Catastrophic California Quake Due at Any Time, Warns Seismologist

The section of the San Andreas Fault in the Los Angeles area has been quiet for too long and Thomas Jordan believes it’s now a ticking time bomb that could produce an 8 magnitude ‘Big One’.

“The springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight… locked, loaded and ready to go,” Jordan said at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach, as reported by the LA Times.

Such a quake would hit areas away from the ocean the hardest like the Coachella and Antelope valleys and Inland Empire, but tremors would hit Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley as well, according to the Times.

This section of the major faultline hasn’t produced a ‘big one’ since 1857 when a 7.9 quake shook nearly half the state.

A San Andreas shift further north in the Bay Area was the cause of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake which killed 63 people and caused up to $6 billion in damage in cities such as San Francisco and Oakland.

Deadly Devastation

A 7.8 quake in the Southern California area could result in “approximately 1,800 deaths, of which about half occur because of the fires following the earthquake” and cost $213 billion, according to a 2008 US Geological Survey.

Another 750 people would have severe injuries, the survey found, and “50,000 people will have injuries that need emergency room care.”

The death rate could further increase due to damaged hospitals not being able to function.

Other risks identified in the study included “between 10,000 and 100,000 individual landslides, the vast majority of which will consist of rock falls, rock slides, rock avalanches, soil falls, disrupted soil slides and soil avalanches.”

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The section of the San Andreas Fault in the Los Angeles area has been quiet for too long and Thomas Jordan believes it’s now a ticking time bomb that could produce an 8 magnitude ‘Big One’.

“The springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight… locked, loaded and ready to go,” Jordan said at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach, as reported by the LA Times.

Such a quake would hit areas away from the ocean the hardest like the Coachella and Antelope valleys and Inland Empire, but tremors would hit Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley as well, according to the Times.

This section of the major faultline hasn’t produced a ‘big one’ since 1857 when a 7.9 quake shook nearly half the state.

A San Andreas shift further north in the Bay Area was the cause of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake which killed 63 people and caused up to $6 billion in damage in cities such as San Francisco and Oakland.

Deadly Devastation

A 7.8 quake in the Southern California area could result in “approximately 1,800 deaths, of which about half occur because of the fires following the earthquake” and cost $213 billion, according to a 2008 US Geological Survey.

Another 750 people would have severe injuries, the survey found, and “50,000 people will have injuries that need emergency room care.”

The death rate could further increase due to damaged hospitals not being able to function.

Other risks identified in the study included “between 10,000 and 100,000 individual landslides, the vast majority of which will consist of rock falls, rock slides, rock avalanches, soil falls, disrupted soil slides and soil avalanches.”

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