Five days after a magnitude 7.4 earthquake hit Izmit, Turkey, in August 1999, the city lay in ruins, with piles of rubble where factories and houses had once stood. Bulldozers roared and clanked. Soldiers shouted. Volunteers sifted through the debris, seeking survivors among the flattened structures. Jeeps and ambulances rumbled, bearing away the thousands of dead.
California native Marla Petal walked slowly past what had been apartment towers, the floors now pancaked and sliding, furniture spilling out through crumbled walls. She lived 60 miles away, in Istanbul, with her Turkish husband (an urban planner) and their daughter, and the couple had driven into the disaster zone to see if there was anything they could do to help the victims.
A year earlier, Petal, then 43, had followed her husband to Turkey, envisioning a luxurious break—“going to lunch with the other expat wives,” she says—from her hectic life as a social worker in California. But having no job, few local friends and minimal Turkish at her command, Petal soon felt lost and homesick.
Now, in the street, she made eye contact with a blank-faced woman in her late fifties. The stranger stumbled into Petal’s arms and crumpled in anguish, wailing. Petal quickly learned that the woman had lost two children during the quake. It was a powerful moment that helped set Petal on her path: to protect the world’s children from the devastation of earthquakes.
In the nine years since that day, Petal has made good on her vow and is now one of the world’s foremost earthquake safety advocates. “When you have been through something that devastating and had to witness the suffering, it drives you,” she says.
But safeguarding children is more complicated than it sounds. They spend more time at school than anywhere but their bedrooms, and it turns out that schools around the world—including those in the United States—are exceptionally vulnerable to quakes, hurricanes and floods. Many classroom buildings have not been built to code; others have never been retrofitted to meet current safety standards. Plus, says Petal, “Very often schools are assigned to unsafe locations, such as the bottom of a landslide-prone hill or a floodplain where others don’t want to build.”
