Posted on 10/19/2016 4:48:32 PM PDT by BenLurkin
If the Hayward and Rodgers Creek faults broke simultaneously along their combined 118 miles, they could produce a magnitude 7.4 quake, said scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Such shaking would be more than five times stronger than the 1989 Loma Prieta quake on the San Andreas Fault that killed over 60 people and collapsed part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
There hasn't been a major quake on the Hayward Fault in more than 140 years....
"This should be a reminder that folks in the Bay Area need to be prepared for a major earthquake," USGS geophysicist Janet Watt said in an email.
Watt and her team probed the geology beneath San Pablo Bay, a tidal estuary that extends north from the San Francisco Bay, using a special acoustic instrument that bounced sound waves through the water and into the rocks below.
The Hayward Fault extends for 62 miles from San Jose to San Pablo Bay, passing through Berkeley and Oakland. The last time it broke was in 1868 when a magnitude 6.8 struck, killing 30 people. The Rodgers Creek fracture runs 56 miles north of the bay through the heart of wine country.
The underwater surveys revealed a previously unknown strand of the Hayward Fault that connects to the western section of the Rodgers Creek Fault. One reason why it has taken so long to determine the relationship between the two faults is because the bay is very shallow, which makes it hard to use a boat. Researchers floated instruments on pontoons.
...
The study was published before an annual earthquake preparedness drill Thursday in which more than 10 million people in California will practice the "drop, cover, and hold" procedure. The drill began in 2008 in Southern California and has grown to include other states and countries.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
“...and collapsed part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.”
That was absolutely awful to see; I’ll never forget it!
Don’t you wish our ONLY trouble these days was Mother Nature shaking out her skirts?
a good article to have posted, but the connection of these two fault lines has been pretty much assumed for decades and was announced as proven several years ago
(Fox news is a bit behind the times on that account)
the Hayward fault line indeed goes under several densely=populated places, like:
University of California campus (particularly the Memorial Colliseum football arena), Freeway 13, the BART mass transit train line, Oakland, Hayward downtown district (which has a number of brick buildings extra susceptible to quake damage), and the Fremont BART station, etc.
ALSO, the Bay Area Emergency Communications Broadcasting Headquarters !~
I’d hate to have anyone connect my faults.
ps: while there would be much damage right along the fault line, most of that region’s earthquake damage tends to be on bay mud or fill dirt
which has been built upon..
such as, in the Loma Prieta (small short) quake,
most of the damage was 50 to 70 miles away from the epicenter (in the mountains south of San Jose). The damage was on fill dirt (Freeway 880 structure collapse, Bay Bridge structure collapse, Marina District in San Fransicko which is built on bay fill, big massive heavy hotel in Burlingame built on fill dirt, etc.
this, too, is built atop filled bay mud
and its already leaning, tipping over, ha!
wait til the next quake?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/san-francisco-leaning-millennium-tower-investigation
That 89 quake was something
and a public agency (trying to build a super train station for the proposed new bullet trains that almost nobody wants and absolutely nobody knows how would ever reach San Francisco anyway)
that agency is digging a big hole in the mud right next door to the Leaning Tower, almost certainly undermining its stability further
the agency claims its construction work won’t hurt the Leaning Tower. go figure....
Tower:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/san-francisco-leaning-millennium-tower-investigation
As long as Peloser gets caught in it. It is all good ...
when that big one hits, what will Hillary do to save San Fransisco?
Or I, mine.
I was in Santa Clara during Loma Prieta.
Man, talk about an E-ticket ride! Five
times that would be some serious bouncing.
I remember the TV coverage of the earthquake in 1989. Some highly-paid TV news anchors were ignorant of the basic geography of the Bay Area (such as that Oakland is on the other side of the bay from San Francisco).
I know.
It is when we discovered that all of our utilities were fed through the Los Gatos substations. We had nada. Highway 17 looked like a sandscape of a series of waves. Santa Cruz was a true disaster mostly unmentioned
The Bay Brisge collapse was astonishing. Bill Wattenberg railed about that for quite awhile
Is it still Bush’s fault?
This one is Billy Bush’s fault. He’s egging them on.
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