Elaine Sullivan
2011 City Hall Fellow, San Francisco

In the March 28th issue of "The New Yorker," I came across this paragraph in Evan Osnos' article "Aftershocks: Living with catastrophe," which had been put under the header "Letter from Japan":

On the hilltop overlooking the ruined city if Rikuzentakata, Jimbo met a semi-retired man in his sixties, who had heard the tsunami siren and packed his mother and dog into his truck and driven two miles inland, the waves churning in his rearview mirror.  "He lost his house, and it's not covered by insurance," Jimbo said.  "His family, fortunately, survived.  I said, 'What will you do next?' He said he would like to think there will be some assistance from the local government.  But all he could think was: The city-assembly office is gone. The mayor could be dead. The only thing he can turn to is the government.  But his local government is gone."

A page later, the author quotes David Leheny, a political scientist at Princeton:

"Earthquake consciousness is drilled into the young—what you need to do, what you need to have ready.  There is an earthquake-oriented gallows humor of daily life.  People talk about the areas that would be hit hardest. They live with it in the back of their minds.  More than San Francisco, there is a sense of certainty about earthquakes here […]."

We all know that it's only a matter of time before The Big One hits the Bay Area, and that the 1989 earthquake was only just the overture.  When my current roommate first moved to San Francisco from New York, she surrounded our television with pillows at night, in case an earthquake would ruin her most expensive possession.  When I drive over the Bay Bridge, I always know when I am driving over the section that fell down in 1989.  The "duh-dump, duh-dump" marks the beginning and end of the replaced section.  

When the average citizen thinks of their local government, they usually think about public schools, transportation, and pot holes.  The Unified School District, MUNI, and the Department of Public Works have employees we encounter everyday.  But as the semi-retired Japanese man realized, local government is all we have when disaster strikes.  Someone must remember to set off the tsunami alert.  Someone must organize the shelters and recovery.  Someone must lead the rebuilding.

Saturday, April 16, marked the 103rd anniversary of the 1906 earthquake and fire.  In the days after April 16th, San Francisco firefighters fought blazes and destroyed buildings to create fire breaks, and the Mayor called in the Army to stop looting. In the months after that earthquake, San Francisco residents set up tent cities in our local parks, and soon the tents were replaced by small shacks, coincidentally designed by the first superintendent of San Francisco Parks, John McLaren.  

Today, the City and County of San Francisco has an entire department devoted to emergencies, the Department of Emergency Management.  This department includes the usual dispatch services for Police, Fire, and EMS, but also plans for disaster response.  They have a website, 72hours.org, which gives details on how to prepare and what to do after a disaster.  

During our three-week orientation in August, the City Hall Fellows went through the same training all San Francisco City and County employees must go through, including disaster training.  According to state law, all government employees are designated disaster service workers, and can be called to work in the event of an emergency.  In such a moment, all city workers have one task – to help their city.  

Finally, the story of the Japanese man ends with the presumption that without his local government, he will not be able to get help from government.  His local government was his connection to the government at large.  The way in which the story is told makes it seem that without a city assembly, without a mayor, this man has no connection to government services.  While this is not necessarily true, it is this idea that had led me and the other City Hall Fellows to work in local government.  We want to be a part of the government that affects people, both on the day-to-day basis and, perhaps, during an emergency.