Terry in Crapchester wrote:Van wrote:Win/win, if ever I saw one...
Except, of course, for the unfortunates who would be killed in the course of said Big One.
Don't you watch movies??
All that ever happens is there's suddenly a big earthly groan and shudder, a giant crack appears beneath the screaming, startled populace and then the land quickly separates into two moving masses...with only a couple three dorks falling into the growing abyss!
Gotta break some eggs to make an omellete, right?
Vito, in all seriousness California really isn't under threat of being split into two. Oh, sure, maybe over millions of years as the tectonic plates continue to shift western California might join Baja California in splitting from the mainland...
Millions of years. California has existed in its current configuration for literally millions of years ('sup, R_T_S and other bible thumping literalists) and though we are subjected to the occasional earthquake the shifts that result from these quakes can be measured in inches and feet, not miles.
Meanwhile, like clockwork, the Gulf Coast gets totally shithammered by Mother Nature. Homes destroyed, cities wiped out, generations lost...
...and it happens, what, once or twice per generation?
Galveston, in 1906? Another massive one in '66. Hurricane Andrew, not too long ago...
Obviously SoCalTrojan is just trolling you guys and attempting to push everybody's buttons with his heartless shots about Katrina and Tornado Alley and all that. Still, there
is some truth to the notion that it takes a certain blind and fatalistic
c'est la vie attitude to stare at the Gulf Coast's history and decide to set up shop there anyway.
It may not happen this year, or even within the next ten years, but if you live on Texas' or Louisiana's coasts long enough, yep, you're going to get hit hard eventually, and possibly wiped out.
Meanwhile, the earthquakes in California? Yeah, they're kind of scary, especially if you're not from here and you haven't gotten somewhat used to them.
Before we got married my wife and her pets were down visiting me in SoCal, in '94. She's from Sacramento, by way of Savannah, Georgia and the Bahamas.
She'd never experienced an earthquake.
When the rumbling started from the big Northridge quake her cat shot out of our room before either of us even knew what was going on. Just took off like a bolt, diving into an open cupboard.
Susan sat up in bed, thinking it was a train rolling by. I knew better, since we were living on the beach and there were no train lines anywhere nearby.
Then it started getting really loud, and I knew what was coming, and then came the deafening roar and, worse, the rolling of the ground.
Susan was panicked. Absolutely freaking out. Me? I was merely irked. I finally realised, fuck, even though it was still way too early in the morning to be getting up this one's big enough that we're going to have to get out of bed and get beneath a door frame or whatever...
About the time I'd made the decision to get us up and moving...it stopped.
I flopped back down into bed, relieved.
Susan sat up in bed, clutching the bedcovers, clutching herself, shaking.
"What was THAT?????"
"Welcome to SoCal. You just got your first earthquake..."
She was wide eyed and absolutely terrified. Inconsolable, even.
Then the aftershocks started, and that quake probably had more aftershocks than any other I've experienced, and some of 'em were fairly big in their own right.
"Goddamn it...", and so I got out of bed and led Susan downstairs. Her cat was stuck inside a china cabinet, shivering and howling. We looked outside on the terrace, down to the beach, and while lots of car alarms were going off it and a few streetlights were blinking intermittently nothing else was really going on aside from simply standing there and watching the landscape roll beneath us during the next rolling aftershock.
She curled up on the couch in the fetal position, still shaking, and I just stayed there with her. Eventually the aftershocks got further and further apart and finally it was over.
Now, living on the beach, we weren't nearly as close to the epicenter as I was during the huge '71 quake, when I was still living in the Valley.
That one knocked me out of my top bunk bed. (I was only seven years old at the time...)
Anyway, the next day following the '94 quake we went down to Northridge to visit friends.
Yeah, there were a lot of buckled buildings and a lot of broken glass. All in all it eventually took a few years to restore everything back to normal.
Here's the thing though: That was it. Some buckled buildings, some collapsed bridges that did in fact lead to a few deaths, and so on.
Millions, if not billions of dollars in damage, especially where the bridges were concerned, such as with the '88 quake in 'Frisco.
That was it.
We got hit fairly hard, yes....
...and all of 'em combined don't even approach the devastation visited upon the Gulf Coast by its wholly predictable hurricanes.
At our very worst we'll see some beach properties slide off their stilts and we may even see a freeway or three collapse.
We'll suffer a handful of deaths.
New Orleans? Galveston?
That's apocalypse stuff. That's far beyond anything our earthquakes will ever do to us. Moreover, nothing about our earthquakes is nearly as certain as the inevitable catastrophe that is N.O., where they built a city
below sea level....right next to massive Lake Pontchartrain...and the city is guarded by insufficient levies....and it's right in the path of annual hurricanes.
Really, it's madness. Modern building codes will allow our buildings to withstand bigger earthquakes than have ever been recorded. Meanwhile, New Orleans was just flattened by a Level 4, and the Gulf Of Mexico sees Level 4s every summer.
Had it not veered slightly off to the right at the last moment and had it not dropped from a Level 5, hey, New Orleans is likely gone.
Then, what, a month later, Texas' coast was spared the same thing when
their monster veered right and dropped in force.
Here's the kicker: Next summer, they're going to go through all those same threats again. Somewhere on that Gulf Coast a hurricane will threaten entire towns agian next year, and every so often one of those threats will come to fruition.
We're not talking once every few million years here either. We're talking a couple times per lifetime.
Earthquakes and faultlines in California? By comparison, to the majority of us who live here, they're just sort of mildly amusing. Cool water cooler fodder, really...
It's not like we're living with our own Mt Vesuvius. We're not staring at
anything inevitable.
BIG difference, vs the mindset of people who live on the Gulf Coast.