Word: francisco
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...disaster Californians remember most vividly, even though most weren't even born yet, was the earthquake that struck San Francisco at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906. The first shockwave registered 8.3 on the Richter scale and shook the city for a full 45 seconds. Many buildings, including San Francisco's city hall, collapsed almost immediately. Seventeen aftershocks came within an hour and fires raged for three days afterward, destroying 500 city blocks. In photos, 1906 San Francisco resembles a war zone; buildings are left half-standing, the streets are littered with debris, barely anything is recognizable. With...
...Francisco was hit again on Oct. 17, 1989, during the third World Series game between the city's two teams: the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants. Measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale, it severed electrical and gas lines, caused part of the Bay Bridge to fall off and collapsed a 1-mile stretch of an elevated Oakland freeway, trapping cars between layers of asphalt and concrete. Thirty-seven thousand people were injured and 1,000 people were left homeless, but only 63 deaths were directly attributed to the earthquake...
...most part, though, the low death tolls can be attributed to luck. "We haven't had a big earthquake beneath one of our metropolitan centers yet," Allen says. "For example, in '89, the quake started beneath the mountains. There was some damage in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, but San Francisco was more than 60 miles away. When an earthquake occurs in densely populated urban areas, the fatalities will be much higher...
...question about it. Southern California hasn't had a major upset since Fort Tejon in 1857 and is due any day - or decade - for something of magnitude 6.7 or higher. Northern California is ready for one too; the Hayward Fault, which runs along the east side of the San Francisco Bay, averages a major earthquake once every 140 years. The last one occurred in 1868, exactly 140 years ago. The U.S. Geological Survey puts the odds of a magnitude 7 earthquake occurring within the next 30 years at 60%. Thirty years may seem like a long time to residents...
Illinois Democrats like Obama have also learned that their Midwestern base provides some inoculation against charges that dog their coastal colleagues. When Republicans call Nancy Pelosi a "San Francisco liberal" or derisively refer to Upper West Side and Cambridge lefties, they tag those Democrats as ideologically extreme and culturally élitist. Politicians from Chicago can be just as liberal as those from New York, New England and California, but they come from the much-fetishized heartland, which makes attacks on them a tougher sell to swing voters. And they have an advantage within the Democratic base as well: while party...