  And perhaps it is for most people.  But perhaps most people don’t realize that there are simple steps that they can take to secure their environment.  Perhaps they think that the coming earthquake will be so bad that the likelihood of survival is slim anyway.  It might be that they don’t trust the securing of contents to hold in a big earthquake.  Or maybe people have a buffer inside, that protects them from projecting the tragedy in another place onto their own personal future.

A lot of lab managers shared the  thought that many items are too big to move in an earthquake.  Buildings move.  Anything in a building is smaller than the building.  Anything in a building can move in an earthquake.  Or, another way to look at it would be:  The entire ground under a building moves in an earthquake, so the building and everything in it  moves in relation to the ground.

Regardless of the reason, the “wake-up call” that major quakes have don’t really seem to personalize the preparedness urgency nearly as well as an actual earthquake.  Dr. Dennis Mileti has done some great research on the sociological aspects of disaster readiness.  He tells governments to combine forces and promote earthquake readiness the way Coca Cola sells product, with a simple message repeated over and over.

Here’s the message:  Secure contents, secure contents, secure contents, secure contents, secure contents.