Funds Slashed for UC
Earthquake Studies

By Norma Gutierrez
Contributing Writer

	Due to federal budget changes which could affect key parts of
California's earthquake monitoring network, UC Berkeley seismology
experts face serious funding cuts for research programs.
	The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Earthquake Hazards
Reduction Program (NEHRP), which funds university research, faces cuts
that could potentially end one project and severely cripple others on
the UC Berkeley campus.
	The dismantling of NEHRP's external grant programs would mean that
universities would lose a major source of money for conducting
research on earthquake hazards and damage reduction.
	The most endangered project currently takes place in Parkfield,
Calif., where scientists monitor seismic faults and changes in the
earth that precede earthquakes with the hope of eventually predicting
larger quakes.
	"The cuts will eliminate the program, requiring us to use the
remaining funds in this year's budget to go down to Parkfield and
dismantle the experiment," said Tom McEvilly, UC Berkeley professor of
geology and geophysics and a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory.
	The proposed cuts would mean a loss of approximately $5.5 million for
California and $2.8 million for the UC system as a whole. Of campus
facilities, UC Berkeley's Seismographic Station alone faces $1 million
in cuts, representing about one-quarter of the station's yearly
budget.
	The seismographic station is one of the world's major centers for
earthquake studies, housing some of the most modern earthquake
detection instruments available today, according to university
officials.
	"The external grants program ... is necessary to the USGS's mission
because it distributes funds for studies that the USGS doesn't have
the manpower to do on its own," station director Barbara Romanowicz
said in a statement.
	Another major UC Berkeley project that will be severely crippled is
the Rapid Emergency Data Integration (REDI) project, according to
Andrew Witakker, associate director of the UC Berkeley Earthquake
Engineering Research Center.
	A federal and state emergency response program, REDI collects data
after a crisis, linking computers across the state to project
information almost instantaneously about earthquake damage while
measuring magnitudes and epicenters.
	"I think that the programs are making significant risk reductions in
California and the United States," Witakker said.
	USGS spokesperson Mitchell Snow said funding for earthquake programs
was included in the federal budget. However, according to Snow, the
head of a congressional appropriations subcommittee felt that cutting
back on several grant programs including NEHRP was necessary to
preserve other core programs.
	Snow said earthquake funding was not singled out for budget cuts but
that the proposed cuts to NEHRP are a small part of a much larger
spectrum of reductions.
	"The goal was to keep people doing their jobs but not necessarily
expand anything new," he said.
	In an earlier proposal this year, USGS had been slated for
elimination. However, Congress decided instead to increase the USGS's
budget and give it added responsibility for the National Biological
Policy Survey.
	With added responsibility and only a limited amount of allocated
money, the USGS expects a reduction of about 20 percent in its
earthquake studies program.

Copyright 1995, The Daily Californian.  All rights reserved.