California Earthquake

[Dean Hoffman]

It might be colder than usual in Nebraska this week but at least my fake Christmas tree will light up.

A little over 70,000 Californians lost power.

[Thats All And Sign It]

And coincidentally, the same number with IQs over 50.

[Scott Lurndal]

Out of 40,000,000 Californians. And most of those 70,000 have had their power restored already. More problematic is the road damage on some of the local highways.

And like normal, the daily mail headline is clickbait. 6.4 is hardly massive.

9.0 is massive.

I'll take an earthquake (very rare) over a tornado or hurricane (rather common) anyday.

[Thats All And Sign It]

Gotta love our wonderful TV "news". Plenty of videos of liquor store damage as usual and nothing else.

[rbowman]

Yeah, a 6.7 ain't nothing.

[Cindy Hamilton]

You can prepare for a tornado or hurricane. Earthquake forecasting is, at best, in its infancy. I'll take the tornado.

[Dean Hoffman]

I remember hiding in the basement of our old farmhouse whenever there were storm warnings out. Dad built a bench down there with a roof over it for further protection. He'd look out of the basement now and then to see what was happening. The old root cellars on the old farmsteads were good hiding places, too. Farmers were probably safer than town dwellers. Where would people in an apartment complex go?

[Scott Lurndal]

I never said they were "nothing". I've experienced a 6.9 (Loma Prieta, the epicenter of which is less than 10 miles from my home (built in '76) - which didn't take any damage) and a 5.9 (Wittier Narrows, the epicenter of which was less than 10 miles from my apt (built in early 50's and partially soft-story to boot) which didn't take any damage) and a host of smaller quakes.

Yes, a 6+ is significant. It's not "massive".

The state instituted significant building code reforms after the Sylmar quake in 1971. Northridge damage was to freeways and older homes and soft-story builtings built before 1971 that hadn't been retrofitted. The codes (and freeways) were extensively updated (and retrofitted) after 1989 and 1991 as well.

The hospital destroyed in the Sylmar quake was used as a set in one of the Mission Impossible TV series episodes shortly after the quake.

Since then, all the hospitals in the state have been either rebuilt to new codes or upgraded.

[Scott Lurndal]

Actually, it is easy to prepare for an earthquake.

It's not difficult to build earthquake resistent buildings and overpasses. The damage occurs to buildings not retrofitted or not built to code. Earthquakes also effect relatively small geographic areas and are very rare.

[Frank]

We have had a few earthquakes here in Delaware. I recall years ago to wake up to what sounded like a big truck going down the street to find next day it was an earthquake.

I missed the one a couple of years ago which apparently people felt underfoot but I was driving and felt nothing.

[Cindy Hamilton]

It isn't 1950 anymore. We can see tornados on radar and everything. We don't have to hide every time there's a storm warning.

The last apartment I lived in had a basement with laundry facilities and a storage cage for each apartment. That's where I would have gone. Can't speak for every apartment house everywhere, of course. But anything more than a couple of stories high will probably have a basement. At least up here in the frosty regions.

The basement of my current house is bifurcated by a concrete-block wall. I'd go to the southwest corner of the eastern half of the basement. The southwest corner of the western half of the basement has a glass window, so that's not so good.

[Cindy Hamilton]

It's easy to prepare for earthquakes. Preparing for a specific earthquake is a little tricky. How do you know when you should get out of your non-retrofitted building and go somewhere safe?

[Dean Hoffman]

70,000 people is a big town in Nebraska. I was curious so had to look it up. Memorial Stadium home of the UNL Huskers holds about 85,000 people. We have only two towns that have more than the 70,000 mentioned in the article about California. Some weird weather hit Grand Island (pop, 54,000 or so) back in 1980. Seven tornadoes with 3 rotating backwards.

[hubops]

Most utilities would tend to state the number of _customers_ interrupted - ie : metering points . A metering point might have 1 person or it might have many many more - or it might have zero < business >

so the actual number of _people_ affected is hard to determine. It's even more difficult when the outage is widespread and affecting multiple utilities - the "master" utility might not include its embedded < smaller > utilities in its stats .. John T.

[rbowman]

They learned a lot from Newhall Pass. I don't think it was even open when the interchange collapsed in '71. They rebuilt it with a little more rebar. The failure in '94 was almost identical.

[Scott Lurndal]

Those 70,000 people were mostly rural, in small towns ranging from 1,371 in Ferndale (a very pretty victorian community in the redwoods), to Fortuna with with 12,500.

The power was fully restored within 24 hours.

The San Francisco bay region population is 4.62 million, the Los Angeles basin population is 13 million, and Sandy Eggo is 1.33 million. The remainder of the

40 million are spread around the very large state in smaller cities and towns.

The largest cities closed to the epicenter are Redding (93k) and Eureka (27k).

The county (Humbolt) where the earthquake was felt has 136k residents.