But Mayor Gavin Newsom's spokesman, Peter Ragone, says the single biggest lesson they've taken from New Orleans is the need for average citizens to prepare themselves. Officials have long been emphasizing that message. Schools and workplaces hold earthquake drills a couple of times a year to train San Franciscans to crouch under desks or huddle in doorways when the ground starts to rumble. And the city has trained more than 13,000 block captains in rudimentary first aid and earthquake preparedness so that there are trained first responders in every neighborhood.
But surveys show that the vast majority of San Franciscans still seem to be ignoring the danger. As many as two thirds of San Franciscans haven't taken even rudimentary steps such as setting aside bottled water, one survey found. What's more, in some neighborhoods, studies show more than 30 percent of the houses would be destroyed by a magnitude 7 earthquake. "We know we have some work to do," says Ragone.
Indeed they do, says Jonathan Ridpath, safety officer for St. Luke's Hospital, who sheepishly admits he doesn't have any kind of emergency kit set aside in his home. If there's a quake, he figures he'll just walk to work, where he's already set up three backup generators and enough supplies to feed hundreds of workers and patients for a week.
The confidence in official preparations and experience from previous quakes may have lulled many San Franciscans into complacency. John Konstin, a native San Franciscan, doesn't have the recommended bottled water set aside at home and hasn't made any contingency plans for his restaurant, John's Grill, which is locally famous because Dashiell Hammett has Sam Spade order lamb chops there in The Maltese Falcon. When the dark wood walls inside his historic restaurant started lurching back and forth in 1989, tourists dining there were alarmed. But Konstin just stood calmly, riding it out.
"It was a nice dance," he says now.
That, of course, is exactly the kind of thing that Hammett's tough, cynical detective would have said. And it may very well be that the specter of Spade's sneer may be the reason San Francisco, which likes to call itself "The City That Knows How," isn't doing more to protect itself from the inevitable.
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