I was sad to read today in the New York Times (but there's a better obituary here) that a former professor of mine, Bruce Bolt, has died.
He wasn't one of my law professors. Nor was he one of my mass communications or sociology professors. He was my earthquakes professor.
As an East Coast transplant, I decided that as soon as I got to Berkeley I was going to have to learn a thing or two about earthquakes. I figured that would make them less-terrifying, if I at least knew what was going on. So I enrolled in Geophysics 20, the only hard science class I ever took at Cal. In fact it was the first class I ever went to as a brand-new college freshman. It was taught by Professor Bolt, himself the very first person I'd ever looked upon as one of my professors.
He was dignified but approachable. I remember one day I'd read an article in the Times about why there was so much damage in the Bay Area during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. You'd normally expect the severity of the damage to be similar an equal distance to the north of the epicenter as to the south. But that wasn't the case: there was much more damage much further from the epicenter to the north than the south. The theory espoused in the article was that the topography of the region had accentuated the quake's strength. In any quake there are waves of energy that get emitted. The more powerful the quake, the larger the wave and therefore the greater the damage it will inflict. But what the theory suggested was that the waves were hitting the bedrock running underneath the East Bay hills on the east side of the Bay and the Santa Cruz mountains on the west side, bouncing off of them and being redirected into the Bay, where they met and doubled their amplitudes, thereby causing more damage (including breaking the cantilevered section of the Bay Bridge and collapsing the Nimitz Freeway).
So I went up to him to tell him about this interesting theory I'd read about. "I know about it," he said. "It was mine."
...
I took the class pass/not pass, which was good because I was new at this college-learning thing and a few of the technical details went over my head. But I thought the course was interesting and went to class regularly. Except for one gorgeous October Friday when a friend of mine and I cut school and went off to San Francisco. We had a grand day out, visiting the beach, walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, paddling the paddle boats in Golden Gate Park... But one of the first things we did was check out the museum in the park. The museum had an exhibit on earthquakes, featuring an explanatory film with narration. As I neared it I discovered to my shock that the voice narrating it was none other than Professor Bolt's! I may have cut his class, but it seems I couldn't get away from him quite so easily!
...
As one part of the class we took a field trip up to Memorial Stadium, which sits squarely atop the Hayward Fault. The Hayward Fault is a creeping fault, meaning that the land on one side moves - about a centimeter a year, in this case. Thus the stadium is slowly being torn apart, and we went up to see evidence of the damage.
The campus will soon be making an investment to improve the stadium, not just to provide better amenities but to give it the seismic retrofit it obviously needs. The obituary linked to above pointed out that Professor Bolt often lent his expertise to the review of structural plans. How good it would have been if he could have lent his expertise to this.
A good guy and a great academic, he will be missed.