That has got to be a violent tornado.
Get those kids in that basement. Get 'em in that closet.
Get away from the windows. Get away from the windows.
Get away! Get away!
People underneath the girders of this overpass.
They're still hanging on.
Oh my God, we're having an earthquake.
Wait a minute. Hold on. Hold on.
Can you feel that? There go the lights. Oh!
We have a major fire burning near San Francisco's marina district.
We have the band now approaching the coast.
So we're just starting the long period of about 12 to 16 hours
when we're going to experience the thrust of this hurricane.
Can we spend most of our lives learning how to control ourselves
and our environment?
And suddenly, you wake up with the realization
I am not in control.
In cities all across the world, we go about our daily routines,
secure in our surroundings,
confident that our lives are orderly and predictable.
But at any moment, that confidence can be shattered,
as nature demonstrates that it still has the upper hand.
When we least expect it,
when we're least prepared, disaster can strike.
And few disasters are as unsettling as an earthquake.
The quake that hit San Francisco on October 17, 1989
was actually centered 50 miles away,
near a mountain called Loma Prieta.
Even in an area accustomed to earthquakes,
this one struck like a hammer.
It was tremendous, believe me. I just held on to dear life.
There was a sudden movement like this,
shaking, whole store rattling.
I mean, the roof, everything, the beams.
My TV screen popped out, and glass began to break,
you know, things like that.
Big marble table flew across the room
and shattered like glass almost.
The Loma Prieta earthquake lasted only 15 seconds,
but in that quarter minute,
northern California suffered six billion dollars in damage,
and 62 people lost their lives.
Earthquakes are not nice.
The ground is moving beneath one
the very essence of stability is questioned.
And that's quite apart from the damage,
the destruction, the deaths.
There's something awful about an earthquake
and it's not fun at all.
My guess is that earthquakes are really so scary
because you don't have any warning.
It's the only thing besides a nuclear war that can really
one second you're living in a big beautiful city
and ten seconds later, it's flat.
Earthquakes leave their trail of destruction on every continent.
In 1948, the city of Fukui, Japan
was leveled by a tremor several times
more powerful than atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mexico city was struck by a huge earthquake in 1985.
Nearly 10,000 died in the greatest disaster in Mexican history.
In September 1993,
a quake devastated the Indian state of Maharashtra.
In spite of warning shocks, most of the victims were asleep
when their houses collapsed around them.
Every day the earth is shaken by hundreds of small earthquakes.
Most go unnoticed.
They usually occur along the boundaries of the thin plates
that cover the earth like an eggshell.
Driven by the heat deep within the earth's core,
the plates grind against each other along lines call faults.
When the plates find their motion blocked, stress builds up.
Finally the fault gives way.
The released energy races through the earth
in the form of seismic waves.
One place where the boundary between plates
is dramatically evident
is the 700-mile-long San Andreas fault.
This is the source for most of California's earthquakes.
But for California, as for much of the world,
the movement of plates like these
is also an indispensable creative force.
If we didn't have earthquakes,
if we didn't have this great flow of heat
from the interior of the earth,
the earth would be a cold, dead place.
If it wasn't for this great flow of heat,
there'd be no continents, no oceans, no atmospheres,
the earth would be as dead and dry and cold as the moon.
Everywhere you look in California,
the hills are really created
by, by the action of the earthquakes, for the most part.
It's really the earthquakes
that create the topography, the valleys, the mountains,
control the river streams, where things go.
Earthquakes have been shaping the landscape of California for eons.
It's only in the last few hundred years
that civilization has gotten in the way.
Around the turn of the century,
San Francisco was a booming metropolis,
an emblem of California's newfound prosperity.
But on April 18, 1906,
that prosperity was shattered by the most famous quake
in American history.
Most of the city was destroyed in the tremor
and the fires that followed.
Much of charred rubble from those fires
was pushed into San Francisco Bay, adding to an existing landfill
that eventually became part of the city itself.
Today, that landfill lies beneath a section of the marina district.
This was the area hardest hit in the 1989 quake.
The problem here is the rubble from the tremor of 1906,
buried underground.
Shaken by the new quake, it literally fell apart,
and so did much of the neighborhood.
The practice of building on such unstable ground
is a problem throughout the world.
Mexico city was built on top of a dried-up lake bed.
The 1985 quake was actually centered hundreds of miles away,
but it turned the soft land under the capital
into a nearly liquid mass.
The buildings simply collapsed;
victims were crushed under tons of concrete and steel.
It's a modern nightmare:
Urban infrastructure crashing down around us.
As geologists and engineers like to remind us,
earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do.
Certain structures, like bridges and freeways,
are especially vulnerable to tremors.
In San Francisco's quake,
most of the deaths occurred on the Nimitz Freeway,
when a one-and-a-half mile section of the upper deck collapsed
on the roadway beneath.
Ed McVey was driving a freight truck when it happened.
There was no traffic.
I was doing about 55,
and all of a sudden it felt like I had a blowout.
I had no control over the truck.
Luckily, there was nobody beside me
because I was just all over the place.
I hit the brakes.
In the rearview mirror,
I could see what looked like the freeway falling,
and that didn't make any sense.
I saw cars and trucks disappearing underneath the rubble.
And I just knew I was dead.
I had no way of getting out of it. There was nothing I could do.
McVey was lucky that day:
His truck just happened to stop
under the only section of freeway that didn't fall.
I don't deal with it as well as people think I do.
I can be driving along anywhere,
and all of a sudden I've got freeway falling down on top of me.
Ed McVey escaped without a scratch.
Forty-two other motorists died.
Five years later, when an earthquake hit Los Angeles,
there was a similar freeway collapse.
Fortunately, the tremor struck before dawn,
when the road was virtually empty.
Next time this could happen at rush hour.
Yet overall, in spite of the freeway disasters
and the loss of some apartment buildings and houses,
San Francisco and Los Angeles weathered their tremors
extremely well...
largely because most of their tall buildings were constructed
with earthquakes in mind.
Too often, in other parts of the world, that's not true.
In December of 1988,
a relatively mild tremor struck the Armenian city of Leninakan,
and its acres of cheap, shoddily constructed housing.
Eighty percent of the city was destroyed,
and more than 25,000 people killed.
Specially trained dogs were brought in
to help locate survivors and victims
standard practice in such urban catastrophes.
Fortunately, Leninakan was a small city.
Tang-shan, in northern China, was not.
Just before dawn, on July 28, 1976,
an earthquake tore through Tang-shan.
It was the first quake in modern history
to score a direct hit on a major city.
As nearly as anyone can tell,
it left close to a quarter of a million people dead.
Entire families were wiped out,
so it was impossible to find out from the survivors
exactly how many had perished.
Besides falling buildings,
earthquakes create other special problems in urban environments:
Broken gas lines spark fires,
and broken water mains can make fire fighting nearly impossible.
We have a major fire brewing
in San Francisco's Marina District.
In the 1989 quake,
the San Francisco Fire Department
battled 34 major blazes simultaneously.
With underground water supplies cut off,
fireboats had to be used to pump water from San Francisco Bay.
Unfortunately, earthquakes in large cities,
with their accompanying horrors, are not rare events:
When you look at a map of the world
and plot the truly great cities of the world,
and compare it with a map
of the great really destructive earthquakes
of the last thousand years,
there's an almost one-to-one correspondence.
I think we may find ourselves witnessing
a large number of destructive earthquakes
in the next three or four decades
that is going to really horrify the world.
The next great urban earthquake may happen in Tokyo.
This vast metropolis, with its population of more that 27 million,
lies near the busy intersection of three tectonic plates.
Small tremors are an everyday occurrence here,
and big ones strike all too frequently.
In 1923, Tokyo was nearly destroyed by a massive earthquake.
Much of the destruction, and most of the 140,000 deaths,
were not caused by the quake itself,
but by the fires that raged on for days afterward.
September 1, the anniversary of the 1923 quake,
is commemorated every year as "disaster day."
Fire departments and emergency crews stage public demonstrations,
while ordinary citizens can get a sense of
what a major earthquake feels like,
and try their hands at putting out fires.
The Japanese are proud of their earthquake preparedness,
and they have good reason to be.
Modern Tokyo boasts some of the most advanced
earthquake-resistant architecture in the world.
Its skyscrapers are "smart buildings"
incorporating features
like motion stabilizers and internal gyroscopes.
But the vast majority of Tokyo's eight million buildings
are older, wood-frame structures.
They're squeezed along narrow, twisting streets
that could prove to a night mare for fire fighters.
To make matters worse,
the city is fringed
by an incendiary jumble of oil refineries,
fuel storage tanks, and chemical plants
much of it constructed atop unstable landfill on Tokyo Bay.
In short, even earthquake-conscious
Tokyo is a disaster waiting to happen.
The unsettling reality is that no place in the world
is completely safe from earthquakes...
not even areas where tremors are rare,
and preparations nonexistent.
The eastern United States and Europe
are hardly hotbeds of seismic activity,
but large quakes have occurred nearly everywhere on earth
at one time or another,
and unlike lightning, earthquakes do strike twice.
It's just a matter of time.
No other force in nature
can come close to matching the power of an earthquake -
except one.
Tornadoes strike with the intensity of a quake
and the surgical precision of a guided missile.
They have the power to fascinate as well as terrify,
and with the advent of video camcorders,
the terror is being well documented by home moviemakers.
This is in Haysville, ansas.
It's gonna' hit our house, Mom.
Just looking for it to hit this tornado.
Sometimes a cameraman gets more than he bargained for.
On a lakeshore in Minnesota...
an idyllic summer afternoon is about to be transformed
by the arrival of a tornado.
Look at that funnel.
Within seconds, curiosity will be replaced by panic.
Look here. Look at the highway trees.
A power line just went out.
Look at it. Oh...
This is cool.
There it goes. Here it comes.
Here it comes. It's right out here.
I'm ten feet from it and all the electricity,
all the power lines are going.
I'll film from the inside. We're filming.
Hold it right there. Don't stand by the windows.
There goes the windows. Oh, get away from the windows.
Tree just blew over. Get away from the windows.
Get away. Get away! Get away! Get away!
Where is everybody? Where is everybody?
Oh no!
Where is everybody?
Oh, my God.
Are you guys okay?
These tornado victims were incredibly lucky:
There were no injuries, and only superficial damage.
The devastation is usually far worse.
A tornado can strike in any country.
But more twisters develop over the midwestern United States
than anywhere else.
And in their wake,
they leave a trail of destruction and despair.
Simulated in a laboratory,
a tornado is fairly simple to analyze.
It's really a whirlpool of converging opposites:
Upwelling warm air confronts down-tumbling cool;
dry air encounters moist;
winds aloft collide with winds below.
In nature, that produces torrential rains, dangerous lightning
and hail storms, and violent winds of up to 300 miles per hour.
Tornadoes travel fast,
especially across the flat landscape of the plains.
When a television news crew
found themselves trapped in the path of a ansas twister,
their only sensible option was to take cover.
Let's go, let's go, let's go.
Go, go, go. Shoot it.
You better floor it. You better floor it. Shoot it.
We're all right. Just stay here.
You're okay. You're okay.
Eep going, man, keep going.
Faster? No.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lots faster, lots faster!
Lots faster. Greg, it's catching us!
You gotta go, buddy.
You gotta really go.
You gotta blaze, buddy. Yeah, we want to jump out.
We want to get in front of the van.
Get under here!
Eep rolling. Yeah, I'm rolling.
Got it? Let's go!
Get up under the girders!
Is that where we want to go?
Yes. Underneath the girders.
Eep rolling.
Hang onto the girders.
You're all right. You're okay.
Tornadoes are among the most destructive
of all natural phenomena,
and in the United States alone,
they're responsible for dozens of deaths every year.
But a tornado cuts a narrow path,
and rarely lasts for more than 20 minutes.
Even more devastating are the forces unleashed
by tropical cyclones,
called typhoons in the Pacific
and hurricanes in the South Atlantic and Caribbean.
These monster storms can be hundreds of miles wide
and last for days,
tearing vast swaths of destruction.
Tropical cyclones visit some parts of the world
with frightening regularity,
and cause staggering losses of life and property.
In 1970, a huge typhoon struck what was then East Pakistan,
leaving more than 300,000 dead.
Frustrated in part by the slow pace of relief efforts,
the people of the region seceded a year later
and created the new nation of Bangladesh.
Bangladesh continues to be pummeled frequently by killer typhoons,
made worse by storm surges
wind-driven walls of seawater that flood this lowlying country.
In the Western Hemisphere, the islands of the Caribbean
and the southeast coast of the United States
are prime targets for hurricanes.
And the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. History
was Hurricane Andrew...
We have the band now approaching the coast.
So we're just starting the long period of about 12 to 16 hours
when we're going to experience the thrust of this hurricane.
When Andrew struck Florida on August 23, 1992,
its winds were clocked at 164 miles an hour,
and they were still climbing when they broke the wind gauge
at the National Hurricane Center.
The storm hit hardest just south of Miami.
Though it came and went here overnight,
Andrew, like all natural disasters, left behind a legacy of ruin.
It created massive environmental damage
that could last for generations.
For the survivors, life would never be the same.
No insurance. My car is devastated,
but I'm not the only one. You know,
there's quite a few people that are going through the same thing.
Look all around.
It's a very lost feeling.
Pictures of the family. That's my niece and my great...
Before it began its rampage across South Florida,
Andrew was born, like most hurricanes,
as a cloud disturbance off the African coast.
Swirling storms are formed when warm, moist air rises and cools.
The storms grow larger and faster as they race westward,
developing into violent cyclones
that can rip through the west Atlantic from June to November.
The hurricane's center, known as the eye, remains calm,
but the eye walls are packed with intense thunderstorms
that generate fierce, gusty winds.
And winds have rarely been as savage as Andrew's.
The storm left a total of 62 people dead.
And it left parts of South Florida a wasteland.
This hurricane caused more destruction of property
than any other natural disaster
in the history of the United States.
We're talking in the order of 15 to 30 billion dollars.
It could have been much worse.
Andrew missed the densely populated center of Miami
by only 20 miles.
As it was, 160,000 people were forced from their homes.
Besides the thousands of personal tragedies,
there was an immense environmental problem.
In one day,
hurricane Andrew created at least three million tons of garbage...
There was enough burnable debris to fuel fires
at more than a hundred sites at some of them 24 hours a day.
The smoke was bad enough,
but Andrew created other, more insidious dangers.
Mike Palmer's specialty
is containing hazardous and toxic spills.
After Andrew, he and his crew sifted
through devastated neighborhoods for household hazards.
Now, what you may normally see with one house
and the typical chemicals they'll have like, you know,
a small thing of acetone or a thing of brake fluid,
and here's some clear stain you know,
you'd say well what's the big deal? You know,
what's how bad could this really be to the environment?
Well, you know, if I opened this up,
and I poured it on the ground here,
you know, would it absolutely contaminate the groundwater
for this whole area?
No, it probably wouldn't.
But we don't have that here.
What we got here is we've got these quantities or more
in every single house.
And if this equipment comes in here and they rupture these containers
and it goes in the environment all at once like that,
it is too much.
This is only a fraction of the hazardous waste
recovered from the wreckage of thousands of homes.
No one knows how much toxic material remained unaccounted for.
In the chaos following a natural disaster like Hurricane Andrew,
human survival is the first priority.
But animals are victims too.
Miami's Metrozoo lay directly in Andrew's path.
The zoo suffered serious losses,
including hundreds of prized tropical birds,
and five large mammals.
Miraculously, most of the animals came through unharmed,
even though they were out in the open,
exposed to the fierce intensity of the storm.
No one knows quite how they survived,
because no one was around to watch.
Many of the zoo's exhibits were ruined.
And it will take decades to replace the crucial shade trees.
But the long process of recovery began right away.
I've received checks and letters
from every state in the country supporting the zoo.
People who've never heard from before.
People who've never been here.
And I think one of the most moving things in that whole situation was,
I received a check one day,
and I noticed the return address was from Homestead.
And Homestead is here in South Miami,
and it was probably the most devastated area
from Hurricane Andrew.
And I opened the letter, and there was a check there,
and it said, "Please, please accept this donation
in memory of our daughter, Naomi Browning
who was killed in the storm."
You feel almost guilty that something has not happened to you
because there's tragedy's around you like this.
And here you have a lady sending you a check
in the memory of her 12-year-old daughter
who happened to have been a volunteer here at the zoo,
volunteered her time.
And I said, "Ms. Browning, why?"
And through her tears,
and as she was crying on the phone and talking to me
she said, "Ron, prior to this beam falling down and crushing her,
the only thing she kept saying all night long was
'Mom, I'm so worried about the animals at the zoo."'
In the aftermath of a hurricane,
the survivors must try to make the best of what remains.
It's a long, slow process,
restoring shattered lives and replacing broken dreams.
But the residents of South Florida must also come to terms
with the certainty that another big hurricane is on the way,
perhaps next year, or the year after.
The long-term problem is that
people build their homes in areas most vulnerable to tropical storms.
All across the globe, if coastal development continues unabated,
more and more people will find themselves
in the paths of major hurricanes and typhoons,
and those storms could be more expensive
and more deadly than ever.
Most natural disasters are mercifully quick:
Earthquakes last only seconds.
Tornadoes rarely touch down for more than a few minutes.
Even hurricanes come and go in a matter of hours.
But a flood is a disaster in slow motion.
It can last as long as the rain continues to fall,
as long as the water continues to rise.
Some floods are of biblical proportions,
dragging on for weeks or even months.
Such a flood was the one
that struck the Mississippi Valley in 1993.
The people who live here
are accustomed to the river's perildic rise and fall,
They've often joined battle with the elements
to preserve their homes.
They refuse to remain passive in the face of disaster.
But 1993 brought the worst deluge in a century and a half.
The Mississippi became a monstrous adversary,
and the struggle would last for months.
The waters from nearly one quarter of North America
drain down the upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
In the spring of '93,
their tributaries were overwhelmed by relentless rain,
turning the land between the rivers into what some called
a "sixth Great Lake."
By mid-July, with record crests converging at St. Louis,
dozens of town downriver faced the danger of being wiped off the map
towns like Ste. Genevieve, Missouri.
Founded by French settlers in the 1740s,
Ste. Genevieve is the oldest European settlement
on the western banks of the Mississippi.
Some of its French colonial architecture exists now here else
in the United States.
And if the river had its way,
that rich heritage would soon be gone.
Where the waters were held at bay,
the town owed its safety to a makeshift wall of sandbags
and an extraordinary volunteer crusade.
People from all walks of life
from the locals to the National Guard
joined hands to try to save what was left of Ste. Gen.
The battle raged all summer long, as the river continued to rise.
But in one way, the people of the Mississippi Valley were fortunate.
As they waited for each new crest,
they could prepare for the onslaught.
But many floods happen fast, too fast for any response.
In southern France in 1992,
torrential rains raised river levels as much as 50 feet
in just a few hours.
The resulting flash floods overwhelmed defenseless towns,
and dozens drowned.
The people of Ste. Genevieve had time
to meet the river's gradual advance,
and they were ready for the worst.
One of those leading the fight was Vern Bauman, a local contractor.
Vern was president of the Downtown Levee District,
the agency responsible for maintaining the dikes
now swallowed by the river.
He coordinated the efforts to save what was left of the town.
Did you get any sleep tonight?
Well, what 15 minutes or what?
We got contractors.
We got the National Guard in here,
and a lot of civilian help and local people here.
And we got we just start coordinating everything,
trying to get the unions to work together.
And it's just a minute...
Sonny, we're gonna' need
we're gonna' need...
The rising tide had brought a flood of people to the town as well,
nearly 10,000 from 34 different states.
But in spite of all their efforts,
after two and a half months of flooding,
more than half of Ste. Genevieve lay underwater.
Temporary levees wove through town creating an artificial waterfront.
A man-made island rose
where Wehner Street had once met North Main:
The work of four families who banded together
in a desperate battle to save their homes.
And they seemed to be winning, at least for now.
But in the struggle to hold back the river,
the families had faced a heartbreaking decision:
Only the homes of those who could stay
and fight were protected by the dike.
It was agreed all at one time that all five was gonna' be here.
Then later one house was not included,
and I really feel bad about this one.
It belongs to Henry, Henry Stackle, and he's, he's in his 70s.
And he was always one who always fought.
A few years ago, he probably led the area up here.
Now, he's the river just keeps coming back,
and he's not as young as he used to be.
He's a very hard fighter,
and I guess this is the first one he ever lost.
This skirmish had been hard-won,
but the compound was, at best,
only a makeshift substitute for the permanent levees,
the ones that had failed.
Those had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers,
as part of a vast network designed to tame the Mississippi.
Over the course of a half-century,
the corps had constructed
some 2,200 miles of concrete-retaining walls
and earthen embankments, designed to defend towns and farms,
and "correct" the river's natural course.
The farmers themselves, together with state and local governments,
had built thousands miles more.
But the plan created new problems.
For 10,000 years,
the great floodplains of the American Midwest
served as a natural spillway for their rivers.
Only in the last few centuries has civilization encroached
on the river's domain.
As the river walls were extended and raised,
they cinched the flow tighter and tighter,
and the speed and pressure of the water built up behind them.
When the river could no longer be held back,
it would strike with a force
and impact multiplied by the tremendous volume.
That's what happened in the summer of '93
at places like askaskia Island, nine miles south of Ste. Genevieve.
There, no amount of effort could maintain the levees
or save the town.
It was an amazing sight.
The Mississippi River flexing its seemingly unlimited muscle.
Dozens of homes and other buildings
including the town's church, all underwater.
Some islanders believe the flood will be the death of a community
whose history goes back nearly 200 years.
Now all of askaskia's inhabitants,
human and animal, were forced to take refuge
on the only high ground available:
The very levee that had failed them.
Yeah, there's water on the whole island and all around the dike.
Probably the only part right now that does not have water on it
are the very high ridges out in the center,
and the water's going to continue coming up.
It's continual rain up north,
and a lot of dikes are broken both north and south.
So I'm sorry to tell you honey, but we lost everything, but us.
I love you, sweetheart.
We'll see ya' later, okay? All right. Bye-bye, hon.
I just wanted to get off. I wanted my kids, my husband off.
My furniture's all still there.
Everything we worked for. Had dogs, cats, two cows.
But I got my family.
My husband was born and raised over here.
I don't want to come back. I'm not gonna' lose it again.
All over the mid-west levees have provided the fore sense
security for the growing populations of the floodgate.
By the end of the summer of 93'
2/3 of all the levees have been bridged thoro-top.
As the river continue disturbed your sort.
Throughout the world, and throughout history,
people have always settled on floodplains,
taking advantage of their fertile soil,
and the rivers' own resources.
In many places they must be protected by artificial levees,
and levees have a tendency to fail,
sometimes with catastrophic results.
In China, in the 1930s,
floods breached the levees along the Yangtze and Huang Rivers.
The Yangtze floods killed three and a half million people
in one of the greatest natural disasters of this century.
Around Ste. Genevieve,
even where the levees were higher than the crest of the flood,
the river could still find a way to penetrate them.
After eight waterlogged weeks,
trouble spots were cropping up on the earthen walls.
Better get some bags here quick.
Even a small seep of water could pose a grave threat.
In just minutes, this situation went from threat to catastrophe.
Unwilling to give in after fighting so long,
Vern Bauman took one last gamble, and drove out to the break.
With luck, Vern hoped to stem the tide
and buy time for those families
whose homes stood in the waters' way.
He took earth from wherever he could,
even the footings of the levee beneath him.
As hard as he worked, he was no match for the river.
Soon, the outcome was clear.
All that remained was to pull men and machines off
the crumbling embankment and evacuate the houses behind.
There was two chances, slim and none, once that truck fell in.
What amazed me about the whole thing was how quick it went.
Throughout the Midwest, the floods of 1993 took a tremendous toll:
$10.5 billion in damage,
56,000 home flooded or destroyed.
306,000 square miles underwater,
and some 50 lives lost to the river.
As for the town of Ste. Genevieve,
it had been saved, at least most of it.
But hundreds buildings were lost or damaged.
Ste. Gen can't afford many more victories like this one.
There were important lessons to be learned from these floods,
and some people took them to heart.
In the past, most flood victims had returned
and rebuilt as a matter of course, but this time would be different.
In some places,
the river will be allowed to keep the land it reclaimed.
Thousands of acres of low-lying farms will be left open
for future flooding.
Many families and even entire towns
have decided to give up the struggle
and move to higher ground
where they'll be safe the next time the river floods.
These changes in practice and policy amount to an admission
that we can't fight nature and win.
It's finally becoming clear that we can't prevent natural disasters,
but perhaps we can learn how to predict them...
In California, scientists are trying to predict earthquakes.
The site is the sleepy little town of Parkfield.
Just about every 22 years,
a powerful earthquake rumbles through here.
And when the next on hits,
seismologist Allan Lindh hopes to be ready for it.
Parkfield will really be our first opportunity anywhere on earth
to really capture an earthquake in all its glory,
to really be sitting there waiting with all our tools out
and sharpened and waiting to go.
The U.S. Geological Survey
has spent millions of dollars wiring parkfield.
All over the valley, highly sophisticated instruments,
like this laser, are poised to detect the tiniest movement
along the San Andreas Fault.
If the earth shifts even a few millimeters before a quake strikes,
seismologists may be able to issue a warning.
The parkfield experiment is not just designed to predict
when an earthquake will happen,
but also exactly where it will strike.
It's based on an idea called the "seismic gap theory."
Seismic gap theory is really just a very simple notion.
And all it says is
since motin is occurring all along a plate boundary,
there are gonna' be earthquakes everywhere along it.
And the places that haven't and 'em lastest are going to be the places
to have them "next-est."
By pinpointing places with the greatest likelihood for a quake,
scientists and urban planners can focus on protecting buildings,
and people.
But geologists can't create an earthquake in the lab.
The only way for them to test their theories
is to wait for one to happen,
and hope they're still around afterwards to analyze the data.
Panning back. I've got to get this updraft just once in my life.
Observing tornadoes presents its own challenges, and thrills.
Every spring and summer, tornado season in the Midwest,
an army of amateur storm chasers is out in the field.
And video cameras are now standard equipment.
That has got to be a violent tornado.
Going head-to-head with a twister is an obsession
for both amateur storm chasers and professional scientists.
It may look like fun, but it pays off with valuable information
about the birth and behavior of these killer storms.
There goes the windshield.
Just as important as direct observation
are remote sensing techniques like Doppler radar.
Over the past two decades,
Doppler radar has revolutionized the study of tornadoes.
First used by the military to detect unfriendly missiles,
Doppler is so sensitive
it can track the movement of insects 40 miles away.
In the field, portable Doppler radar units can be used
to record data at dangerously close range.
I'm on the left side of that tight circulation and I'm gonna' go over.
With the information they've compiled,
scientists are creating computer models of severe storms
to learn even more about their structure and behavior.
As with earthquakes,
the key to avoiding catastrophe is alerting the public.
At the National Weather Service, scientists have introduced NEXRAD,
the "next generation" of advanced Doppler radar.
NEXRAD's enhanced imagery makes it easier
to spot tornadoes as they form, and that can save critical miuntes
in alerting those in the twister's path.
Hurricane prediction is also becoming more precise,
as scientists gain a new perspective on these giant storms,
with the help of powerful new tools
like the space shuttle and weather satellites.
And as the accuracy of forecasts improves,
hurricane fatalities are declining.
The beginning of the hurricane conditions will start there
anytime after dark this evening.
Today when hurricanes form over the Atlantic,
the National Hurricane Center in Miami serves
as a central clearinghouse
analyzing data, issuing forecasts,
and, most important,
broadcasting warnings, to the public.
There's a fine line
between alerting the community and creating panic.
Evacuations are expensive,
and false alarms can damage public confidence.
But in the face of an approaching hurricane,
it's a good idea just to get out of the way.
Like floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes,
hurricanes remind us that there are powerful forces beyond our control.
We have not conquered nature and we never will.
But perhaps we can learn to survive nature's fury.