Well, for one thing, an inordinate amount of people will chortle evilly and go “Sucks to be them. So long, hippies!”
First rule of surviving a disaster: Dont Be There. But, as we’ve pointed out recentl, some folks, despite wanting to leave for greener (and safer) pastures, are stuck where they are for various reasons. Good luck.
I have a friend whose uncle was a photographer for the railroads in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. I have a suitcase here filled with ancient pictures of California in the late 1890’s right up to, and shortly after, the big San Francisco earthquake. Its eerie to look at those photos and imagine all those buildings, wharves, and people being destroyed in the following conflagration.
It’s easy to forget that a gigantic California earthquake is not the same as a giant San Francisco earthquake. We think of earthquake we think of tall buildings swaying, broken water mains, etc…but California covers a lot of ground that looks nothing like San Francisco or LA.
All the scientists keep saying that The Big One is ‘overdue’. Will it create Nevada beachfront property? Probably not. (Darn it.) But it will definitely be something pretty much unprecedented in modern American disaster responses. I would think that it would be an ‘all hands on deck’ event with pretty much every resource across the country being shipped westward. The survivor stories would be epic.
Happily, my little chunk of Montana seems relatively stable…last years earthquake notwithstanding. Sure, we have a supervolcano brewing a few hundred miles away, but the likelihood of that thing popping off within the incredibly small amount of time that is my lifespan is like hitting the PowerBall.
Will The Big One happen in my lifetime? I dunno. I figure I’ve got about 25 years left on my meter…thats a pretty small window, from a geological timeline, to have something happen. For the sake of the few decent people in California, I hope it doesn’t happen but theyd be crazy not to be geared up for it.
The only thing ANYONE can really do about it is……..*leave*.
That’s it. They know the risks. They roll the dice. It’ll be really, really bad.
Make conscious decisions.
lived there during 94 quake. only thing that has changed is buildings have gotten taller, they built thousands of stick built homes on top of faults and doubled the population of the suburbs. gonna be ugly.
A couplea thousand sounds about right. I grew up along one of the smaller fault lines in California (the line ran about 15 feet outside my bedroom window). All you can do is be prepared.
Other than the usual stockpiling of supplies, my family used to play a game… Can you get to work and back without crossing a bridge or overpass? How about Mom’s house? That game required a fair bit of thinking.
on our lease land, the 94 quake open a crack 1 mile long 3-5 feet wide in some spots. we filled and graded it over, it was a access road and cattle pasture, now a 300 home development at an average price of 1 million each sit on top of it, yeah is also burns every 10 years. stupid is what stupid does. glad i’m out of that cesspool, even Nor-Cal is gone.
We lived in southern CA for a year (hated it – way too crowded!). We were concerned about earthquakes. We lived in a very old building that had survived many, but it was the water supply that had me worried. Between water mains breaking & raw sewage contaminating the supply, I knew an earthquake would difficult to get through. Back in the 80’s we hadn’t heard much about preparedness, so we didn’t have water set aside, even for drinking.
Now we live in an area where the only disaster threat is forest fire. I don’t think there’s anyplace in the world that is totally safe.
Safety, like virtue, has it’s degrees…….
“First rule of surviving a disaster: Don’t Be There” So very true and is the main reason I beat feet out of the major city I was living in back in 2001.
Personally I don’t hold any animosity towards anyone who lives on the west coast. They do what they think is best for them and if it works, great. The only issue I have is if the big one should ever happen, the cost to the economy could send it over the edge and into the abyss. But like you Commander Zero, I only have 25 or 30 more years until I shuffle off this mortal coil, so I’m not loosing sleep over it.
Another fun one to game out is the Cascadia zone. In FEMA’s words, after the quake and tsunami, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” Like California, I feel bad for the folks trapped behind enemy lines.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
Most of the West Coast population, all three states, pretty much fits that location. WA and OR may be around i5 more than CA, but it’s still true. Whether it falls into the ocean, or just feels like it did, won’t matter that much to lots of the denizens.
My local Silicon Valley town is busy removing commercial businesses and replacing them with “high density” housing. About 5-6 story apts/condos. Virtually ALL of them are built on “Fill”, land that was salvaged from the bay and it’s surrounding wetlands. Perhaps half of the flat land surrounding the Bay is fill. Bay used to be ~twice as big. This land acts like a fluid when hit by the type of quake we tend to get around here. Really weird to see waves rolling across a blacktop parking lot during an earthquake!
I expect them to start crowding out single family homes to increase the number of people they can cram into town. I wonder how they expect to deal with all these new residents when these big buildings get condemned after a/the big one?
Working on getting out of here soon…
Commander:
Is anyone else going to to say that, if “The Big One” was to hit California, it might IMPROVE it!
(Sort of joking…)
“The BIG One”.
Yawn.
’94 was a 7-pointer two miles away.
I was in a four-floor apartment building, center square in the Hollywood Squares.
Shook the shit out us; was pretty sure after 30 seconds death was imminent. By 45, it was more just waiting for death to happen, or the quake to finish, while watching the blue flashes of exploding powerpole transformers cooking off across the area from my third floor perch.
First thought after it was over: “Shut off your damned car alarms, you 10,000 idiots, we’ve got some serious $#!^ to deal with!”.
When the 6.0 aftershock hit, and bounced me inside the stairwell on the way to move the cars out from under the building, my only thought was “Kill me, or leave me alone, I’m too busy for this crap.”
Power was out for a week and a half. No one was sure they would ever get it back on; they’d never cold-started an entire city before.
Water was boil orders for 30 days plus, because water mains broke 3′ above sewer mains. Taps smelled like pool water for months afterwards, and it’s why L.A. has had multiple sinkholes for the last 20+ years: rotted mains undermining the surface cover.
Nevada beachfront? Hardly.
In a paltry 4,000,000 years, give or take, L.A. and San Jose will be co-located, and Portland will be an inland port behind the 400-mile long SF peninsula sliding along northwards at 6 inches a year.
The Golden Gate is going to be a bit short to span that chasm though. But we’ll all be deader than triceratops then, so WGAF?
Anybody here in ’94 stocks up on things, and the houses are mostly built for it. Unlike in the other 47 states south of Canada. Stick built in a quake is a feature, not a bug: houses crack, but they don’t crumble, unlike the mud-hut and unreinforced masonry building with a multi-ton tile roof load in every Turd-World sh*thole from Turkey to Tierra del Fuego. We lost dozens, and they lose thousands.
The “Big” One, though, is kind of pointless, as the faultline is tens to hundreds of miles away, and the next big quake on it could hit anywhere from Imperial Valley at the Mexican border to the Golden Gate itself. Most of that will mostly annoy cows, chickens, and ground squirrels.
The bigger risk is smaller upthrust faults, like Northridge. The whole southern state is like the ten thousand pieces of a giant cracked mirror, and every jiggle moves all the pieces, eventually.
An upthrust fault makes sudden steep hills; I used to drive up the one that leads to Northridge to go to high school.
There’s another one not far away though: it starts in East L.A., runs right under the oldest and newest buildings in downtown L.A., and then through every old neighborhood full of pre-1933 sub-standard architecture along Sunset Blvd (right under the underground Metrorail line – genius engineering, right there) all the way to Santa Monica Bay in the Pacific Ocean.
Forget the “BIG” One 50-100 miles away.
If that upthrust cuts lose with a 7.0, it’ll probably kill 10,000 people from downtown to Beverly Hills. Maybe multiples of that, depending on time of day.
Where I’m at, there isn’t anything likelier to hit with much more than a 5.0, which it did a couple of years ago, and sent this monitor flying off the desk. (I was under the desk, so it was only a minor perturbation). Didn’t even crack paint on the plaster. Just jiggled pretty damn hard, but it was only a mile or two away, and over in about 5-10 seconds, not 45.
I don’t keep much stored higher than waist level, for that reason. Earthquakes are just entropy + gravity, at high speed.
The people mostly screwed are the ones buying on crap land, or new high-rise buildings, instead of single-story ranch and bungalow houses, because they’ll be hosed up but good.
Especially the ones who’ve moved here since ’95, and never had a good ass-puckering shake to help them sort their priorities.
Sucks to be clueless.
I expect I’ll be busier than a one-armed paper-hanger at the ER afterwards, and it’ll be grim for the newbs, the cluelessly unprepared, and the unlucky, but $#!^ happens, man.
If I had hurricane-style three-to-five-days warning, I could be in Las Vegas or Utah on my bicycle before Zero Hour, but ‘quakes don’t work like that.
As it is, short of the entire building coming down on my head (not likely), or some dumbass who checks for gas leaks with a candle, and burns the block down (and really, I’ve seen it in person) I can eat, drink, bathe, and sleep dry and warm for only about six months before I’d have to think about finding new digs, so I’m not too worried.
And at least afterwards, the roads will be half as busy, when all the crybabies pack up and head back to Mehico or BFEgypt, or wherever else they came here from.
If anyone wants to read the full details of what it was like, my write-up in 4 parts:
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/04/northridge-earthquake-pt-i.html
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/04/northridge-earthquake-pt-ii.html
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/05/northridge-earthquake-pt-iii.html
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/05/northridge-earthquake-pt-iv.html
Hope you never have to worry about the saucier versions, CZ.
Little jiggles are fun, until you get a whopper.
Then afterwards, the little jiggles get you all freaked out until they stop, because you never know how big the quake is, until it is.
Or whether your little jiggle was the ripples from a HUGE shake 50-80 miles away.
We had a fairly strong earthquake in the Sunnyvale/Bay Area ~1980, that cracked the walls of the warehouse I was working in. Husband of a woman that worked with me was sponsored to race flat track for the company. I can’t remember if Kenny Roberts was still riding for us, but these two racers had no problem sticking their foot on the track and throwing their Harley into a turn at 140mph on the mile dirt tracks. She came to work the next day and informed us that Rick had gotten home that evening, packed his bags, and left for his home state in the mid-west. She followed him a couple weeks later. ‘Quake scared him pretty badly. Courage can be an odd commodity.
I thought it was funny that he had moved back to the area that had the strongest ‘quake ever felt in North America in the past ~500 years, in 1809, iirc.
That was the first time I saw waves rolling through a blacktop parking lot. (2nd time was in the ’89 shaker) I didn’t know the experts were unaware that some quakes could make “fill” act like a fluid. (Most of the bay is lined with filled land. If it’s flat, it’s fill.)