Media Coverage of the Northridge and North Coast Earthquakes in California
by
Christine M. Rodrigue
Department of Geography
California State University
Long Beach, CA 90840-1101 USA
Eugenie Rovai
Department of Geography and Planning
California State University
Chico, CA 95929-0425 USA
and
Susan E. Place
School of Graduate, International, and Sponsored Programs
California State University
Chico, CA 95929-0875 USA
INTRODUCTION
In the early morning of January 17, 1994, a magnitude 6.7 (Mw) earthquake shook the Los
Angeles area (Figure 1). There were several spectacular collapses of buildings and freeways,
including the Northridge Meadows apartment building, in which 16 people died when the first
floor failed. Estimates of those killed by the quake range from 57 (e.g., U.S. Geological Survey
1996) to 72 people (e.g., Federal Emergency Management Agency 1998). 11,846 people were
injured to the point of seeking or being brought to medical attention (FEMA 1998 ). Although
loss of life was moderate by global standards, damage to property was enormous. Current
estimates include $16.6 billion in insured property loss in 1999 dollars, $9.5 billion in Federal
financial assistance (Torregrosso et al. 2002), $6.5 billion in business interruption costs in 1994
dollars (Gordon and Richardson 1995), and $20 billion in hidden uninsured losses, including
deductibles paid by insured homeowners, repairs paid out of pocket, and damages to uninsured
buildings (Platt 2000). Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the January 17 Northridge earthquake
were considered the costliest natural disasters in United States history until September 11th,
2001. Northridge and Andrew have since been superseded by the sociogenic disasters of
"9/11," with insurance payments exceeding $30 billion (Torregrosso et al. 2002) and total costs
exceeding $100 billion (Institute for the Analysis of Global Security 2004), and Hurricane Katrina
with $125 billion in economic losses, including $45 billion in insured losses alone (Munich RE
2005).
Catastrophic earthquakes strike rural portions of California as readily as they do urban areas.
On April 25-26, 1992, three powerful temblors with magnitudes 7.2, 6.5, and 6.7 (Engdahl and
Villaseñor 2002; Oppenheimer et al. 1993) struck the rural Humboldt County area on the
northwest coast of California (Rovai 1994). The first shock was about 24 km east of the town of
Petrolia and 15 km south-southeast of Rio Dell and Scotia, while the epicenter of the second
was 4 km southwest of Ferndale and 6 km north of Petrolia. The third struck just offshore about
1.5 km off Cape Mendocino, northwest of Petrolia and southwest of Ferndale (Figure 2). This
series of earthquakes did very serious damage to the small towns of the area, including
Ferndale, Fortuna, Honeydew, Petrolia, Rio Dell, and Scotia, amounting to $61 million in 1992
dollars (Rovai 1994). Given the magnitudes of these quakes, it was extremely fortunate that noone was killed by the quakes themselves, though one Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) worker was killed subsequently in the course of assessing damage, and 98 people
were injured (NOAA 1997).
Such disasters have differential impact on various segments of the affected population.
Obviously, differential impacts reflect the particular focal dynamics and physical properties of
the underlying lithology and the seismic responses of structures and other infrastructure,
together with the location of people and their belongings with respect to these. Less obviously,
the social geography and history of the affected area also produce differential vulnerability to
disaster among various populations.
Vulnerability is a function of risk, but it cannot be conflated with it entirely (Rodrigue 1993). One
is vulnerable to a hazard through the risk of a specified event taking place in a given time-frame
2
and the probability that one will be at a location where the energies released in the event can kill
or injure human life or destroy or damage assets. More than statistical risk, though, social
vulnerability reflects access to knowledge about an event, ability to evade it or mitigate its
impacts, and, most importantly, capacity to recover from a disaster through command of
personal resources or effective demand for social resources. This chapter focuses on the rôle
of the media in constructing vulnerability after the Northridge and North Coast earthquakes.
Specifically, the paper documents the spatial patterns of damages from both earthquakes and
then compares them with the spatial patterns in media attention and relates these two
geographies to vulnerability patterns in each earthquake.
THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF LOS ANGELES AND HUMBOLDT COUNTY
Los Angeles is culturally an extremely diverse city, with strong spatial segregation of its various
racial, ethnic, and national groups and socio-economic classes (Booza, Cutsinger, and Galster
2006; Ethington, Frey, and Myers 2001). Residential segregation has led to extreme crowding
in areas of recent immigration and to tremendous suburban sprawl as "white flight" (and,
indeed, some "black flight") creates the "edge city" phenomenon described by Garreau on the
periphery ringing the Los Angeles metropolitan area (1991). This process accelerated during the
1970s and 1980s as a result of globalization-related plant closings in established Fordist-style
heavy industrial areas, such as South Central Los Angeles, South Gate, and Compton, which
traditionally anchored non-white working and middle class residential zones. At the same time,
the persistence and increase of labor-intensive craft factories and sweatshops supported a rapid
influx of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and Asia, resulting in an ethnic sea-change
in many Los Angeles neighborhoods, intense overcrowding, and socio-economic polarization to
an extent unusual in the United States (Booza, Cutsinger, and Galster 2006). One outcome was
an explosion in the number of languages spoken in the city and linguistic isolation for many
immigrant communities.
3
In the context of a kaleidoscope of different political jurisdictions in the metropolitan Los Angeles
area, these industrial and demographic changes translate into very complicated problems when
a disaster strikes (Wisner 1994). Emergency response and subsequent recovery are all
compromised by the large number of different political jurisdictions that need to be coördinated
(Bolin and Stanford 1998). This is made doubly difficult by the budgetary problems caused by
the declining tax base in the older central city communities, strong resistance to paying taxes by
the denizens of the affluent edge cities in politically independent suburban jurisdictions, and the
authority of the State of California to siphon revenues from municipalities and counties during
budgetary downturns to balance its own budget.
The North Coast of California has a different array of conditions and problems, which also
produces variations in vulnerability to earthquake hazard. Like many peripheral areas, this
region has traditionally depended heavily on primary sector activities, notably lumbering, fishing,
and farming. As with the old industrial core of Los Angeles, the North State has also seen blue
collar job loss, particularly as the lumber mills closed down due to competition from Mexico and
Japan. There has been some increase in tourism, especially around the picturesque and
relatively prosperous dairying town of Ferndale (known for its well-preserved Victorian homes).
Ethnic change is occurring in the North Coast, too. In this case, the lumber mills had supported
communities of Italian immigrants and their descendants (e.g., Scotia and Rio Dell). Younger
people from this community have largely left the area, leaving older and increasingly female
survivors of the Italian community. Real property has been depressed by this outmigration,
leaving the emigrant children with their families' homes, which they cannot sell and in which
they do not wish to live. Many have turned to renting these residences out, again in a
depressed market. At the same time, there has been an influx of non-Italian welfare recipients,
especially from the San Francisco Bay Area, who are trying to make their meager dole stretch
4
further in the drastically cheaper rental market of the old mill towns. There has been some
counter-cultural migration from the Bay Area, too (especially around Petrolia), one of the last
enclaves of the hippie tradition of the 1960s.
LITERATURE REVIEW
As seen in the rest of this book, earthquakes are the subject of research by scholars in a great
variety of disciplines. The various geosciences generally focus on the physical generation of the
events themselves, the propagation of their energies, and the redistribution of stress associated
with them, while engineers concentrate on structural responses to these stresses and
mitigations to earthquakes in various seismological and technological settings. The emphasis
here is the social science approach to hazards.
The Social Science of Hazards and Disaster
The classic social science literature on natural hazards stems from the work of White (1942,
1964), Kates (1962), and Burton and Kates (1964). This work and the work it inspired explored
social and individual risk to natural hazard and perceptions of risk on the part of potential
victims, as well as behavioral adjustments to perceived or experienced hazard on the part of
affected individuals and individuals in agencies involved in emergency response or hazard
planning and mitigation (e.g., Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Johnson 1993; Kunreuther 2000;
Margolis 1996; Mulilis and DuVal 1995; Palm 1995; Saarinen 1966; Sorkin 1982). In many
ways, this tradition features a very individualistic conception of society. Society and its
institutions are represented as aggregations of individuals, who try more or less rationally to
optimize their private benefit to cost ratios in their behavior toward potentially hazardous
situations (Watts 1983).
5
In 1977, Haas, Kates, and Bowden created a classification of institutional reaction to disaster,
dividing the post-disaster period into four stages: Emergency response, restoration,
replacement reconstruction, and betterment reconstruction. Their book identifies a list of
activities common to each of these often overlapping phases, which are quite recognizable in
media coverage of the post-disaster period. More controversially, they argued that each stage
peaks at a point in time that is an order of magnitude longer (base 10) than the peak of the
preceding stage. If response peaks about a week after a disaster, restoration will peak about 10
weeks after the disaster, for example. Their intent was to give disaster managers an idea of
how long the full reconstruction process might take if they knew the duration of the first one or
two phases. Critics have attacked the rigidity of the logarithmic phasing and pointed out that the
different phases overlap in time and, depending on local circumstances, may well not follow the
predicted sequence (e.g., Berke, et al. 1993; Bolin 1994; Neal 2004; Rubin, et al. 1985).
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, another, less individualistic and institutional approach had
emerged from work on natural hazards in mostly Third World contexts (Bates et al. 1963; Blaikie
et al. 1994; Liverman 1990; Rivers 1982; Rossi 1993; Susman, O'Keefe, and Wisner 1983;
Watts 1983; Wisner 1977, 1994, 2001; Wisner, Westgate, and O'Keefe 1976). This approach
focusses on the structure of social groupings based on certain common interests; hence, this
tradition is sometimes called the structural approach. These can include classes differentiated
by income, source of income, and socio-political power or influence. Some of these might
variously include peasants, landless peasants (“rural proletarians”), major landowners, family
farmers in the First World, workers in industry or services, participants in the “informal
economy,” small business owners, professionals, high level managers and shareholders in
major corporations, soldiers, and military leaders. Other groupings include gender; people with
disabilities; aged people and children; ethnic, racial, linguistic, and/or religious minorities; and
people with minority sexual orientations or behaviors. At the level of the individual or
6
household, there may be complex memberships in more than one of these groupings, leading to
social stresses and conflicting loyalties within an individual or household, which may play out in
unpredictable ways during a disaster. These differences in interest and conflicting identities
result in differing perceptions of and responses to a hazard, and the hazards perception
community has explored these distinctions (e.g., Blanchard-Boehm 1997; Mulilis 1999).
Under normal circumstances, the interests of one group may quite often conflict, sometimes
sharply, with the interests of various others. Such differences in interest may be exacerbated
during a disaster. Classes, however, do not have equal access to power: Dominant classes and
groups can impose constraints on the behavioral options of subordinated classes and groups,
making them even more vulnerable to the effects of an extreme event (Wisner 1977, 2001).
Perhaps they are forced to live in the riskiest locations and buildings: It may be a “choice” of
living and working in a hazardous place or not working and living at all. Perhaps subordinated
groups have little access to information about what to do in a disaster, and very commonly they
have little to no command of personal or societal resources for rescue or recovery from a
disaster (Blaikie et al. 1994). People belonging to the subordinated groups may become
invisible during an emergency, deepening their vulnerability (Wisner 1998; La Opinión 1994).
In many cases, the normal living and working conditions of the most marginalized people are
little distinguishable from catastrophe, calling into question the meaning of “restoration” of
“normalcy” (Blaikie et al. 1994). As Bates et al. pointed out (1963), a disaster accelerates
existing trends toward economic decline in a community already afflicted by lack of resources.
The poorest people are the most vulnerable, especially those in the informal sector and the
secondary labor market (Blaikie et al. 1994; Wisner 1998). In Los Angeles, recent immigrants
are frequently hidden in the informal sector and, thus, marginalized. Their economic situations,
already highly precarious, make them extremely fragile in a disaster, such as this
7
earthquake. An anecdote from La Opinión, the dominant Spanish-language daily in Los
Angeles, illustrates the obstacles faced by people in such circumstances in obtaining relief and
rebuilding their lives following a disaster. A Central American woman, who had been working as
a live-in domestic/nanny with a family in the San Fernando Valley in exchange for room and
board and a small amount of money, found herself homeless and jobless following the January
17 earthquake. The family with whom she had lived left their damaged home to move in with
relatives, where there was no room for the domestic. She was unable to obtain aid, because
she had no proof of having lost home or employment as a result of the earthquake (La
Opinión1994).
In Humboldt County, there was a marked difference in the experiences of those displaced by
the quakes in the more prosperous Ferndale and in the more marginal Rio Dell. In Ferndale,
there were no tent cities, because relatives and friends of the displaced parties had spacious
enough quarters to accommodate them. In Rio Dell, fully ten percent of the population (300
people) were displaced, many into tent cities. Makeshift shelters were visible for over seven
months in the form of tents throughout the town and near the local grammar school.
Manufactured mobile homes were then brought in, and the people living in tents moved into this
more solid form of temporary housing. Some officials became concerned that outside transient
populations were exacerbating the displacement issue in Rio Dell by taking advantage of the
mobile homes meant to house the permanent residents of the community who had been
displaced by earthquake damages to their homes (Rovai 1994).
This chapter focusses on the equity, or differential efficiency, of social response to disaster,
which places this chapter in the more structural social science literature. Of particular concern
is the rôle of the media in constructing the mental map of a disaster as it may affect response,
restoration, and reconstruction. Does media coverage represent actual damages and impacts
8
on all kinds of victims more or less equitably? Does media coverage affect response,
restoration, and reconstruction?
Media Criticism
Media coverage has been the subject of an extensive critical literature. Themes in this
scholarship include risk amplification (sensationalism) and attenuation, emergency mass
communication, biases in coverage, and agenda-setting. A common criticism is of the
sensationalism many media bring to hazard stories, which can amplify public concern
inappropiately or even hamper efforts to respond to a disaster (Bennett 2002; Elliott 1989;
Fishman 1978; Friedman 1994; Kasperson and Kasperson 1991; Kasperson et al. 1988; Mazur
1998; Scanlon 1989; Smith 1992). Alternatively, by not focussing on an important hazard in the
pre-disaster period, media can attenuate the development of public concern and pressure on
decision-makers to deal with a risky situation (Kasperson and Kasperson 1991; Rodrigue
2001a, 2001b).
There is a large body of generic media criticism mostly targeted to an educated lay audience
with progressive political sympathies, which is not focussed on hazards and disaster coverage
but offers insights into such coverage (e.g., Bagdikian 1997; Cohen and Solomon 1995, 1993;
Gans 1989; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Lee and Solomon 1991; Schechter, Browne, and
McChesney 1997; Stevens 1998). This work identifies a variety of filters purported to bias
media selection of newsworthy items from the chaos of daily events, of which the most often
cited are capital concentration in media and media dependence on advertising revenue. The
intense capital concentration in the media is argued to limit critical public debate on issues
involving parent corporations and encourages sensational coverage, which is so common in the
reporting on hazards and disasters. Dependence on advertising revenue encourages
disproportionate coverage of topics of interest to the usually prosperous demographic segments
9
the advertisers are trying to attract. Conversely, those with little purchasing power are likely to
see few of their concerns covered by the media on a regular basis, and what coverage they do
receive fits their experiences into common story frames about minority and/or poor people and
their neighborhoods: violence, crime, despair, drugs, and wanton behavior (Street 2005). With
an eye to advertisers, some editors explicitly discourage reporters spending time on events in
poor or minority neighborhoods (Davidson 2003).
HYPOTHESES
Given these filters, three hypotheses were tested. First, it can be expected that media
reportage may emphasize more socially and economically privileged areas in a chaotic natural
disaster situation. Second, the significance of such disparities, should there prove to be such a
tendency in reporting, is that emergency, recovery, and reconstruction activities may be
allocated to affected areas on the basis of residents’ and disaster management personnel's
mental maps of damage, themselves shaped by media. Residents' mental maps are, thus,
expected to resemble the media geography of attention more than the actual geography of
damage. Third, the possible result of media-skewed mental maps would be that better-off
communities may secure thereby earlier and more disaster relief. While everyone in coastal,
desert, and Sierran California is at significant risk to the earthquake hazard (California
Geological Survey 2003; U.S. Geological Survey 2004), uneven performance of reconstruction
can mitigate vulnerability for more affluent communities and exacerbate vulnerability for the
more marginalized (Blaikie et al. 1994: Ch. 8).
DATA AND METHODS
To determine if media coverage emphasized more privileged communities, coverage must be
related to the geography of actual damages. The question is whether such areas received
media attention that was disproportionately greater than the damages suffered. To determine
10
whether recovery processes are roughly equitable, some means must be devised to track
recovery in socio-economically disparate communities. Data collection differed in the two cases
considered here, due to the great differences between the small town and rural setting of
Humboldt County and the megacity context of Los Angeles.
Humboldt County
Based on the local knowledge of one of the authors (Rovai), it was decided to contrast two
communities close to the epicenter cluster that represent different ends of the local socioeconomic spectrum and that also had experienced roughly similar dollar damages from the
North Coast temblors. The two communities that fit these criteria were Ferndale (population
1,3331) and Rio Dell (population 3,012). The 1990 U.S. Census reports that Ferndale has a
higher per capita income than Rio Dell, $13,504 versus $9,559, respectively. In terms of
educational attainment, fully 39% of the Ferndale population aged 25 and older possessed a
college or professional degree, compared with only 9% in Rio Dell. Occupationally, 32% of the
Ferndale labor force were engaged in managerial and professional specialties, while only 5% of
the Rio Dell labor force were so engaged; only 10% of the Ferndale workforce were engaged in
blue-collar occupations, while 29% of the Rio Dell workers were. Only 3% of the Ferndale labor
force were not employed, while fully 18% of the Rio Dell were without work.
Public assistance figures tell a similar story: Only 8% of the Ferndale population received public
assistance, while 25% of the Rio Dell population were on some form of public assistance. While
the percentage of government-subsidized residents in Rio Dell is more than triple that of
Ferndale, the total dollar value of the government assistance they receive is 8 times as great as
in Ferndale ($219,062 in Ferndale and $1,700,000 in Rio Dell). Home values in Rio Dell are
markedly lower than in Ferndale, with the median home value in Rio Dell only $67,100,
compared with $111,700 in Ferndale (U.S. Census 1990).
11
With respect to earthquake damages, the two communities were nearly identical in terms of
dollar damages. Ferndale suffered $10.0 million of losses, while Rio Dell experienced $10.4
million. While these damages are distributed over more people in the larger Rio Dell, the great
difference in property values in the two communities meant that the same dollar damages
produced greater physical damage in Rio Dell.
The disparity can be seen in the results of the Applied Technology Council (ATC-20)
classification of businesses and residences in the two communities. The ATC-20 inspection
process results in a building receiving a red tag, yellow tag, or green tag (ATC no date). Redtagged buildings are unsafe for human entry and occupance; yellow-tagged buildings are
unsafe for more than limited and supervised entry pending repairs; and green-tagged buildings
are safe for routine human entry and occupance, though they may have suffered extensive
cosmetic damage. In Ferndale, 69 or 12% of the 595 inspected residences were tagged as
unsafe, 14 receiving red tags and 55 yellow tags. In Rio Dell, 251 or 22% of the 1,150
inspected residences were structurally damaged to the point of unsafe, 88 receiving red tags
and 163 yellow tags. Similarly, 10% of Ferndale's 49 business establishments were damaged,
2 receiving red tags and 3 getting yellow tags. In Rio Dell, 57% of the community's 54
businesses were damaged: 10 were red-tagged, and 21 were yellow-tagged. The same dollar
damages, then, created greater devastation in the poorer community of Rio Dell. Not too
surprisingly, Rio Dell experienced a significant displacement of its population: 300 persons, or
10% of the population, had to evacuate to public shelter. There was no such displacement in
Ferndale: Those residing in the 69 damaged residences were apparently accommodated by
their relatives and friends or were able to secure other living quarters from their own resources
and did not wind up in tent cities.
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The first hypothesis suggests that media coverage will disproportionately emphasize more
privileged communities, in this case, Ferndale. To evaluate media representation of damages in
the two communities, photographs of the disaster in local and regional print media were
examined (Times-Standard, Union, and The Lumberjack locally, and the San Francisco
Chronicle regionally) for one year after the earthquakes and the images of Ferndale and of Rio
Dell counted and compared. In order to evaluate the second hypothesis concerning the impact
of media coverage on residents' perceptions, Eugenie, do you have data on media coverage of
the Humboldt quake? There isn’t much on pp. 60-61 of your Yearbook paper to go on here –
should I mention this hypothesis in connection with Ferndale/Rio Dell? I did a cursory study. I
might be able to find my original numbers and of course, I still have the clippings.
To compare reconstruction in the two communities for the third hypothesis, all articles related to
the disaster were collected and their content categorized by activities related to Haas, Kates,
and Bowden's sequence of post-disaster recovery. The location in which an earthquake coping
activity took place was also recorded. The length of these stages was defined by the duration of
reported coping activities belonging to each of the phases. The peak of each phase was
determined by that point in time in which half of the coping activities belonging to a phase had
been completed, the halfway point generally being indicative of the most intense coping
activities during that period. Recognizing that media may show systematic biases toward
affluent communities, these data were supplemented with field checks on the physical status of
recovery conducted in April 1992 and April 1993, during which additional information was
derived from informal interviews with city officials, local business owners, and residents in both
towns. From these media, field, and interview derived data, timelines of recovery were created
for both Rio Dell and Ferndale. The timelines show the time after the event along the X axis,
using a logarithmic scale (due to the amount of time involved and the detail required to
represent the first couple of weeks), and the three periods of post-event response and recovery
13
are shown for each community on the Y axis. The intensity of coping activity is shown on as a
bar spanning the time each phase was the subject of reportage for each town, shaded to
express the intensity of coverage. The peak coverage is shown with the darkest shade. The
shading allows the intensity of reported coping activities to be compared between the two
communities, no matter the balance of media attention between them. The peaks for each
phase can then be compared in terms of relative timing between the more prosperous Ferndale
and the poorer Rio Dell as a way of evaluating the equity of the recovery process.
Los Angeles
In the case of the Northridge earthquake, the City of Los Angeles made readily accessible its
address-specific ATC-20 building inspection database, which other jurisdictions would not do.
The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) never released its version of this
database compiled from comparable reports done by all affected jurisdictions, despite our
repeated requests and their repeated promises. It was, therefore, eventually decided to
examine the first hypothesis (i.e., the expectation that media coverage would favor more
prosperous communities over less advantaged ones) strictly within the confines of the City of
Los Angeles, which would release the data. Since the City contained the lion’s share of the
damage, this was not a serious impediment to analysis.
The Building and Safety database lists by address the type of structure (e.g., single-family
residence, multiple-family residential structure, or commercial) and the post-earthquake
condition of over 90,000 inspected buildings, using the ATC-20 classification of red-tagged,
yellow- tagged, or green-tagged. The database was revised, at first weekly and then at longer
and longer intervals, in order to reflect new building inspections, the demolition of red-tagged
buildings, and the repair, re-inspection, and green-tagging of yellow-tagged buildings. The
14
database was available for purchase in compressed ASCII format. Four different editions were
eventually purchased: 26 April and 12 August 1994, 13 January 1995, and 22 January 1996.
The databases were sorted by Zip postal code and the numbers of red-tagged, yellow-tagged,
and green-tagged buildings in each Zip code were tabulated. Zip codes are associated with
named communities and districts within the City of Los Angeles. Some of these, mainly in the
San Fernando Valley, had been independent towns before annexing themselves to the City of
Los Angeles and so the Post Office continues to deliver mail to those areas under their original
names (e.g., Northridge, Studio City, and Venice). In the older portions of the City, more
nebulous districts have locally-recognized names (e.g., Crenshaw, Fairfax, and Eagle Rock),
but the Post Office requires mail to be addressed to the more generic "Los Angeles." In some
cases, one place name is attached to one Zip code (e.g., Reseda, Tarzana, and Granada Hills),
while larger communities and districts may contain more than one Zip code (e.g., Northridge,
South Central, and Hollywood), and still other Zip codes contain two or more locally-recognized
communities (e.g., 90012 contains Downtown Los Angeles, Chinatown, and Little Tokyo).
Complicating the picture still further, place names are not necessarily stable: Names can be
negotiated by petition with the U.S. Postal Service to try to dissociate communities with what
they feel are undesirable stereotypes. So, much of Canoga Park is now West Hills, Sepulveda
has ceased to exist by being renamed North Hills, west Van Nuys is now Lake Balboa, and
South Central is now called South Los Angeles. Within these constraints, Zip codes were
aggregated, if necessary, to create a geography of damaged buildings by place name or
vernacular district, generally using older and more established nomenclature.
The geography of damaged buildings in the City of Los Angeles Department of Building and
Safety database was then compared with the geography of place name mentions in earthquakerelated front page articles in the first four weeks of the Los Angeles Times and all earthquake
15
related stories in (the much smaller) La Opinión, the leading Spanish language daily newspaper
in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. For a community to be included in the analysis, it had to
meet the following criteria:
o
It had to be within the City of Los Angeles (this excluded such independent
municipalities as Beverly Hills, Burbank, San Fernando, Santa Monica, and Santa
Clarita) and
o
It had to have at least 50 damaged buildings or at least 1 mention under whichever
variant name in the newspapers (some areas that experienced significant damage were
never once reported in the papers, and other communities were mentioned though they
had not experienced much building damage)
These criteria yielded 35 communities for further analysis. The two media geographies were
then related to the building damage database through simple linear regression. Because it
would be unrealistic to expect place name mentions to be somehow perfectly proportional to the
number of damaged buildings in a community and because the resulting regression shows great
heteroskedasticity, the simple linear regression method was used just for the specific purpose
of identifying grossly overcovered and grossly undercovered communities, that is, communities
with large positive and negative residuals from the regression line.
The communities identified in this manner were subjected to further demographic analysis to
evaluate possible bias in media coverage. Using the 1990 U.S. Census Summary File Tape 3A,
the following attributes were calculated for each community: percentage of the population that
was non-Hispanic white and per capita income. These attributes were compared between the
undercovered and the overcovered communities to see if the latter were significantly wealthier
and significantly less minority-dominated. Significance was assessed through a Z-test of the
16
difference in proportions for the ethnicity variable. Significance is reached, for the purposes of
this chapter, with a prob-value of <0.05.
While a t-test of the difference of means for per capita income would have provided an
analogous test for the second variable, the lack of standard deviations in the Census data
precluded that approach. Per capita income is also a notoriously right-skewed distribution,
again making a t-test a shakier approach, even if it were possible. To get at the significance of
the difference in weighted per capita incomes, then, it was decided to apply a resampling
approach, bootstrapping the observed data randomly into 10,000 resamples. This allows an
estimate of the proportion of possible resamples that would result in two groups with per capita
income differences greater than the observed differences had the communities been allocated
to the overcovered and undercovered categories by randomization.
Second, mental maps of the Northridge earthquake elicited from residents by telephone survey
were compared with both the Building and Safety database geography and the geography of
media attention. The purpose of the comparison is to determine whether actual damage or
media coverage dominates the production of residents' mental maps.
We developed a systematic random sample of 219 telephone numbers from the six Pacific Bell
telephone directories then serving Los Angeles County. The samples were stratified
proportionally to the number of telephone listings in each directory. A sample developed in this
manner is subject to certain biases. It omits unlisted numbers, which may disproportionately
exclude those more affluent households who pay extra for unlisted numbers. By excluding
those households without private telephone lines, it is skewed against households too poor or
sometimes too fearful of deportation to maintain a telephone line. This particularly affects
undocumented immigrants. A way of coping with the first bias is to use random numbers
17
chosen for each exchange or area code, but then that separates telephone numbers from
addresses, making the survey dependent on guarded answers to direct queries about
household addresses. There is no alternative sampling system that can compensate for the
second bias, while still permitting telephone access for the survey. In all, the sampling system
employed retains biases against households from the opposite poles of the Los Angeles socioeconomic structure.
Both English and Spanish speaking survey staff were utilized. These are the two dominant
languages in Los Angeles, but, with over 100 languages represented in Los Angeles County,
there remains the likelihood that some refusals were based on language difficulties, introducing
an unspecifiable bias. Unfortunately, since costs limited the size of the sample and because the
focus of the study was eliciting a generic Angeleno mental map of the earthquake damages,
rather than differentiating mental maps by ethnicity, no records were kept of which respondents
replied in which of the two languages supported (though the number of respondents taking
advantage of Spanish survey administration was very small). At least three attempts were made
to contact every household, and 52 eventually did participate in the survey. Included in the
survey was a question eliciting respondents' impressions of the three hardest hit communities.
Responses to this question permitted the crude construction of Angelenos' mental maps of the
earthquake damages. Respondents were also asked their sources of information about these
hard-hit areas. For binary responses (i.e., whether a given community was mentioned), the
results have an error rate of +11.4 percent at the 0.10 alpha. The more generous alpha is used
for this component of the chapter, because of the small number of respondents and the
exploratory nature of the survey, but, even so, the large potential error rate should be kept in
mind in reading analyses of the mental maps (at the 0.05 alpha, the error rate would be +13.6
percent).
18
Los Angeles proved intractable to the methodology used to test the third hypothesis in Humboldt
County. This is due to the sheer scale of the City (1,2912 km) and because of the extraordinary
imbalances in media coverage that emerged in the analysis of the geographies of damage and
media attention. Several of the hard hit communities were simply absent from coverage, and so
there was no way for us to construct timelines of response, restoration, and reconstruction
activities for communities at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. To get at recovery
rates in the city, longitudinal use was made of building inspection data. The rates of change
from the April 1994 to the August 1994, January 1995, and January 1996 databases were
calculated. Smaller percentage reductions implied a more slowly recovering community, and
larger percentage reductions suggest a more rapidly recovering community. Once these rates
of change had been calculated, they were compared for the grossly overcovered and
undercovered communities.
RESULTS
Results will be discussed by hypothesis. The results of each hypothesis are broken out by the
Humboldt County earthquakes of 1992 and then the Los Angeles earthquake of 1994.
Media Emphasis on More Privileged Communities
Print media coverage did give disproportionate emphasis to better-off communities. This is
seen in both case studies.
Humboldt County. -- First reports led many to believe that the damage from the 1992
earthquake series was concentrated in Ferndale and its "Victorian Village" (Bernay et al. 1992).
The national media and the regional paper serving the affected area (the San Francisco
Chronicle) referred to this salvo as the "Ferndale earthquakes," although local media and
residents referred to them as the Humboldt County quakes (or, sometimes, the North Coast or
Lost Coast earthquakes). The geoscience community, meanwhile, named them the Cape
19
Mendocino earthquakes, following the U.S. Geological Survey's preference to name a rural
earthquake for a physical landscape feature in the epicentral region, a preference that cannot
always be followed once the media has chosen a name before the epicenter is fully constrained.
Fully 75% of all photographs in the print media depicted Ferndale, despite the identical
monetary damage and greater physical and social devastation in Rio Dell and despite the
existence of other hard hit communities in the vicinity.
Los Angeles. -- Again as expected, print media reportage of the Northridge earthquake
emphasized more socially and economically privileged areas. Table 1 shows the number of
damaged buildings (red-tagged and yellow-tagged buildings by April 1994) for each of the 35
communities, with the corresponding number of community mentions in the first month of Los
Angeles Times front page articles. Figure 3 depicts the association between damages and
Times attention as a scatterplot. The damages by community clearly govern much of the
variation in Times attention, as seen in the correlation of 0.64: 39% of the variation in Times
coverage is accounted for by the spatial variation in actual damages (Appendix A tabulates all
correlation and regression statistics in this paper). The regression it depicts identifies 8
communities with unusually large positive residuals (the overcovered communities) and 8 with
unusually large negative residuals (the undercovered communities). For the Times regression,
a residual of > |5.00| was used to differentiate overcovered and undercovered communities from
those that received coverage roughly proportionate to their damages. Appendix A provides the
correlation and regression statistics for this and other associations discussed in this paper.
Table 2 identifies these overcovered and undercovered communities, together with their 1990
per capita incomes and the percentages of their populations who are non-Hispanic white. The
overcovered communities are predominantly non-Hispanic white in ethnicity (63.2%, weighted
by population of the communities), while the undercovered communities, by contrast, are
20
minority dominated, with only 20.4% of their populations being non-Hispanic white. With a Z of
444, the difference is highly significant, with a prob-value < 0.0001.
The undercovered communities are, as a group, also markedly poorer, with weighted per capita
income of only US$11,996 (1990 dollars), compared with the relatively high incomes of the
overcovered communities ($26,314). Unweighted for population, those means would be
$11,130 and $23,735, respectively. Randomizing the unweighted per capita incomes from the
overcovered and undercovered communities through 10,000 resamples, only 475 resamples
yielded differences in mean per capita incomes larger than the $12,497 between the observed
unweighted means for the overcovered and the undercovered communities (i.e., estimated
prob-value is 0.0475). Figure 4 depicts the distribution of the 10,000 resamples in terms of the
differences of the means of the "overcovered" and "undercovered" groups when the community
means are randomly allocated to each category. In other words, it is highly unlikely that the
marked difference in per capita incomes between overcovered and undercovered communities
resulted from sampling error. Figure 5 shows the incomes of the overcovered communities and
the undercovered communities by their ranks, and the significant income bias in the Times'
coverage is quite transparent.
The Los Angeles Times results for the damage and media association were nearly identical to
the results extracted from La Opinión. Table 3 shows the number of damaged buildings by
community and the number of place name mentions in La Opinión in all earthquake-related
stories appearing in the first four weeks after the disaster. The damages by community do drive
much of the variation in La Opinión attention, as seen in the correlation of 0.63: 38% of the
variation in La Opinión coverage is accounted for by the spatial variation in actual damages,
virtually the same relationship seen in the Los Angeles Times coverage (Appendix A). Indeed,
the variation in spatial attention in La Opinión is largely explained by variation in Los Angeles
21
Times coverage , with an r of 0.95 and r2adj of 0.89 (Appendix A), perhaps not surprising in light
of the fact that the Los Angeles Times owns 50% of La Opinión. (Moore 2002). Figure 6 shows
the association between La Opinión's coverage and that of the L.A. Times as a scatterplot and
regression line. Figure 7 shows the same association, but with the Northridge outlier removed.
While r and r2adj are significantly different from one another (Z=4.41 and prob <0.0001), the
slope and intercept of the two models are very similar (Appendix A).
A comparison of the residuals from this regression, however, suggests that Hispanic ethnicity
was modestly relevant to explaining the few differences between the two media geographies:
La Opinión, obviously, has a Spanish-speaking readership (Table 4). The 6 communities that
La Opinión covered more than the Times (residuals > 1.75) were 36% Hispanic, while the 5
communities that La Opinión gave less coverage than the Times did were 32% Hispanic
(residuals < -1.75). The same 11 communities were identified as overcovered and
undercovered using the same residual cutoff standard in both models, with and without
Northridge, due to their similarity in slope and intercept. Though minor in magnitude, the
difference is, however, significant (Z= 31.7, prob value <0.0001). La Opinión coverage is
affected by concentrations of the Spanish-speaking population in Los Angeles.
Figure 8 represents the relationship between the number of damaged buildings and the number
of La Opinión place name mentions as a scatterplot and regression line. Eight communities
emerge as grossly overcovered and nine as grossly undercovered (Table 5). For the regression
of La Opinión place name mentions and damaged buildings in a community, a residual > |2.25|
was used to differentiate overcovered and undercovered communities from those that received
roughly proportionate coverage.
.
22
Though the particular mix of communities in each category is slightly different than was the case
with the Times, overcovered and undercovered communities again diverged in ethnicity and
incomes in the same direction as with the Times. Overcovered communities were 55.1% nonHispanic white, while undercovered communities were only 23.2% white, a highly significant
difference, with a Z of 383 and a prob-value <0.0001. Weighted per capita incomes in the
overcovered communities were $18,629 while, in the undercovered communities, they were
$13,003. Unweighted averages were $17,807 in the undercovered communities and $26,192 in
the overcovered. This unweighted difference of $8,394 favoring the overcovered communities in
La Opinión is, however, two thirds as extreme as in the case of the Times, with its disparity of
$12,497. Indeed, on bootstrapping the La Opinión data into 10,000 random resamples, 1385
(or an estimated prob-value of 0.1385) of the resamples exhibited a greater difference between
the overcovered and the undercovered communities (Figure 9). La Opinión, then, did not
evince a bias along income lines rising to the level of statistical significance seen with the Los
Angeles Times. Figure 10 shows that La Opinión's coverage, in fact, distributed attention and
neglect almost equally along income lines other than the inordinate attention the paper paid to
the extremely wealthy Beverly Glen/Bel Air area.
La Opinión did, however, display the same ethnic bias as the Times, in the sense that it
overcovered non-Hispanic white communities (and, here, the focus on Beverly Glen/Bel Air
does not account for this effect, due to the tiny population of this community. This finding was
surprising, because the target readership of La Opinión is Spanish-speaking, the quintessential
"Other" to the "non-Hispanic white" demographic favored in both papers' coverage of the
Northridge earthquake. Indeed, that targeting does show up in La Opinión's tendency to cover
Hispanic communities more than non-Hispanic, but white communities, even so, remain
markedly overcovered in both papers
23
Perceptions of the Spatial Concentration of Earthquake Damages
Disparities between the distribution of actual damages and of media attention are expected to
affect the perceptions of residents and those responsible for public response to a disaster. This
effect showed up in both case studies, among public officials in Humboldt County and among
residents in Los Angeles County.
Humboldt County. -- A number of surveys of earthquake damage and tours by politicians
designed to express their concern were conducted after the Humboldt County quakes. These
high-profile visits and media events took place mainly in Ferndale, reflecting widespread
perception that damages had been concentrated in that well-publicized town. Among them
were visits by Pete Wilson, Governor of the State of California; Marilyn Quayle, Chair of the
FEMA Advisory Board's Subcommittee on Natural Disasters and spouse of former VicePresident, Dan Quayle; and Frank Riggs, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. This
focus on Ferndale was so pervasive that even Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, made
reference to the earthquake reducing much of the lovely town of Ferndale to rubble (1993: 500).
The persistent emphasis on Ferndale was commented on by residents during interviews
conducted by Eugenie Rovai in Humboldt County in April of 1992 and 1993. One resident
opined that the reason Ferndale received most of the media attention was that it was "cuter than
Rio Dell."
Los Angeles. -- Survey data are presented in Appendix B. The 52 survey respondents were
asked their sources of information about the earthquake. The greatest number (42 or 81%)
mentioned television. Newspapers and radio were tied for second place with 20 citations each
or 38%. Tied for fourth place were family/friends and visiting the damaged areas, with 14
citations each or 27%. Three individuals did not provide their sources (6%). Thirty-one
mentioned more than one source (60%) and, of those 18 citing only one source, 11 (61%) cited
24
television. Those 42 who cited newspapers among their sources of information were asked to
identify which one they felt provided the best coverage. Twenty-six (62%) cited the Los Angeles
Times, two cited the Orange County Register, and there were one citation each for five other
local papers (La Opinión was not among these).
Their information sources solicited, respondents were then asked which they considered the
three hardest hit communities in the Northridge earthquake. Of the 52 respondents to the
survey, 46 volunteered one or more community names. Most were within the City of Los
Angeles, though 11 place name mentions were outside (the municipalities of Santa Monica,
Santa Clarita, Palmdale, and Fillmore) and another 12 were too vague to attach to particular
communities (e.g., "adjoining Northridge," "Los Angeles," "the San Fernando Valley," and the
"Westside"). Eighty-one of the place name mentions were within the City and specific enough
to be compared with the place names mentioned in the two newspapers and with the
community-level damages.
Of the 81, 37 were of Northridge. Reseda (the probable epicentral community) received 8
mentions and Sherman Oaks 7 (Table 6). Encino, Granada Hills, and Woodland Hills each
received 5 mentions, and another 8 communities received 1 or 2 mentions each. Comparing
the distribution of survey respondents' place name mentions with the actual pattern of building
damages, the correlation is 0.60 (prob = 0.0001), with variation in damages accounting for 0.34
of the variation in the respondents' aggregate mental map of the earthquake (Appendix A
contains a list of regression co-efficients and prob-values for each of the associations discussed
here). Removing the Northridge outlier, the relationship between the geography of building
damages and the respondents' mental maps drops out of significance: r=0.32 and r2adj=0.07,
with prob=0.0653 (Figure 11).
25
Regressing these respondent place name mentions on the Los Angeles Times place name
mentions (Figure 12), however, fully 94% of the variation in the aggregate mental map of
respondents was explained by variation in the Times' coverage (r = 0.97, prob < 0.0001). Doing
the same against La Opinión coverage, the correlation co-efficient was 0.92, explaining 84% of
the variation in respondents' aggregate mental map (prob < 0.0001). Removing the Northridge
outlier (Figure 13), the Times and mental map regression drops, but the effect of media
attention remains a strong influence on the aggregate mental map: r = 0.65, r2adj = 0.41, and
prob < 0.0001).
For La Opinión, similarly, the model (Figure 14) weakens in explanatory
power with the removal of the Northridge outlier even more than was the case for the TImes but
remains significant: r = 0.38, r2adj = 0.12, and prob = 0.0248 (Figure 15).
Since respondents ranked their impressions of the hardest hit communities, it is possible to
weight their responses and compare those with the newspapers' coverage. Weighting the place
name mentions by rank (top-ranked community = 4; lowest-ranked community = 1), the effect of
the media geography on respondents' mental maps becomes even more striking. The Los
Angeles Times place-name geography resulted in a correlation of 0.98 and an r2adj of 0.96 (prob
< 0.0001; for La Opinión, r was 0.93 and r2adj was 0.87 (prob < 0.0001). With the Northridge
outlier removed, the co-efficients of correlation and determination, while weaker, remain
significant. In the case of the Los Angeles Times, they amount to 0.70 and 0.48, respectively,
with a prob-value less than 0.0001); for La Opinión, they are 0.43 and 0.16, respectively, with a
prob-value of 0.0104.
As expected, then, these 52 residents' mental maps resemble the two newspapers' geographies
of attention much more than the actual geography of damage. This effect persists in the case of
both the Times and La Opinión coverage even when the Northridge outlier is removed from the
26
model. Possibly due to linguistic self-selection among survey respondents, the distortion of
residents' mental maps from actual damage patterns may be more strongly associated with the
Los Angeles Times geography than with La Opinión's. The Times is the regional "paper of
record."
Disparate Recovery after the Earthquakes
Because of underlying variations in social vulnerability to disaster, there are likely to be marked
differences in the rates of recovery in various communities. Wealthier communities can be
expected to move through the post-disaster stages of emergency response, restoration,
reconstruction, and betterment reconstruction faster than poorer communities due to their
greater household resources and their greater ability to command social resources through
personal and political processes. Media contribute to the social variability in vulnerability
through their emphases during and after a disaster. They may be one of the specific
mechanisms by which already vulnerable communities are accelerated along existing social
trajectories of uneven economic development by a disaster. The Humboldt County case
documents the skewed recovery process between a prosperous and a poorer community, while
the Los Angeles case documents skewed recovery in a manner suggestive of media influence.
Humboldt County. -- Recovery timelines were constructed for Rio Dell and Ferndale for the
first year after the quake of April 1992 (Figure 16). The emergency stage lasted approximately
one week in Ferndale, peaking about 4 or 5 days after the quakes. In Rio Dell, the emergency
stage persisted for about 3 weeks, peaking in the middle of the second week. During this
period, Governor Pete Wilson declared a state of emergency. In both communities, the Red
Cross and the Salvation Army were engaged in providing shelter and meals for the victims and
for the first responders and relief workers. The end of this period was marked by the scaling
back of relief operations in both communities, the dismantlement of the tent city used for
27
temporary shelter, and, in Rio Dell, the announcement that a site had been selected for the
donated mobile homes into which displaced persons would be moved. Disparities in the
emergency response phase included both the timing of the emergency phase overall and also in
a number of specific activities. The restoration of drinking water was slower for Rio Dell than for
Ferndale, and Rio Dell had to cope with the displacement of fully 10% of its population.
The restoration period in Ferndale lasted for about 7 weeks after the disaster, peaking roughly 2
weeks after. For Rio Dell, the restoration period lingered on for fully 30 weeks, peaking about 6
weeks after the earthquakes. For both communities, this phase began with the reopening of
some of their businesses, the declaration of Humboldt County as a Federal disaster area, the
establishment of FEMA disaster application centers, and the distribution of FEMA checks. The
restoration period saw the restoration of utility services and the bulk of repairs to the majority of
yellow-tagged and green-tagged residential and business structures. In Rio Dell, 9 donated
mobile homes were moved in to replace tent housing and provide safer and more comfortable
temporary housing for the displaced population. The end of this period was marked by the
completion of the majority of utility and transportation restoration repairs and the
commencement of infrastructure replacement, as opposed to the stop-gap repairs typical of the
restoration phase. For Rio Dell, this phase ended with the closing of the official temporary
shelters.
The reconstruction period in Ferndale spanned 47 weeks of the 52 week study period and
peaked from 10 to 30 weeks after the earthquakes struck. Officials interviewed in April 1993
estimated that reconstruction activities would probably go on for another 5 or 10 weeks. The
beginning of this phase saw the strengthening of building codes by the County Board of
Supervisors. During this phase in Ferndale, the final repairs were made to the sewer plant, and
the Main Street Bridge was being replaced entirely. Rio Dell's reconstruction phase
28
commenced just about the same time as Ferndale's but with much feebler intensity in the
associated coping activities. Reconstruction activities here included demolition of 13 residential
and 2 business structures and the sale and removal of the 9 donated mobile homes. As in
Ferndale, this phase had spanned 47 weeks of the study period. Unlike Ferndale, however, it
was estimated that the activities considered part of reconstruction would go on for at least
another 50 weeks. The peak of reconstruction-related activities did not begin until 35 weeks
after the disaster, after the peak of such activities in Ferndale.
The timelines in Figure 16 illustrate the differentiation of recovery rates between the poorer
community of Rio Dell and the more prosperous community of Ferndale. While the data
collected for this case study do not validate the Haas, Kates, and Bowden model of a
specifically logarithmic relationship between each post-disaster phase and the following one, the
temporal duration of the restoration and reconstruction periods was directly related to the
temporal duration of the emergency period: If emergency response is delayed, so, too, will the
subsequent phases. Calculating the duration of the three phases in socially and economically
disparate communities graphically expresses that social processes of recovery from a disaster
are likely to reflect and deepen the vulnerability of already disadvantaged communities. This
accords with the expectations of the acceleration hypothesis, which holds that disaster
intensifies pre-existing social polarities, leaving the poor even more vulnerable than before and
restoring the better off to a semblance of their prior normal life (Bates et al. 1963). The Los
Angeles case study explores the extent to which media may exacerbate these effects.
Los Angeles. -- The megacity context of Los Angeles proved less tractable to the
methodologies used in Humboldt County. Timelines cannot be constructed for the Los Angeles
area because of significant media skewing in the communities covered: Too few references
were made to poorer and minority communities to be able to establish timelines. To get at
29
recovery rates in the city, longitudinal use was made of building inspection data instead. We
subtracted each edition of the database (August 1994, January 1995, and January 1996) from
the April 1994 edition to develop a crude measure of recovery. Throughout the period this
database was maintained, new buildings would enter as inspections were carried out and
already inspected buildings' change in status would be noted. Repaired and re-inspected
yellow-tagged buildings would be moved to the green-tagged category, while red-tagged
buildings were demolished and removed from the database. The balance between buildings
entering the inspection process as damaged structures and leaving it as repaired and reinspected buildings or through demolition will tend to produce a lowering of the numbers of
damaged buildings after the first several weeks after a quake. The shift in the numbers of redtagged and yellow-tagged buildings thus constitutes a rough proxy for recovery (Table 7).
The highly overcovered communities (focussing on the Los Angeles Times, which seems to
drive residents' perceptions) included a total of 816 red-tagged and yellow-tagged structures as
of April 1994, while the seriously undercovered communities included a total of 2,691, more
than three times as many. By August 1994, these figures had dwindled to 484 in the
overcovered communities and 1,784 in the undercovered communities, a decline of 40.7%
versus 33.7%. A year after the earthquake, in January 1995, the overcovered communities
contained 296 damaged buildings, a decline of 63.7% from the April 1994 levels. For the
undercovered communities, the building count had eroded to 1,009, or 62.5%. Two years after
the disaster, overcovered communities held only 137 red-tagged and yellow-tagged structures,
versus 701 in the undercovered communities, resulting in declines of 83.2% and 74.0%,
respectively. The change from April 1994 to August 1994 is highly significant, with a Z of 3.743
and a prob-value <0.0001. Oddly, the undercovered communities effectively caught up with the
overcovered communities by January 1995, because the Z for the test of the difference in
proportions was only 0.681, giving a prob-value of 0.248. The differences between the
30
communities had reasserted itself by January 1996, however, resulting in a very significant Z of
4.536 (prob < 0.00001). The overcovered communities moved through the recovery process
significantly more rapidly than the undercovered communities (Figure 17).
DISCUSSION
All three hypotheses received affirmation. Media coverage did correspond significantly with the
actual pattern of damages throughout the City of Los Angeles, but 16-17 (Times and La
Opinión, respectively) communities out of 35 named communities were conspicuously
overcovered or undercovered. These two groups of communities proved to be significantly
different in their income and racial characteristics: Overcovered communities were both
significantly wealthier and significantly whiter than undercovered communities in the coverage of
both newspapers. In Humboldt County, media attention was disproportionately paid to the more
prosperous and photogenic Ferndale than to the economically struggling Rio Dell.
These disparities do affect mental maps of a disaster. Los Angeles County residents
responding to a telephone survey produced ranked lists of their perceptions of the hardest hit
communities. The aggregate mental map of the Northridge earthquake almost perfectly
accorded with the geography of damages implied by media coverage, duplicating the media
geography more faithfully than either reflected the actual pattern of damages. Though the
Humboldt County surveys did not specifically solicit residents' and business owners' mental
maps of the 1992 earthquakes, the disparity between media coverage and actual patterns of
damage were spontaneously mentioned by several respondents. The mental maps of
politicians and those who manage their itineraries are affected by media geographies, as seen
in the pattern of gubernatorial, Congressional, and high-profile FEMA representatives' visits to
Humboldt County to tour Ferndale and, in Los Angeles, President Clinton's visit to Northridge.
31
The significance of mental maps is that, if they are skewed by media coverage patterns, they
may skew the pattern of response to the disaster on the part of emergency managers and
politicians. Local first responders rely on emergency calls, which, hopefully, insulates them at
least in part from this kind of skewing. Bias can enter the process as first responders are
supplemented by other emergency response personnel who begin the process of restoring
lifelines and other critical services and as disaster assistance for reconstruction is established in
the area. Those entering the area from outside have often expressed to us when asked during
conferences (e.g., the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop held annually in
Colorado and the 1995 U.S. Natural Hazards Symposium in Washington, D.C.) that they
depend on the AP and Reuters wires and national and, later, regional media to learn about a
disaster, its scale, and the geography of need as they come into the area. They comment that
they know the media are biased, but their expectation of bias focusses on issues of
sensationalism and rumor-mongering, not that there might be systematic biases to the detriment
of more vulnerable populations.
Both case studies indicate that recovery is delayed in communities undercovered by the media.
Rio Dell moved through the stages of response, restoration, and reconstruction quite a bit more
slowly than Ferndale. Undercovered communities in Los Angeles saw slower rates of decline in
the numbers of red-tagged and yellow-tagged buildings than overcovered communities. Given
the association between media attention and the income levels of different communities during
a disaster, it might be argued that poorer communities simply have fewer personal and social
resources on which to rely in a disaster and, as unfortunate as it is, the delayed recovery has
everything to do with resources and nothing to do with media attention. The disparities in media
attention might, thus, be more correlated with the delayed recovery of poorer communities than
an independent influence on that delayed recovery.
32
A few counterinstances within the Los Angeles area, however, are suggestive of an
independent media influence on the delay in disaster recovery. The undercovered
communities, as a group, were poorer and more minority-dominated than the overcovered
communities, but there were two wealthy, white communities in the group: Woodland Hills and
Chatsworth. These communities, with their less dense populations, were unable statistically to
counter the much denser populations of the very poor and very minority-dominated communities
in the weighted group statistics of the undercovered communities. Their mean per capita
incomes amounted to $28,538, substantially higher than the undercovered communities as a
group ($11,996). Their ethnicity is 83.1% non-Hispanic white, drastically different from the
undercovered group as a whole (20.4%). Even so, the substantial damages in these two wellto-do communities were neglected by the media, perhaps due to their proximity to Northridge,
which was the site of three of the most dramatic building failures in the quake. Their recovery
lagged: Only 34.5% of their buildings reported as damaged in April 1994 had dropped out of the
red-tagged or yellow-tagged categories by August 1994, compared with 40.7% of the
overcovered communities; 60.7% had dropped out by January 1995, compared with 63.7% for
the overcovered communities; and 76.9% by January 1996, while the overcovered communities
enjoyed 83.2% recovery by then. Wealthy as these two communities were, neglected by the
media gaze, their recovery was much lower than the overcovered group of communities and,
indeed, for August 1994 and January 1995, they are at the low end of the undercovered group
in their recovery rates.
CONCLUSION
Given the extreme complexity of human society and its interactions with the physical systems of
the planet, it is often difficult to see strong signals in the noise of confounding variables in any
social science project. This study has detected a strong signal of media influence on the
process of disaster recovery, from the initial relationship between the spatial distribution of
33
earthquake damages and media representation of those damages, biases in that relationship
along income and racial lines, the accordance of survey respondents' mental maps with the
geography of media attention more than with the geography of actual damages, and the
disparity in recovery between the communities receiving excess media attention and those
receiving an attention deficit.
This paper has troubling implications. First, media narratives of disaster do not necessarily
adequately or fairly reflect actual damages in socio-economically and ethnically diverse areas, a
situation which fits the expectations of media critics. Second, the socio-economic structure of a
community, together with and reïnforced by media, affects disaster recovery: Poorer
communities recover more slowly than more prosperous ones do and those occupied by the
socially, economically, and politically dominant ethnic groups in an area. Third, emergency and
disaster management personnel need to develop and routinize alternative means of assessing
the hardest hit areas immediately after a disaster, rather than rely on local papers, broadcast
media, wire services, or, these days, the Internet. Given that poorer and minority communities
are undercovered, emergency response and recovery personnel coming in from outside the
region might obtain maps of census data to identify potentially unnoticed areas and
independently go to such areas to assess needs there. It is critical to make connections with
the local leaders of minority and otherwise marginalized groups in the area. Directing such
personnel to community-based organizations and leaders may, in fact, be one of the most
useful contributions of local media, who may, in the course of covering local politics and events,
be aware of such groups and key people. In some countries, too, the census may be a bit
spurious; in that situation, it is even more critical to expend considerable effort to connect with
community-based organizations and activists within them. Fourth, reporters and editors need to
acknowledge and confront their own biases and at least try to ameliorate their effects in their
representations of disasters or any other newsworthy event.
34
More generally, the hazards research community and practitioners need to address an even
larger issue than the slowness of "recovery" in marginalized areas and populations. For many
people in much of the world, even in the richest countries, quotidian existence entails such
harsh limitations on access to the means of livelihood that daily life under "normal" conditions is
not importantly different from "disaster" conditions. The temporary disruption that disaster
causes in the lives of economically stable and prosperous people is their only acquaintance with
the ongoing and permanently disastrous condition of a large and growing population around the
world. For such marginalized people, a disaster may cause them to descend into even more
chaotic conditions, from which they are unable to extricate themselves. In that light, the process
of "recovery" towards "normalcy" is freighted with assumptions about what is acceptable for
(other) people to experience in their daily lives. Might not planning for earthquakes and other
locally relevant hazards and, especially, planning for recovery and normalization be centered
around the concepts of equitable response and restoration, so that reconstruction can lead
towards sustainable and humane co-existence of all members of society with great natural
forces?
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Bates, F.L.; Fogelman, C.W.; Parenton, B.; Pittman, R.; and Tracy, G. 1963. The social and
psychological consequences of a national disaster. National Research Council Disaster Study
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FIGURES
Figure 1 -- Epicenter of the "Northridge" earthquake CMRSEPfigure1.tif or .jpg
Figure 2 -- Epicenters of the "Ferndale" earthquakes CMRERSEPfigure2.tif or .jpg
45
Figure 3. -- Los Angeles Times place name mentions by number of damaged buildings in a
community CMRERSEPfigure3.tif or .jpg
Figure 4 -- Distribution of resampled differences in means between "overcovered" and
"undercovered" communities (Los Angeles Times) CMRERSEPfigure4.tif and .jpg
Figure 5. -- Ranked incomes of the overcovered and undercovered communities in Los Angeles
Times coverage CMRERSEPfigure5.tif and .jpg
Figure 6 – Los Angeles Times place name counts by La Opinión place name counts
CMRERSEPfigure6.tif and .jpg
Figure 7 – Los Angeles Times place name counts by La Opinión place name counts with the
Northridge outlier removed CMRERSEPfigure7.tif and .jpg
Figure 8 –La Opinión place name mentions by number of damaged buildings in a community
CMRERSEPfigure8.tif and .jpg
Figure 9 -- -- Distribution of resampled differences in means between "overcovered" and
"undercovered" communities (La Opinión) CMRERSEPfigure9.tif and .jpg
Figure 10. -- Ranked incomes of the overcovered and undercovered communities in
La Opinión coverage CMRERSEPfigure10.tif and .jpg
Figure 11 -- Survey respondents' mental maps of earthquake damage by the distribution of
damaged buildings (with and without Northridge outlier) CMRERSEPfigure11.tif and .jpg
46
Figure 12 -- Survey respondents' mental maps of earthquake damage by the distribution of L.A.
Times place name mentions CMRERSEPfigure12.tif and .jpg
Figure 13 -- Survey respondents' mental maps of earthquake damage by the distribution of L.A.
Times place name mentions without the Northridge outlier CMRERSEPfigure13.tif and .jpg
Figure 14 -- Survey respondents' mental maps of earthquake damage by the distribution of La
Opinión place name mentions CMRERSEPfigure14.tif and .jpg
Figure 15 -- Survey respondents' mental maps of earthquake damage by the distribution of La
Opinión place name mentions without the Northridge outlier CMRERSEPfigure15.tif and .jpg
Figure 16 -- Recovery timelines for Rio Dell and Ferndale CMRERSEPfigure16.tif and .jpg
Figure 17 – Recovery of overcovered and undercovered communities in Los Angeles
CMRERSEPfigure17.tif and .jpg
TABLES
Table 1 -- Number of damaged buildings by community compared with number of times each
community was mentioned in the Los Angeles Times. CMRERSEPtable1.xls
Table 2 -- Demographics of overcovered and undercovered communities in the Los Angeles
Times' coverage CMRERSEPtable2.xls
47
Table 3 -- Number of damaged buildings by community compared with number of times each
community was mentioned in La Opinión. CMRERSEPtable3.xls
Table 4 – Hispanic ethnicity of communities given more coverage by La Opinión than the Los
Angleles Times. CMRERSEPtable4.xls
Table 5 -- Demographics of overcovered and undercovered communities in La Opinión's
coverage CMRERSEPtable5.xls
Table 6 -- Communities mentioned by survey respondents, damages, and places mentioned in
the L.A. Times and La Opinión. CMRERSEPfigure6.xls
Table 7 -- Changes in status of buildings over time as a crude measure of recovery
CMRERSEPfigure7.xls
APPENDICES
Appendix A -- correlation and regression statistics for the associations explored in this paper –
CMRERSEPappendixA.xls
Appendix B -- Los Angeles telephone survey results
48