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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
A series of earthquakes has Southern California shook. Is a big one
coming?
By Stephanie Elam, CNN
Updated:
11:40 AM EDT, Wed October 16, 2024
Source: CNN
Beautiful beaches. Majestic mountains. Hollywood.
One more thing Southern California is known for: earthquakes.
Yet for a long time, and to the great relief of millions, the many
active faults that claw and tear through the earth have been
relatively quiet.
That peace has been recently shaken by several quakes that jostled the
region to attention, including a in mid-August that sent a jolt across
Los Angeles. It was no disaster, but strong enough to rattle nerves.
Then came the u exactly one month later.
It was enough shaking to leave people wondering: Is a big one coming?
“Under every hill and mountain we have here in Southern California,
there’s an active fault that’s helping to produce that
topography,” said Kate Scharer, a research geologist at the United
States Geological Survey. While the San Andreas is the most famous,
scientists know it’s not the only fault that can produce a powerful
earthquake in Southern California.
“Magnitude-7s are very possible in this region along the front of the
San Gabriel Mountains,” said Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert operations
team lead at the US Geological Survey. “Part of the reason those
mountains are there is because there’s a really big fault there
called the Sierra Madre fault.”
All of these faults have clashed and scraped against each other through
the decades — small shifts on the planetary scale, but massive
movements have rocked Southern California. The worst in modern Los
Angeles history was the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake in 1994,
the first to strike under a major metro area since the 1930s.
Highway overpasses, office buildings and parking garages collapsed in
the violent shaking that lasted a painful 10 to 20 seconds along a
fault scientists didn’t even know existed. Thousands of people were
injured and dozens of people were killed. At tens of billions of
dollars, it was one of the costliest natural disasters in American
history to that point.
Nothing has compared to that quake since then, and in that time, the
population of Los Angeles County has grown from around 9 million to
more than 10 million people. Many newcomers have no idea the havoc a
big earthquake can wreak, including young Angelinos who grew up in
Southern California‘s quiet times.
They’ve gotten a taste in the recent sequence of moderate quakes. Now
the question is whether they mean a big one is coming.
“When we look back at the catalog, from like the 1930s to the
present, we can see this thing happens every once in a while,” Allen
Husker, a research professor at the California Institute of Technology
and the manager of the Southern California Seismic Network.
“There’s never a definite sequence where it happens, like, 100% of
the time, that we’re going to have a big earthquake (after the
sequence of smaller quakes).”
“We can be guaranteed that there’s always going to be a big one”
in a cycle that’s gone on for ages, Husker told CNN. What we don’t
know is when.
“There will be another big one in California sometime in our
lifetimes,” Husker said.
Part of the reason earthquakes are difficult to study is proximity.
“Next time you’re on a plane and they say, ‘we’re at 30,000
feet (above sea level)’ or ‘at cruising altitude,’ that’s about
the elevation above the surface of the earth,” Scharer explained.
“But earthquakes happen (that same distance) below the earth.”
While it may be unnerving to not know when the next big one will
happen, experts say residents should channel that anxiety into getting
prepared.
The most important items are water, food and medicine, Scharer says.
The Centers for Disease Control recommends having an emergency supply
of a gallon of water per person a day – as well as non-perishable
food and extra medicine for at least three days. It may take some time
for stores and pharmacies to reopen. The has guidelines on how to
prepare for an earthquake as well.
They also suggest a shift in thinking: Don’t just prepare for
yourself; prepare for and with your community. When all hell breaks
loose, you’ll be in it together.
“I would recommend that (residents) think about how to help their
friends and family and their local community if there is an
earthquake,” Scharer advised. “Start with yourself and your family
and then connect with your neighborhood and try and think about how
you’re going to respond.”
A relatively new early warning system — ShakeAlert — covers 50
million people in California, Oregon and Washington. It detects ground
motion as soon as shaking starts on the earth’s surface.
An estimated size and location are quickly calculated and become the
basis for emergency alerts straight to cell phones, municipalities and
schools.
The alert will tell you who is likely to feel the strongest shaking,
giving people a precious few seconds of warning to get in a safe place
before the earth begins to move.
“We want people to think of it as something that you can add to your
arsenal of things that you can use to be ready before the earthquake,
during the earthquake, and of course, after the earthquake,” said de
Groot, adding that people should remember to practice “drop, cover
and hold on” when they feel an earthquake – even if their phone
doesn’t send them an alert.
October 17th is the Great – a day for people around the world to
practice earthquake safety drills.
“We need to be prepared, because we could have an earthquake that’s
pretty big at any time,” Husker said. “It’s easy to get lax.”
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