Why I don't live in San Francisco!

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Fine Wine For A Big Quake
Sure a quake kit is a great thing -- if you can afford it. Too bad about everyone else
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, September 21, 2005


You are not ready.

This is just a fair guess. You are not fully prepared for the monster life-slapping colon-rattling quake that is slated to devastate our fair state somewhere between the time you finish reading this sentence and about 2035 -- an epic disaster that will make Katrina look like a waterslide and that, if all predictions and all experts are to be believed, will look something like "The Day After Tomorrow" crossed with "28 Days Later" with a dash of "War of the Worlds" and nothing at all like "Just Like Heaven," with cute blonde Reese Witherspoons walking around all sassy and blonde and perkily dead and haranguing the really cute living dudes by casually walking through the wall while they're taking a shower. Whoops!

It will, of course, be much worse. If the quake is big enough and hits us just right, experts predict nightmare scenarios, presumably full of desperate hordes of lost citizens tearing like wild dogs through twisted skyscrapers stuck like stalagmite Popsicles around the state, as the levees crumble and bridges shatter and roads split apart to reveal great underground networks of secret government nuke labs and three-legged alien hellbeasts working in collusion with the GOP to zap all the heathen pagan queers of California once and for all. See? You're not even close to ready.

Here's the test: Do you have a fully stocked earthquake preparedness kit? Have you followed the official guidelines? Do you have emergency stashes of fresh water and canned salmon and bandages and batteries and flashlights and traveler's checks and pliers and disinfectant and sewing kits and emergency radios and camping stoves and guns and flares and blankets and fuel and a generator and a radio and candy and porn? No? Have you not been paying attention?

Do you not know that they predict 1,700 destroyed roads? Over 330,000 uninhabitable homes? How about the flailing emergency response teams, police and fire and so on, unable to communicate with one another because of faulty communication channels? Did you know they predict innumerable smashed levees across the state, resulting in flooded cities and unusable bridges and collapsed everything and dead bodies like confetti, with only a fraction of the regional hospitals still functioning to accommodate all the death? It is not, let us just say, a very pretty picture.

So then. It's time. Get your kit together. Do you have about $500 to spare? Or more like $1,000? Because if you truly follow the instructions and if you properly assemble the earthquake kit per the Red Cross guidelines, you will spend at least that on all the various "basic" supplies, double that if you make a kit for your car (which they do, in fact, recommend), quintuple that if you include vital ingredients and essential items any true SFite absolutely must have in the event they have to go without Pottery Barn and chilled pinot gris and Ace Wasabi's sushi for a whole week, and 20 times that if you actually lay out the ten grand to properly retrofit your house.

Because let's be honest. Disaster preparedness is mostly for the middle and upper classes. It is for the informed and the educated, the credit carded and the disposable incomed, the newspaper subscribers and registered voters and people who keep a spare pair of Timberland boots in the trunk of the Range Rover, just in case.

As Katrina proved in no uncertain terms, if you're poor or from the lower classes and a massive natural disaster strikes, you are, of course, screwed, given how you do not have extra money, no cash reserves to spend on motels or plane tickets, no credit card numbers to keep written down in a safe place. You do not have a car. You do not own a cell phone. You do not have wealthy relatives in Miami with a few spare rooms in their beach house. When disaster hits, you simply do not have anywhere to go.

All of which means the Bush administration will consider you, essentially, trash, disposable, invisible -- except for when the TV cameras find you floating face down in the flooded street and suddenly Bush's poll numbers collapse and Dubya comes on to pretend he understands your plight and will have his mom send you cookies and a warm condescending hug ASAP.

See, they just don't know. Or, for that matter, care. The government and the GOP in particular, they just have no idea of true American reality, of how the poor actually live, of the vicious inequities of consumer culture (which their nasty domestic policies only exacerbate), the brutal gap between the haves and the have-nots, between Lands' End and Salvation Army, between stock portfolio and food stamps, between stashing away an emergency block of Brie and a case of Sterling cab for when the Big One strikes, and hoping you don't get stabbed at the emergency shelter over a candy bar.

This is, after all, what most baffled the snide and quietly racist GOP leadership: Why didn't all those poor people in New Orleans just leave? Why didn't they hop in the Escalade and fill the tank with a hundred bucks' worth of Unocal premium and hightail it outta New Orleans and head for a Travelodge and watch the disaster on the Panasonic big-screen TV with the rest of us, like any good upstanding citizen? What the hell was wrong with them?

It's a breathtaking type of all-American myopia that probably won't be all that different here. Hell, any major disaster in San Francisco and California will have the same two-tiered effect as anywhere: those who have comfortable access to all goods and services, and the rest. And while our state may be better prepared than Louisiana to handle the onslaught of devastation to all classes, the burden will, of course, still fall disproportionately on the shoulders of the poor.

After all, as the Bush value system makes indisputably clear, how well you survive usually lies in direct proportion to how well you live. Sure, it's a global truism. Sure, it's the same as it ever was. But in the world's wealthiest and most (ostensibly) beneficent nation, the dichotomy is even more vicious, even more revealing of our troubled and Bush-ravaged spirit.

Chances are, if you're reading this column you could very well afford to put together a decent enough disaster kit. And of course you very well should. As the experts say, a massive quake is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And to be sure, you do not want to be running around looting the local Restoration Hardware for fine drawer pulls and Egyptian sheets with anything less than the finest in emergency tools and goggles and Tasers.

Meanwhile, the irony looms over our culture like a black cloud. Because much like health care and birth control and education and housing and the rest, the people who need disaster preparedness the most are, of course, the ones least likely to have access to it. And if massive natural disasters expose our culture to anything, it's just that type of inequity, the kind that still plagues the world's richest nation like a disease.

But hey, at least we have FEMA.


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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.


As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.