On the list of existential threats to Los Angeles, earthquakes rank highest. With dozens of fault lines running beneath and around the metropolitan area, the ever-looming threat of the Big One is a not-so-quiet concern in the back of most people’s heads. The last major earthquake to hit the region was the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake in 1994, which killed 57 people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage. Many predict that an even stronger earthquake is increasingly likely to strike by mid-century.

But LA isn’t just idly waiting for the catastrophe. For the past year, Mayor Eric Garcetti has been working with the US Geological Survey’s southern California earthquake expert Dr Lucy Jones to develop an quake resiliency strategy for the city. In October, the city enacted the showpiece of that effort, a set of aggressive seismic regulations that will require retrofits on more than 15,000 buildings across the city.

A few weeks later, Garcetti and Jones were in a high school science classroom, flanked by students and other city officials, to unveil ShakeAlert, an early warning system that can send out notifications when nearby earthquakes are sending shockwaves toward the city. Jones, who led the system’s development, demonstrated how an earthquake about 150 miles from the city would trigger sensors in the region, giving people in LA about 60 seconds of notice before the damaging shock waves hit. As he introduced the system, Garcetti referred to Jones as “the Meryl Streep of government service”. Another official called her “the Beyoncé of earthquakes”.

Marissa Aho.

In the back corner of the classroom, behind all the TV news cameras, school employees and mayoral aides, stood Marissa Aho. Though not instantly recognisable like the mayor, nor nerd-famous like Jones, Aho in many ways was the most important person in the room. Her new role as LA’s first chief resilience officer puts her in charge of making sure the city can not only heed those early earthquake warnings but also survive and recover in their aftermath.

Aho quietly took on this new role over the summer and quickly got to work. A trained urban planner who’s lived in LA for the past decade, Aho previously worked as an adviser to cities drafting long-range plans. Since being hired into this position, she’s been meeting with the city’s many departments and agencies to try to figure out what resiliency means in the context of Los Angeles.

“I see building resilience as a holistic approach to addressing the opportunities and challenges in a city through the physical, social and economic strengthening of communities,” Aho explains. “By strengthening communities we will create the tools we need to be more prepared to weather a storm, earthquake or other crisis if and when they come.

“The city of Los Angeles is complex, with strong neighbourhood identities, a fabled history, growing cultural assets, people from more than 150 countries speaking 220 languages, and industries – old and new – that are reinventing, innovating and constantly changing. Yes, we have our share of challenges to overcome. But I see the tremendous possibility of Los Angeles and feel fortunate to be surrounded by people who are working hard to make this city’s future stronger and brighter.”

But to achieve a stronger LA, Aho must also think beyond the city limits. “The city of Los Angeles has 87 other cities in the county and Southern California is much larger. So in order for the city to be resilient, working with our neighbours and the rest of Southern California to improve our resilience is really important,” she says. And that means coordinating with each of those 87 other cities, and, in some cases making the case for why what happens in places like Long Beach, 25 miles to the south, or Palmdale, 60 miles to the north, can have impacts on LA and the region as a whole. To get all these disparate places to understand their shared interest in resilience planning, Aho says LA will have to become Southern California’s resilience leader.

“We’re doing a little bit of everything,” she says. “Because resilience covers so many subjects I would say that every hour the subject matter changes and I’ll go from a telecommunications conversation to a water conversation to a building conversation to learning more about what different departments might be doing that tie into resilience.”

Her role is new, but it’s not a completely blank page. There’s already a list of goals for Aho to achieve. In December 2014, the mayor’s office released Resilience By Design, an 18-point plan to help the city prepare for, respond to and recover from earthquakes. Its recommendations led to the city’s seismic retrofit ordinance, and also seek to address water security and telecommunications stability in the event of a large earthquake. Aho is working to improve the stability of cell phone towers so that they’ll be able to operate and connect people with critical emergency services during an earthquake or other major disaster.

She’s also working with the Department of Water and Power on the city’s other main existential dilemma: its reliance on imported water. The main tunnels that bring water from the California Aqueduct down to the Los Angeles basin lay almost directly on top of the San Andreas Fault, a major continental fault between the Pacific and North American plates. A moderate to major earthquake could destroy the tunnels and cut off the city from its water supply. Aho is trying to find ways to make sure that water can keep flowing through seismically retrofitted tubes and also to develop regional backup supplies in case that connection is lost.

A small stream of water flows along the concrete waterway of the Los Angeles river. The city relies on imported water. Photograph: Kenneth Johansson/Corbis

In addition to the 18-point earthquake resilience plan, she is tasked with developing a citywide resilience plan that goes beyond earthquakes – covering everything from economic collapse to sea-level rise to extreme water shortages. The idea is to build this plan into the city’s rulebooks. “We will likely not solve it all” in two years, Aho concedes.

In her city hall office, Aho explains that most of her first few months on the job have revolved around understanding the interrelatedness of the challenges facing the city. She says it’s about seeing the city in terms of shocks and stresses. “And the ‘and’ is really important. It’s about being able to look at stresses like drought or affordable housing and how those things might be impacted by an earthquake or flooding, and really linking the shock and the stress and trying to come up with innovative programmes or solutions to the potential of compounding issues.”

For example, the city is currently facing a rental housing shortage; if a large earthquake were to hit and pull hundreds or thousands of housing units off the market, the housing shortage would become even more acute. So even though it may be a devastating earthquake, the resulting housing crisis could be even more damaging to the city in the longer term. By creating a citywide resilience plan, Aho is aiming to anticipate this type of potential collateral damage.

But while an earthquake is fairly easy to understand, its long term impacts on the housing market are a bit more nuanced. For most people, the connection is hardly clear. “I think that’s part of the reason why I have my position,” Aho says. “There are opportunities to educate people more about what they can do and how being resilient may impact their daily lives.”

But it’s not just about constantly explaining to the public why resilience planning is important. She’s also learning from her colleagues: Aho says she’s been in close touch with the CRO of Christchurch, New Zealand, a city that is still recovering from a massive and devastating series of earthquakes in late 2010 and early 2011.

“They’re much smaller but they have some of the same challenges, both earthquakes and water, and they have the same building types,” Aho says. “As much as we can learn from them before we have a major earthquake, that will really help us to be more prepared and therefore more resilient.”

The key is getting ready, Aho says. “Typically you have a major disaster, a Northridge, a Katrina, a Sandy, and then you start making changes,” she says. “We’re making changes before.”

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook and join the discussion