The SF Chronicle is reporting on a USGS study about the impact of a major quake in the Bay Area–something they say is overdue
While nearly 113 years have passed without a major earthquake on the fault from the Peninsula north, the quiet will end. It could happen tomorrow or next week or decades from now. When it does, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people will feel the ground shake like they’ve never felt before. Based on current understanding of earthquake recurrence, that’s a statistical anomaly, according to a report this month from U.S. Geological Survey scientists. According to a 1,000-year earthquake history of those fault branches, the chances that not a single site would experience a major temblor in any given 100-year period is about 0.3%, the paper said.
Yep, we are riding on a 0.3% wave of luck. Burlingame is doing more than most to prepare for this by way of our annual Neighborhood Network disaster drills, supply caches, ham radio courses and the like we discussed here. The added bit of information from the USGS study is that a major quake on our San Andreas fault would have the probability of causing 3.7 million people to go without water for the following periods of time:
1-3 days has a 60% probability
1 week has a 58% probability
1 month has a 48% probability
3 months with no water has a 30.5% probability
Wow. It's basically 50/50 that we would have to go a month without running water. That is one of the reasons I believe we should be strengthening the Hetch Hetchy pipeline, building more reservoirs and limiting further population growth until we have done that. It is somewhere between sad, ironic and scary that plenty of politicians read the headlines about the IPCC's 100 year climate change model and want immediate action, but this much nearer and more identifiable threat goes unnoticed. Forewarned is forearmed. This year's drill is Saturday, October 12th. Put it on your calendar and if you don't have a group working in your part of B'game, think about volunteering.
Update: I just got my 33 gallon water barrel with pump and preservatives to last 5 years from our local B'game preparedness experts, Earthshakes.com. $143 all in and very well worth it. Here it is
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