Posted on 05/25/2005 2:11:01 PM PDT by Pyro7480
Little-known fault threatens big LA disaster-study
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A little-known fault that runs under Los Angeles into its suburbs could cause the costliest earthquake in U.S. history and kill as many as 18,000 people if it shifts, geologists said on Wednesday.
The Puente Hills fault has caused quakes of magnitude 7.2 to 7.5 at least four times in the past 11,000 years, said the teams at the U.S. Geological Survey and the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California.
This is rare, but building codes and emergency planning should take the risks into account, the quake experts said.
"As an individual, your odds of dying of a heart attack or an auto accident are much greater than of dying from this earthquake," said Ned Field, a USGS researcher who led the study.
"That being said, there are other sources of earthquakes throughout the region, and it's not a question of if, but when, so everyone should take necessary safety precautions."
The Puente Hills fault runs under Los Angeles County and adjacent to Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
A quake of magnitude 7.2 to 7.5 would kill anywhere between 3,000 and 18,000 people, would displace between 142,000 and 735,000 households, and cause up to $250 billion in property damage, the researchers report in the journal Earthquake Spectra.
That would make it the costliest disaster in U.S. history, the researchers said.
The estimates come from 18 different possible quake scenarios, all presuming that the rupture occurs at 2 p.m. on a weekday.
The fault runs under older commercial and industrial structures, they said, while the areas damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which killed 33 people, were mostly wood-frame residential structures.
"One of the main goals of this study was to use our improved knowledge of seismic hazards in Southern California to evaluate -- and hopefully reduce -- the uncertainties in this type of risk analysis," said Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. We were constantly having quakes on this fault or that fault, and now and then we'd have one on a fault nobody knew existed. We would dub it "Nobody's Fault" until someone gave it a name. :-)
No worries.....Mexico will handle the resucue, cleanup, and rebuilding...after all, Los Angeles is theirs now, isn't it?
I guess that fault should be called "Bush's Fault" :)
That would be the Housing Bubble Fault
And there would have been many more deaths if Northridge had happened during daylight hours.
Hell when I went to Rio Hondo JC in Whittier our geology class did a field trip to study the Puente Hills fault... It's not that unknown if you live it the Puente Hills area
I have a serious question..You own a house...you have title insurance. There's a big earthquake..your house, and property, dissapears..Can you file a claim with the title company, since you can't convey a clean title?
Why?
Funny how all these articles come out when its EARTHQUAKE WEATHER
OMG! Earthquakes in Los Angeles? Do the people living there know? </sarc>
It also turns out that Northridge was sort of a "directed energy" quake and a lot of the energy was directed into fairly uninhabited hills.
Other thing that has emerged in some new studies is that you can have multiple faults triggering each other at the same time in the LA area, the San Andreas AND some of the ones closer to LA;
Or the same thing could happen in a sequence of perhaps 2-4 slightly smaller (but still of a Northridge quakes) occuring every few months for a period of up to a year.
Your SOL. Most people don't carry earthquake insurance....there is a big push on for people to buy it with high deductibles.
One of the weirder phenomena I've seen occur on multiple FR threads (hasn't happened on this one yet) is people from California sort of kid themselves that "everbody is in the same boat all over the country" and then usually go on and on and on about tornadoes in the Midwest being worse than earthquakes, etc.
One thing that should tell those people something; there's no such thing as "tornado insurance"....a basic homeowner's policy covers tornado damage, even in the Midwest. However you can't get quake coverage in CA unless you specifically pay through the nose for it.
That, and it was a government holiday (MLK Day), keeping public workers snug in their beds.
Seriously - had it happened between 6:30 and 8:00 a.m., the Newhall Pass interchanged would have had stop-and-go traffic creeping along bumper to bumper; dozens would have gone with the collapse..me included. 
Overall, though, for the average Joe Schmo, there's probably an over-focus on the "Big One" threat from the San Andreas (which is real, but it's at least a bit removed from downtown LA) compared to the threat of slightly smaller quakes from relatively unknown faults in more populated areas.
Sure you can. The new owner may have a tough time finding the improvements, though...
More people would have driven off the freeways...
Or trapped in the libraries at USC...
Or in the parking garages at Cal State Northridge
Or trapped in Kaiser medical center
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