Earthquake Preparedness: What to Do Before the Shaking Starts

Every other hazard on this site gives you something: a watch, a cone, a few hours. An earthquake gives you nothing. The first thing you know about it is that it has already started, and whatever you did beforehand is what you have.

That one fact reorganises the subject. Earthquake preparedness is not a response plan you activate when the alert arrives. It is a handful of decisions made on an ordinary afternoon, mostly with a drill and a few brackets, then mostly forgotten.

Why Earthquakes Break the Usual Preparedness Rules

Hurricane preparation has a clock. Tornado preparation has a warning, measured in minutes but real. Earthquake preparedness has neither, and that gap changes what a plan can even be.

A written earthquake preparedness plan that begins with "when an earthquake is forecast" is worthless, because that sentence will never apply. What works instead assumes you are asleep, or driving, or at your desk three towns from your children, and answers one question: where do we end up, and how do we learn that everyone else is alive?

What happens during the shaking, and in the first confused hour afterwards, has its own rules: Earthquake Safety covers it. This page is the part you can still act on today.

The Work That Pays Off: Securing What Falls

If you read one section, read this one. In a moderate quake in a modern building, the building is usually fine and the contents are not. Injuries come from bookcases, televisions, water heaters, hanging mirrors and the contents of upper kitchen cabinets, arriving at speed.

The fixes are unglamorous and take a weekend:

• Strap tall furniture to studs — bookcases, wardrobes, filing cabinets, anything taller than it is wide. Nylon straps into a stud, never a drywall anchor.
• Strap the water heater at the upper and lower third. A toppled heater tears its gas line, and in many jurisdictions this is already required.
• Latch upper cabinets, especially where glass and heavy crockery sit above a worktop.
• Move the heavy things down. Nothing over a bed, nothing stored high you would not want to catch.
• Secure the television and anything on a wheeled stand.

Beyond the contents sits the structure: older houses on raised foundations may not be bolted down, and an unbraced crawl space can let a house slide off its footings. That is permit-and-contractor work, covered at Seismic Retrofit.

Fault Lines, Shaking Maps and Where You Actually Live

People go looking for a map of fault lines near their address, and the fault map is the less useful of the two maps available. Proximity to a mapped fault matters, but so does what the house stands on: soft sediment and filled ground amplify shaking, rock does not. Two streets the same distance from the same fault can behave very differently.

Two things not to take from that exercise. Do not conclude you are safe because no fault is drawn nearby: damaging earthquakes happen on faults nobody had mapped, and large parts of the central and eastern United States carry real hazard with very few visible faults. And do not wait for a prediction. Earthquakes cannot be predicted at any useful timescale — probabilities over decades exist, forecasts of next Tuesday do not.

Your Plan, Your Kit and the Place You Work

A workable plan fits on an index card. One out-of-area contact everyone texts, because local circuits fail first. One meeting place outside the building, and one further away for when the neighbourhood is closed. Who collects the children, and the written authorisation at the school that lets them. Where the documents are. Who checks on the neighbour who cannot get downstairs.

A good earthquake preparedness checklist is two lists: the fixing-things list above, and the supplies. What an earthquake preparedness kit needs that a generic one does not — footwear and a torch reachable from the pillow, water stored well past three days, supplies split between house, car and desk — is set out in Earthquake Kits, and the baseline household contents at Emergency & Survival Kits.

Then the building you spend your days in. Earthquake preparedness in the workplace is mostly whether anyone has looked up from the desk: does that bookcase have a strap, do you know two ways off the floor, is there water on site, has the office practised anything. The ShakeOut drill, on the third Thursday of October, exists to make that practice happen at scale, and registering is free. Workplace Emergency Kits covers what a desk kit holds.

FAQ: Earthquake Preparedness