It happened in a relatively small Northern California town, not particularly heavily populated, but one littered with picturesque older buildings in an agricultural region that draws millions of tourists every year. It’s wine country with the some of best vintages and the finest restaurants in the land. But at 3:30 in the morning on August 24th, a 6.1 earthquake slammed into this area, wreaking havoc across the region, hitting particularly hard in the little city of Napa.
Napa County alone pumps about $13 billion into California’s economy every year, while producing only about 4% of the state’s wine output. But it’s the good stuff! Facing the worst shaker experienced in Northern California in a quarter of a century, the total damage has yet to be calculated. It will be over a billion dollars. Over two hundred injuries, some of them very serious. Power outages, about 100 burst water mains, and over 50 buildings getting the dreaded red-tag (uninhabitable). Inventories of really expensive wine, some in barrels yet to be bottled and some in thousands of bottles crashing to the floor, some producing expensive “flood” damage within winery buildings… recorded really serious damage to many small local businesses. Really fine olive oil inventories for some businesses totally gone.
Large sections of the United States are finding out that earthquakes are not relegated to the West Coast. And fracking has introduced quakes with magnitudes over 4.0 to communities in oil-producing Oklahoma. While the “Big One” – the San Andreas fault which created the spectacular Bay Area harbor – seems to get all the headlines, the entire West Coast is situated on that tectonic plate that marks the Pacific “Ring of Fire.” The Pacific Plate has separated Baja California from the rest of Mexico, and rises up through that San Andreas Fault, exiting North America at the split it caused in San Francisco Bay. But the edge of that volatile plate continues up the coast and wraps around southern Alaska, where massive earthquakes are well within recent memory: the 1964 9.2 Alaska quake was the second biggest shaker in recorded history, with 139 fatalities in the relatively lightly populated Anchorage area.
When an earthquake really hits, the damage to structures, infrastructure and human lives can be horrifically huge. But strangely, Americans are woefully under-insured (and where they carry coverage, 10% deductibles and designated exclusions make even covered folks bleed to pay for a post-quake fix). “Some homeowners who suffered damage are in for a further shock when they learn they have to pay for their rebuilding costs out of their own pockets: Only about 12 percent of California homeowners have earthquake insurance coverage. In areas hardest hit by Sunday’s quake, such as Napa, fewer than 6 percent of homeowners have earthquake coverage, according to the most recent data from the California Earthquake Authority.
“The percentage of homeowners who have purchased earthquake insurance has declined over the years, both in California and across the nation. Data from the Insurance Information Institute show that only seven percent of homeowners nationwide have earthquake insurance, down from 10 percent last year. In the West, 10 percent of homeowners have the coverage, a drop from 22 percent last year.
“In California, 30 percent of homeowners had earthquake insurance after the 1994 Northridge earthquake killed several dozen people and caused about $44 billion in damage. The disaster taught many people the value of earthquake insurance, said Robert P. Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute… But 20 years later, ‘people decided to roll the dice and not to buy the coverage,’ Hartwig said.” Washington Post, August 26th. We need to stand together to help our fellow citizens cope with this disaster. We have also received a painful reminded to prepare for natural disasters, power and communications failures and… to get the right kinds of insurance for the disasters that face so many American communities.
I’m Peter Dekom, and what happened in Napa should be a wake-up call to the rest of us to get ready for... whatever your neck of the woods threatens!
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