"The Shake Map plots all nationwide shaking, however, primarily in California. This state has the highest risk of any state in the
entire country. California will have ¾ of the total loss due to earthquakes for the country over the next 50 years," said Wald. According to Wald the biggest challenge is to attempt to understand Mother Nature. "We
want to comfort and reassure people with knowledge of what happens during a quake," said Wald.
A typical day for Wald looks like this: research damaging earthquake ground motion, work on the Shake Map system, create
computer generated descriptions of earthquakes, and coordinate information with agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Administration, utility companies, media and the public.
"The best part of my day is when I get
feedback from people who visit our agency on the Internet. After the Seattle quake we got lots of feedback from people who used the Shake Map. We asked people to tell us about their quake experience and what they physically felt at
the time of the quake. We also got comments from the Army Corp. of Engineers and FEMA," said Wald.
When an earthquake strikes anywhere, the USGS puts up a map of the shaking on the Internet within five minutes of the quake.
The purpose of this rapid response is to inform the public and the emergency response agencies.
"The Web has been phenomenal for the USGS. What we learn from our research, all that information goes on the Internet. One web
page can be viewed by millions of people," said Wald. "When we have an earthquake we have a spike in our viewers. After the Seattle quake on February 28th we got 733 hits per second at our Web site."
Unfortunately, during the big Northridge earthquake six years ago the Shake Map at USGS was not in place. "We developed the Shake Map in southern California. We do plan on exporting this map to other regions. We'd just sent
the software our agency in Seattle a couple of months before the quake hit. Seattle wasn't fully in place but we were able to patch a system together," said Wald.
At the first sign of a tremor "our pagers go off. We
know within a minute or two what is going on. I jump online and check the system," commented Wald. "Everything happens at once. The phones start ringing before we've processed the information. The media needs to know
what's going on. At the same time, we are trying to understand what's happened. We are well aware of the tragedy of the situation too. We know better than anyone else the causalities of earthquakes."
Small earthquakes occur
all the time. Earthquakes are a part of the landscapes of our lives. After an earthquake Wald noted that he does 'earthquake forensics,' the gathering of seismic information that includes the known damage, the earthquake source,
the fault, the slip, how fast and then relates the earthquake to the damage. Like trying to put all the pieces of a gigantic puzzle back together earthquake forensics is not a simple one-step process.
Wald received his Ph.D at
California Institute of Technology in 1993 in Pasadena, CA. Eager to gain more knowledge, he went on to do his post-doctoral work at U.S. Geological Survey, later staying on as a researcher. "My day starts with pretty normal
hours, but I'm always on-call. Whenever an earthquake happens I'm paged," says Wald.
"We jointly run the Southern California Seismic Network with Cal Tech, where our office is located. We are currently building a new
seismic network in California," said Wald.
Regarding his interest in the sciences, Wald stated, "I had a teacher in the 11th grade who made science fun and generated a lot of excitement about the subject. During my
college years I became interested in earth science. I was also exposed to science at home, since my father was a doctor," said Wald.
Sometimes the direction a career takes can happen in interesting ways. "During the
Thanksgiving week break during my undergraduate studies, a geologist friend gave me a ride home. We drove through the Adirondacks talking about his work. I went back to school and started taking geology classes. I already had a
physics background, and so I just combined the two disciplines into geophysics. The specialty of geophysics is seismology.
