Word: bayes
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...quake than with the strength of building codes and emergency-response plans. In the years since the 1989 quake, California has reinforced building codes, especially for public structures like schools and hospitals, while the state government has spent billions to improve the reliability of highways, bridges and roads. The Bay Bridge - which partly collapsed in 1989 - is being remade to handle the largest plausible earthquake expected to occur over a 1,500-year period. "We're in much better shape for emergency response," says Jones. (Read "How Disaster-Ready...
Looking back 20 years later, however, seismologists say the Bay Area got lucky. The epicenter of the quake was near Loma Prieta peak in Santa Clara County, outside the densely populated urban neighborhoods of San Francisco and Oakland. The destruction missed Silicon Valley - with its tens of billions in economic value - altogether. "If that quake had to happen, that was really the best place," says Yanev. "We were about as lucky as we could get." (See TIME's special report "Where Will the Next Five Big Earthquakes...
...more and more people will be living in seismological danger zones. The key to minimizing damage is to prepare for the inevitable. "The Loma Prieta quake was really a wake-up call for this region," says David Schwartz, a USGS geologist and the co-chair of the San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake Alliance. "But we still have a lot to do." (See pictures of Indonesia's devastating earthquake...
California's responses to the 1989 quake and to a 1994 temblor in Los Angeles are instructive. First, there's the science of quake analysis and prediction. In 1989 the Bay Area had only 75 accelerometer sensors, which locate quakes and determine their intensity. Today, there are more than 200, which allow seismologists to more immediately pin down the size and strength of an earthquake as it happens. Many of those sensors have also been equipped with global-positioning system add-ons, which can determine the rate at which a quake has caused a fault to slip. Scientists...
...March 15 - and only to prevent "very big and serious snow" from falling on the city, said Andrei Tsybin, head of the department. This could mean that a few flakes will manage to slip through the cracks. Tsybin estimated that the total cost of keeping the storms at bay would be $6 million this winter, roughly half the amount Moscow normally spends to clear the streets of snow...