Lucy Jones’
official curriculum vitae says that her undergraduate major was Chinese literature.
After spending her junior year in Taiwan, a major earthquake center, the native
Californian returned to school to finish her physics degree, but instead felt
a different calling, to geology. Now a leading earthquake scientist, she is
the voice of seismology for Southern California, and her new position as chair
of the California Seismic Safety Commission (CSSC) has the potential to pump
up the volume of her message.
Geologist Lucy Jones, head of the U.S.
Geological Survey office in Pasadena, Calif., speaks to reporters from the media
room at Caltech. Jones is the new chair of the California Seismic Safety Commission.
Photo by Robert Paz, Caltech.
Jones’ transition to geology started with a brunch in her sophomore year
at Brown University hosted by Jan and Terry Tullis, two geoscience professors.
Over the next year abroad, she thought about geology. Because it was so late
in her undergraduate career, however, she abandoned physics in favor of taking
as many geology classes as possible before graduating and majoring in Chinese
literature. Luckily, she had fulfilled the major requirements while in Taiwan.
In 1981, Jones completed her Ph.D. in geophysics at MIT. After a stint at the
Lamont- Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., working on Chinese earthquakes,
she returned to Southern California in 1983, taking a postdoc with the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS) at Caltech in Pasadena. She returned in time for “a
spate of damaging earthquakes” larger than magnitude 5, she says.
Throughout those events and starting with a magnitude-5.9 Palm Springs quake
in 1986, Jones has been called on to tell the public the basics behind earthquakes
over the years, as one of many geologists in the USGS Pasadena office. In 1992,
she made an indelible impression on Southern Californians, holding her toddler
son (now a tall high school student) during several television interviews after
the magnitude-6.1 Joshua Tree and the magnitude-7.3 Landers events.
“Lucy provides Southern California — and the nation — with a
very calming voice and an authoritative voice to the public’s inquiry in
disaster,” says Tom Jordan, a seismologist at the University of Southern
California and the director of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).
Her straightforward manner, he says, helps her in communicating complex science.
After the events of September 11, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times
called for “a Lucy Jones for bioterrorism” to serve the region, conjuring
up someone “able to deal with public anxiety,” Jordan says. “That
gives you some indication that she really is a household name here in Southern
California.” Her strong voice and high visibility give her “the potential
of being one of the most effective chairs of CSSC ever,” he says.
An important body in the state of California, CSSC “exerts a lot of influence
on both legislation and policy,” says Bill Ellsworth, who heads the USGS
Earthquake Hazards Team in Menlo Park. The commission includes representatives
from a broad spectrum of communities: scientists, engineers, emergency managers
and others. Ellis Stanley, Los Angeles’ emergency manager, calls Jones
“a true collaborator,” who can reach across the disciplines and concerns
of all parties involved.
The organization’s primary mission is to review legislation that might
affect any aspect of earthquake safety, as well as to inform the research and
legislative agenda for California. To illustrate some of the issues she wants
to address in her tenure as CSSC chair, Jones refers to last December’s
San Simeon earthquake, during which two women died, struck by bricks from a
crumbling historic building in downtown Paso Robles.
The more than 70-year-old building had been cosmetically improved, but remained
unretrofitted. Jones says she wants “more teeth in the retrofitting enforcement
program [and] more disclosure” under a 1992 “placarding” law,
which requires signs notifying people as they enter a structure if it has been
seismically retrofitted. “We’ve got to actually enforce the laws that
we’ve got,” she says. “This level of shaking is to be expected
anywhere in California. The building was just really bad.”
At the heart of many of her concerns, however, is education. The women who died
in the San Simeon event ran outside, the most dangerous thing to do during an
earthquake (instead, taking shelter under a table or doorframe is suggested
as a general rule of thumb).
“There was essentially no earthquake education in the public schools when
I grew up,” Jones says. “They taught us once a year” how to respond,
and even the “duck and cover” exercises they practiced were more for
the Cold War than an earthquake. She worries that may still be the case today,
with earthquakes appearing in the California science curricula only in a sixth-grade
plate tectonics lesson.
In addition to her public role, Jones continues to work on how to quantify the
occurrence of aftershocks, and how that information can be used in forecasting
earthquakes and their probabilities. As head of the USGS Pasadena office, she
coordinates the earthquake hazard reduction research program in Southern California
and oversees all research activities.
Jones also says that she takes science into her personal life. She and her husband
Egill Hauksson, a seismologist at Caltech, have published about 20 papers together.
Both manage key program components of the SCEC. “We can talk about science
at home, not management issues,” she jokes. “We have kids — we
don’t need to struggle over programs as well.” Jones is “someone
who has balanced a science career and being a mother, raising a family,”
Ellsworth says.
In her new position, “her public recognition,” Jordan says, gives
her the potential to raise the profile of earthquakes, which has been somewhat
buried by the threat of terrorism, particularly in California. “Whatever
she accomplishes here in California,” Stanley says, probably “will
translate across the nation as well.”
Naomi Lubick
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