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.”
The May 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan province of China, in which apartment buildings stood undamaged next to destroyed school buildings, is a terrifying example of how poorly many schools are built: Almost 7,000 schools collapsed, by some reports killing 10,000 children. (The Chinese government has refused to release an official number.) Heartbreaking images flew around the world on CNN International: students perched on tipping slabs, waving to show rescuers where classmates were buried; parents, weeping and frantic, clawing at the rubble.
Soon afterward, the Earth Institute at Columbia University calculated how many U.S. children might be at risk for a similar disaster and found that 4.2 million attend school in earthquake zones throughout the nation. In 2007, Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries released a report that examined 3,300 education and other public buildings, and deemed 1,300 of them to have a “high to very high” probability of structural failure in a quake. These statistics infuriate Petal. “Schools should be safe,” she says, unequivocally. “We should notput kids’ lives at risk to educate them.”
Petal is a child of two earthquake zones. She was born in California and spent some formative years in Japan, so she learned to “drop, cover and hold” (the standard earthquake instruction) as a routine part of her school day. When she was eight, the 1964 Niigata quake struck 100 miles from her house in Tokyo. Petal tried to run upstairs to bring her baby brother to safety, but she couldn’t reach him because the steps wereshaking too much. (He was unhurt.) When the 1994 Northridge earthquake hit northwestern Los Angeles, she was there with her husband and daughter. They all jumped out of bed and rode out the temblor clinging to doorframes. Petal’s family came out of it unharmed, but she acquired a deep respect for the unpredictability and brute force of quakes.
Petal has always had an interest in helping children. Starting in the early 1990s, she worked as a private practice consultant for disabled kids and their parents, helping them claim hard-to-access government services; additionally, she worked as a child abuse prevention specialist. She excelled: In 1994, the California Department of Social Services gave her an award for exceptional commitment to the children of Los Angeles. “I learned to listen to everyone’s experiences,” she says, looking back on those years. “I took great pleasure in it.”
Still, she willingly gave up her career when, in 1998, her husband proposed relocating the family to Turkey for his work. The following summer, sideswiped by the loneliness of being unable to speak the language and the self-doubt of having no job of her own, Petal took her daughter back to California for a long visit with friends.
Ironically, as it turned out, they used some of their time to gather disaster education mater-ials: Petal’s daughter, then eight years old, had joined an Istanbul Girl Scout troop, and Petal had an idea—based on her childhood experiences—to create an earthquake-safety badge. The trip went so well, they extended it a week, switching their departure tickets to August 20, 1999. On August 17, Petal heard that an earthquake had rocked northwest Turkey and torn Izmit apart. Two days after her return, Petal and her husband entered the ravaged city.
Petal was perfectly suited to her new mission: She had lived through earthquakes without being debilitated by the trauma. She knew how to help people talk to one another, even about very sensitive issues. And she had just stuffed her suitcase, and her head, with critical disaster-preparedness knowledge. Back in Istanbul, Petal immediately created an earthquake safety workshop for other expat women. She expected a dozen to attend; about 100 showed up. Demand grew quickly: She put on workshops for another women’s group, expat schools and local businesses. Her Turkish neighbors became interested, and she taught them too, through a translator. She began to understand that the simple protective steps every Californian picks up in childhood, such as fastening furniture to walls and not hanging heavy objects over the bed, were rarely discussed in Turkey. People didn’t understand how vulnerable they were, and there was no widely disseminated source of earthquake safety information.
News of Petal’s seminars quickly spread. The American Friends Service Committee—an international relief organization founded by the Quakers—asked Petal to draft materials that community organizers could distribute throughout the neighborhoods. A Turkish magazine wrote admiringly about her efforts. And in 2000, Istanbul’s BogĖ aziçi University, home of the national earthquake research institute, asked her for help in developing the Istanbul Community Impact Project; the resulting curriculum educated 4,000 teachers about what to do during an earthquake, how to prepare buildings to reduce the chance of injuries and how to organize first responders. The lessons those teachers passed on to their one million students over the next three years were so well received that the Turkish Ministry of National Education asked her to expand the program so that 25,000 more teachers could attend. Five years after Izmit, the woman who once felt alienated from Turkey had helped to protect and educate five million Turkish students. “Everyone cares that their schools and their children are safe,” she says. “We just need to think ahead.”
Petal didn’t limit her message to only one country. From 2002 to 2005, quakes in Italy, Algeria and Pakistan killed more than 17,000 children and destroyed more than 8,500 schools. Petal quickly saw the need for governments worldwide to teach earthquake safety techniques and to improve the construction of school buildings. She joined the Coalition for Global School Safety, an international group of engineers, architects, social scientists and disaster workers from 40 countries. And with disaster preparedness expert Ilan Kelman, Petal founded RiskRED (Risk Reduction Education for Disasters; riskred.org), an online nongovernmental organization that Petal runs from Geneva, where she and her husband moved in 2007. Funded by grants, donations and consulting fees, Petal and her RiskRED colleagues work with governments and nonprofits worldwide to de-velop the plans that will save students’ lives in emergencies. “She’s an energy source, a connector,” says Tracy Monk, the Vancouver-based founder of Families for Seismic School Safety. “And she’s so insightful; she has a knack for distilling what a roomful of people are trying to say.”
Today, Petal’s work has an increasing impact worldwide. The United Nations recently released a report that Petal wrote, about disaster prevention in schools, to the education ministries of 168 member countries. UNICEF is using her earthquake safety checklist in China to help shape a major public awareness campaign after the Sichuan earthquake. In Turkey and Central Asia, the courses Petal developed—which include slides, safety manuals and booklets—have been used to train almost 30,000 teachers. She has written chapters for engineering and urban planning textbooks and penned articles for dozens of professional journals. Petal also directed and produced 20 short public-awareness films, which have been translated into many different languages and are shown in education workshops and on television.
All of this keeps Petal zipping around the globe: In 2008, she visited France, China, Uzbekistan, South Africa, Turkey, California and Seattle; in 2009, she’ll travel to eight more countries. “The number of people we reach is in the millions,” Petal says. Still, she continues to touch individual lives: A grandmother in Uzbekistan promised to name her next grandchild Marla as thanks for Petal’s lessons; classrooms of children around the world proudly show her their earthquake safety skills.
Despite her international involvement, Petal hasn’t forgotten the risk to children in the United States. In November 2008, she and her RiskRED colleagues participated in the Great California Shakeout, a massive earthquake simulation that included five million people and hundreds of schools. The state asked Petal to evaluate how well the government helps children survive disasters. Petal’s report is due to be released this month, and she is already focusing on two major weak spots in California’s disaster planning: children who might be on school buses or in licensed family day care during an incident. “By the time a disaster happens, it’s too late,” Petal says, before she gets off the phone so that she can catch her next plane. “The time to plan is now.”
Maryn Mckenna is the author of the forthcoming book Superbug.
