RadioFan wrote:with 10 times as many people living there as in 1906
Huh?
Best get to checking those numbers, bro.
Off the top of my head, there was roughly 450,000 people in SF in 1906(I remember this only because the story is being revisited as of late). Today, I think there's somewhere around 800,000. Not 4,500,000. Hell, there isn't a whole hell of a lot more than that in the entire Bay Area today.
combined with virtually no building codes until the 1950s, it's a disaster on an epic scale waiting to happen.
You mean like if another really, really, really big earthquake hit?
Sin,
1989
If you want to get into
potential, due to building codes and whatnot -- I live in an even worse place than SF.
There's this huge industry/government scam known as "seismic retrofitting." Believe it or not, those buildings are not sitting there in the same precarios position they were 50-60 years ago.
And the Freaking Gorgeous midwesterners crack me up. "Yeah, but you have earthquakes!"
Yup, devastating ones. And the very worst place(in practice, rather than theory anyway) out of all of them, has had all of...
two...spaced 83 years apart. Maybe ten minutes of ratlling in the last 100 years. The dissater
that is your region shakes your world 24/7/365.
But, keep on cracking on them earthquakes. I
allegedly live in the second-worst earthquake city in the country (or so they tell me, probably a geologist gunning for a grant. Anchorage is the worst-btw). And Paleface has lived around here for about 200 years now, or close to. And in that 200 years, the total number of devastating earthquakes Portland has suffered...?
The total is sitting right at
zero.
Number of minor quakes in my lifetime, ones big enough to make me take notice, and even worry a little bit?
Two. Biggest one was 5.6 or something like that. BFD.Fix a couple of drywall cracks, rehang some door-trim, and good as new. Whoop-de-do.
Whatever. Anything under 6 isn't an earthquake -- it's an annoyance.
Sure, that could all change tomorrow....but I'm betting my life that it won't. And if some huge chunk of a building comes crashing down on top of me, crushing my innards, leaving me no hope for anything but a slow, inevitable, painful death....at least as I gasp for my last dying breath, I can leave this word by saying to myself...
"Could be worse -- I could be in the Midwest."