"A Dangerous Place" by Marc Reisner

Plunged into the Bay? Smothered in the superstore? Californians may have forgotten about their looming apocalypse, but eco-journalist Marc Reisner's final work is here to remind them.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Mar 5, 2003 | The official federal terror forecast has mellowed from "tell your wife you love her right now" orange to "don't panic just yet" yellow.

But if you live in California, this is no time to stop biting your fingernails.

Because while you were up at 4:37 a.m. busy fretting about smallpox, dirty bombs, and whether you really had enough duct tape for the apocalypse, you forgot that you're living on top of a disaster waiting to happen, no evildoers required.

The late Marc Reisner's posthumously published jeremiad, "A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate," is a brusque reminder that most Californians have settled "where they shouldn't have," with some 80 percent of the state's population now teetering atop active seismic zones -- earth that wants to move.

But this little book goes beyond the usual Chicken Little routine about earthquakes, familiar to any West Coast kid schooled in the basics of subduction and lurching continental plates. Reisner, who died of cancer in 2000 at the age of 51 before finishing the manuscript for "A Dangerous Place," made the history and politics of water in the arid West into a page-turning narrative for non-hydrologists with his 1986 opus "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water."

In his final work, he links the prospect of the Big One hitting the Bay Area or L.A. to the staggering network of dams and levees that bring water hundreds of miles to California's sprawling urban centers (and also keep water from flooding the Central Valley's rich farmlands). When the plates of the earth shift, so does all that water, and that great sucking sound you heard is the echoing of this well-worn truth -- nature abhors a vacuum.

In a 7.2 quake, Reisner fears not only for the thousands of lives likely to be lost in the collapse of bridges, unreinforced masonry buildings and cheaply built retail stores. He's worried about the state's whole way of life, which is balanced precariously on its improbable water supply. "If the contrived flow of water should somehow just stop, California's economy, which was worth about a trillion dollars as the new millennium dawned, would implode like a neutron star," he writes.

"A Dangerous Place" feels like the rushed work of a dying man, sounding the alarm for his home state, written as he's about to leave it. But this brief stress-out, finished up by the author's wife and editor after his death, certainly succeeds in roiling old fears and dishing out new worries.

Reisner delights in reminding us of the irascible California forefathers who got us into this mess, reveling in the shysters, misfits, adventurers, hustlers and greedheads that made their fortunes marketing arid California as a farmers' paradise. This will be familiar stuff to readers of "Cadillac Desert," but the highlight reel found here is still freak-show fun.

By the middle of the 19th century, Los Angeles was a "filthy, drowsy, suppurating, dunghole" boasting streets vernacularly known as "Nigger Alley" and "Cunt Lane," where the cultured populace's idea of entertainment was tying a bull and a grizzly bear together just to see which mauled the other to death first.

But San Francisco was no more lily-fingered.

In that city's Gold Rush heyday, water was so scarce that a bath cost $10 to $15 in today's terms, and laundry was literally shipped out to Hawaii. (Confidential to PETA: It was an animal-lover watching mules haul water up San Francisco's steep, slick, filthy, hilly streets who invented the cable car to ease their burden.)

In just eight years, those unwashed gold miners ate their way through the great herds of pronghorn antelope and elk of California's Central Valley, which were said to be so numerous they rivaled the bison of the Great Plains. Yet fruit and vegetables were so scarce that when someone figured out how to clear the water from the natural sloughs and marshes that meandered across the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, that entrepreneur made more money selling melons to miners than Zachary Taylor, the president of the United States, did the same year.

That cleared, then irrigated, delta of rich peat has become California's botanical gold mine. But in the last century and half or so that it's been farmed, it's been sinking, just like Holland, turning into a bona fide netherland. The deepest acre, Reisner reports, is now 21 feet below sea level.

That's little more than an odd land-use factoid until you start to think about what happens when the tectonic plates give a really good shift, and the dikes -- or levees as they're called here -- start to give.

Next Page: Pick your poison: Boiled in hot sand, plunged into the Bay, or buried alive in a superstore

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