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...computer, Aagaard first conjures up the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which started, many scientists think, along a spur of the San Andreas some 60 miles south of San Francisco. Across a Landsat image of the Bay Area, Aagaard's simulation takes the form of a spreading blob of mixed colors that indicate shaking intensities, from low-intensity blue to medium-intensity yellow and high-intensity red. Then Aagaard calls up 1906. The difference is immediately apparent. This time red flows across the landscape like a river of lava, and among the places that glow the brightest is the area around...
What will happen when the Hayward Fault--or the San Andreas--goes off? Scientists who study ancient quakes cannot answer that question because it depends on details that sediments do not preserve. But using a new 3-D model of the earth's crust in the Bay Area, USGS geophysicist Brad Aagaard and his colleagues can run simulations that tweak different parameters for earthquakes that have already occurred and for those still to come. The results range from the expected to the quite surprising...
...question is: Will Bay Area residents pay attention to what these public-spirited researchers say? The ghost of Hurricane Katrina, no less than that of 1906, will haunt the centennial as it gets under way. "Katrina has shown us what a $100 billion--plus disaster looks like, the kind of disaster no one wanted to talk about before," says Chris Poland, chief executive of Degenkolb Engineers and chairman of the conference. "It's shown us what happens when you damage a community so much that its economy stops...
While it is true that the communities in and around San Francisco have taken a number of laudable steps--constructing a whole new span for the San Francisco--Oakland Bay Bridge, for example--it is also plain that they need to do more. There are tens of thousands of older buildings in the Bay Area that do not meet modern earthquake standards, among them office and apartment buildings whose upper floors rest atop an unreinforced storefront or garage. In an earthquake, such "soft-story" buildings are likely to collapse or sustain damage so severe that no one will be able...
...from Katrina did to New Orleans, and the vividness of what it means to a modern city to lose so much housing and so many jobs has given the 1906 centennial a somber emotional edge. At risk in this case is not just a very large metropolitan population--the Bay Area now has about 7 million residents versus perhaps 800,000 in 1906--but also a vibrant $350 billion economy that includes one of the nation's largest financial hubs, one of its busiest ports and one of the world's densest concentrations of technical and scientific talent...