Word: faulted
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...They need only step outside their hotels to see a city that has become one vast society for risk analysis. All around the Bay Area these days, amid the tumbled roadways and jolted buildings left by the earthquake, people are asking themselves: Is it crazy to live on a fault line...
...awaiting the judgment of geologists as to whether homeowners should be allowed to rebuild on the fractured hillsides, where landslides may now become a perennial headache. Many residents are nonetheless eager to rebuild. True to their reputation for mellowness and impregnable cool, Californians are generally unfazed by the fault-line threat...
...fact, Californians are no different from other Americans when it comes to risk. The national temperament seems to have a fault line all its own. On one side of that psychic divide, Americans shrug off demonstrable threats: they build houses on eroding beaches, speed without wearing seat belts, go hang gliding and expose themselves to the cancer-causing rays of the sun. On the other side, they suffer a bad case of the jitters about the smallest threat to personal well-being. They flee from apples that might bear a trace of Alar and fret about radon, nuclear power...
...that Californians have been willing to tolerate the risks arising from life on a fault line is not to say they have been indifferent to them. The recent quake was comparable in magnitude to the one in Armenia last December, which killed 25,000. "A substantial contributor to the much lower death rate in California was that California was conscious of the risk and made significant investments as a precaution," says M. Granger Morgan, head of the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie-Mellon University. But after last week, earthquakes are going to be viewed as a much...
...suffered a massive tremor in this century and has a much larger population, a major quake could result in far greater devastation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates that an 8.3 magnitude temblor (16 times as powerful as the one that hit San Francisco) on the southern San Andreas fault near Los Angeles could cause $17 billion in property damage and between 3,000 and 14,000 deaths...