Word: cruz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...action. In Berkeley, University of California graduate student Anthony Lomax felt the sidewalk shiver and watched telephone poles sway, then rushed to his seismographic station. "The instruments were off-scale!" he marveled. Within minutes the scientists on duty had pinpointed the epicenter of the quake in the rugged Santa Cruz mountains some 50 miles away. The spot was no surprise: it lay on the San Andreas fault, a great gash in the earth that extends nearly the length of the California coast. Even before the quake, the Santa Cruz area had been identified as a prime candidate...
This quake did not begin to exhaust the pent-up energy in the 800-mile-long San Andreas system. In a list of seismic danger zones compiled by an expert panel last year, the section around Santa Cruz ranked only sixth. The area believed most likely to have a devastating quake...
...tributaries, the San Andreas is associated with numerous lesser faults, among them the Hayward fault, which undercuts Berkeley and Oakland, and the San Jacinto fault, near San Bernardino. Some parts of the San Andreas are more dangerous than others. One segment that lies to the south of the Santa Cruz mountains does not appear prone to large jolts at all. "It just creeps along," says geophysicist Ross Stein of the USGS. "Probably & there's some remarkable material down there that, like talcum powder, acts as a lubricant...
...time or in a hundred, but they are working on it. Seismic silence is one clue. Soundings taken along the San Andreas over the past 15 years showed that the small earthquakes that are a daily event along other parts of the system were not occurring in the Santa Cruz mountains. Scientists argued over the significance of this blank spot in the data. Then a year ago, activity ominously resumed, and last August brought a damaging earthquake. Such an increase in activity, notes Columbia's Scholz, seems to indicate that stress has built up to the point where a major...
...information can be instantaneous." Tuesday night was a reminder that there are limits to what even television can do when electricity and telephones and highways are knocked out. By the time most networks closed down for the night after five or six hours of coverage, San Jose and Santa Cruz were still disconcertingly cut off from contact, the scope of the tragedy on Oakland's I-880 was unknown, and it had been impossible for reporters to convey the full flavor of what life was like for 6 million residents of the Bay Area on a night they will never...