They describe "victory" as public doubt. That's how Chairman Henry Waxman characterized the American Petroleum Institute (API), and its take on climate change, in this morning's House Committee hearing on "Political Interference with Science: Global Warming, Part II."

Just 'public doubt'?

Lightweights.

Some real estate promoters, land speculators, and a local Building Owners and Managers Association managed to convince a nation that sunny California's earthquake problem could be safely ignored!

Damaging earthquakes visited California often during the great Westward Migration. Two in particular devastated the San Francisco Bay region, in 1868 and 1906. After each, sketchy news reports of death and destruction filtered back across the country, scaring tourists away and threatening to staunch the flow of transplants who fed the Golden State's post-Civil War housing bubble.

The news was not good for the West Coast real estate industry, or the wealthy industrialists who staked their fortunes on an endless stream of new residents attracted to the land of endless summer.

What to do?

What else! Spin the facts. Revise history. And sell the American public a silk-purse scenario that would keep the people, and profits, rolling in.

Less than two weeks after the Great San Francisco Earthquake in 1906, and the fire that followed, "the Real Estate Board of San Francisco had passed resolutions pledging its members to speak hereafter of the disaster as 'the great fire' instead of 'the great earthquake.' " (Geschwind, 2001).

Without a mention of the colossal earthquake, then-Governor George C. Pardee wrote, "this is not the first time that San Francisco has been destroyed by fire, I have not the slightest doubt that the City by the Golden Gate will be speedily rebuilt, and will, almost before we know it, resume her former great activity. (source)

Great conflagrations had earlier destroyed much of Chicago, Boston and Baltimore, and lesser urban fires had raged in New York, Massachusetts, Iowa and Mississippi. By comparison, San Francisco's "fire disaster" became more palatable -- and more preventable -- than nature's unpredictable seismic wrath.

(Equally important for San Francisco property owners, fire damage was an insured loss. Most hazard policies of the day excluded building damage done before the fire that was due to other causes...like an earthquake. So, a "fire disaster" vastly improved the odds that insurance claims would be paid.)

The 1906 shock devastated cities and towns throughout the northern half of coastal California. But the Sacramento Valley Development Association, protecting its territory from fallout, reported that the quake's damage was limited to the small area of the San Francisco Peninsula and San Jose (Geschwind, 2001).

To prop up the confidence of out-of-state investors and the stock market, civic promoters and the California press minimized the damage and trivialized the seismic hazard. They argued that the earthquake danger had now disappeared and urged that San Francisco be rebuilt quickly. "Official" dollar losses were low-balled for public consumption. Photos were doctored to hide earthquake damage. And the death toll was fixed by fiat. A year after the quake, the county Board of Supervisors proclaimed the official death toll for the disaster to be 478. Only last year, on the centennial anniversary of the 1906 quake, was the "formerly official" death toll adjusted upward, to 3,400 (and the actual number could be as high as 6,000).

Fanning the fears of East Coast observers was a ground-breaking report published in 1908 by a team of eminent scientists in the Bay Area ("The State Earthquake Investigation Commission"). In two volumes and an atlas, they photographed, mapped and documented in painstaking detail the damaging effects of the great earthquake and identified its cause: the San Andreas fault, a fracture in the crust that stretched through most of the state.

Worse, they proposed a new theory that explained the earthquake process -- and it anticipated repeating cycles of great earthquakes in coastal California. The experts' message was clear: California's landscape was born of earthquakes and its residents should get ready for more to come, with buildings that are better, stronger, and safer.

No one on Main Street was ready to hear that.

The scientists' prudent message of preparedness was all but lost on the public, glossed over, revised, reviled or ignored as opportunities permitted. The revisionists, with their unmatched financial resources, press access, and political influence, prevailed. Their post-disaster civic marketing plan belittled the earthquake threat and headlined tales of survival from the great fire, in stories carried by East Coast newspapers.

And their plan worked.

San Francisco recovered quickly. (Too quickly for the rebuilding to benefit much from new quake-resistant engineering designs.) By 1915 the city's rebirth was essentially complete, in time to host the Panama Pacific Exposition commemorating the opening of the Panama Canal that year -- and to celebrate San Francisco's "rise from the ashes."

Behind it all were the "California boosters" -- an organized alliance of pro-growth real estate developers, mortgage bankers, insurance underwriters, politicians and businessmen in league with a complicit, or at least compliant, newspaper industry (Geschwind, 2001).

They fooled a nation with their media assault on California's earthquake risk. Even nature herself was a co-conspirator. After the great release of seismic energy in 1906, so little remained beneath the state's faulted landscape that metropolitan California did not suffer another serious earthquake until 1918, and even that was on the fringe (a moderate shock near Riverside).

But they weren't done yet. The Great Whitewash of 1906 merely laid the battle plan. The "Fort Sumpter" between seismology and the real estate industry awaited southern California's next severe earthquake, in 1925. The opening volley was an earthquake prediction.

The Building Owners and Managers Association of Los Angeles jump into the fray when this post continues in "Part II: Predicting perils."

Oh. And Waxman's hearing? His Oversight and Government Reform Committee is now investigating a modern remake of this classic tale. He and fellow Democrats contend the White House censored government climate scientists, and revised their reports on climate change, in order to create public doubt about global warming science and belittle the role of humans in its cause. If true, it would favor the view that global warming can be safely ignored, too. The lead "booster" in this case was a former oil industry lobbyist with the API. He was appointed by the Bush Administration to monitor and manage the government's climate change documents for the Council on Environmental Quality. (NY Times article)

Acknowledgement

Carl-Henry Geschwind, 2001, California Earthquakes: Science, Risk, and the Politics of Hazard Mitigation, Johns Hopkins University Press, 352 p. (An absolutely awesome, and award-winning, story about California's earthquake history and the scientists, engineers and policy makers who collectively developed the state's, and by extension, the nation's, earthquake hazard policies and their applications, such as seismic-resistant building codes, land-use hazard zoning, and real estate laws regulating natural hazard disclosure. Most of the real estate history in my post above came from this excellent book!)