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...ecodisaster in a lifetime is enough for Dennis Kelso, Alaska's commissioner of the department of environmental conservation. Unless tankers that use the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline submit individual spill contingency plans by Nov. 13, Kelso says he will deny them access to the port of Valdez, effectively shutting down the pipeline. George Bush has warned that a shutoff of oil would not be in the "national interest." This is not Alaska's first such threat. After the Exxon Valdez ran aground in March, Governor Steve Cowper told oil companies to increase safety measures or he would shut...
...rush hour. Minutes later, Reynolds felt "a ripple." Then a neighbor screamed a warning. He ran out of his shop to find "the whole goddam ground lifting up." He grabbed a telephone pole as the sidewalk buckled beneath his feet, and looked up at a horrifying sight. A mile-long section of the freeway's upper deck began to heave, then collapsed onto the lower roadway, flattening cars as if they were beer cans. "It just slid. It didn't fall. It just slid," said Reynolds. "You couldn't see nothing but dust. Then people came out of the dust...
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...
...fault once generated a big earthquake, it can be assumed that it will do so again. But just where and when will the next big break occur? Here scientists are beginning to make headway. Geophysicist Wayne Thatcher of the USGS notes that the 1906 quake ruptured a 260-mile-long section of the San Andreas, extending from Cape Mendocino to San Juan Bautista. But the plate movement along the southern portion of the rupture was minor compared with the far greater movement in the north. To Christopher Scholz of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, this meant one thing...
Halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, near the tiny town of Parkfield, scientists are conducting an experiment that they hope will open the door to a new era of earthquake prediction. Along a 20-mile section of the San Andreas, researchers have sunk strain gauges up to 1,000 ft. deep into the earth and laced the surface with "creep meters" that measure rock movement. "We're listening to the heartbeat of this section of the fault very, very closely," says the Geological Survey's Thatcher. The Parkfield section of the San Andreas is unusual in that...