That a 6.7-magnitude earthquake will hit California in the next 30 years is almost certain -- there's a 99.7% chance, according to scientists with the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast.
For comparison, the 6.7-magnitude 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California resulted in 57 deaths, thousands of injuries and more than $40 billion in damage, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The 6.5-magnitude quake that struck near Eureka, Calif., on Jan. 9 was another reminder of this constant threat. Earthquake damage is generally covered only by earthquake insurance, not by standard renters or homeowners insurance policies.
Yet just 12% of Californians who buy residential insurance policies also buy earthquake insurance. Because this number doesn't take into account people who buy no form of home, renters or condo insurance, the actual percentage is even lower. Those without such coverage face total loss of their homes and all their furniture and other personal belongings. What gives?
Disaster psychology
If you think Californians' reluctance to buy earthquake insurance is just about high deductibles and premiums, think again. The decision to forgo earthquake insurance has as much to do with psychology and biology as with economics, researchers say."Human beings are hard-wired to believe in their heart and soul that disasters don't happen and won't happen to them," says Dennis Mileti, a retired University of Colorado sociology professor and noted researcher. "Human beings are not rational when it comes to risk. Rationality is a myth invented by the Italians in the Renaissance."
But people perceive risk according to their experiences, rather than through scientific forecasts. After the 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, for instance, state and U.S. Geological Survey officials warned residents they could be in for a strong aftershock within the next 72 hours. Those who suffered a lot of damage did a lot to get ready, Mileti says. Those who suffered a moderate amount of damage did a moderate amount of preparation, and those who suffered no damage did nothing to prepare -- regardless of the fact that they were in the danger zone.
"When it comes to human beings, there is no such thing as objective risk," Mileti says. "There's only perceived risk."
The deciding factor of whether Californians buy earthquake insurance has nothing to do with demographics, income, home values or how close they live to an earthquake fault, says Risa Palm, the senior vice president for academic affairs and provost for Georgia State University. Palm is a social-science researcher who studied Californians' attitudes about earthquake insurance before and after the Northridge quake. "The major predictor is whether they believe they themselves will be affected by an earthquake," she says.
Palm says that after the Northridge earthquake, Californians who suffered damage were slightly more likely to purchase quake insurance, but that tendency faded over time.
Denial: In our biology?
"If you understand evolutionary biology, it gives us some real insight into why we take certain kinds of risks and don't take certain kinds of risks," says UCLA evolutionary biology professor Jay Phelan, a co-author of "Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food; Taming Our Primal Instincts."Our brains developed to handle the risks we faced as small groups of hunters and gatherers and weren't designed to wrap themselves around concepts such as earthquake risk, a rare event and one that primitive people couldn't do anything about anyway.
"You're asking us to solve a problem we're not built to solve," Phelan says.
However, he takes issue with the notion that humans are hard-wired to ignore impending disasters. We may not be designed to understand earthquake risk on a gut level, but we can take steps to override our biology to prepare, he says.
Phelan, who lives in Malibu, Calif., has taken steps to prepare for earthquakes but doesn't have earthquake insurance. He says he can't afford it, yet if the cost of earthquake insurance was rolled into a mortgage payment, he says he could probably trick himself into thinking he could afford it.
