Word: richter
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...playing Mexican pop. There is less panic here than among the Anglos, but more sadness. Yvonne Androver, 27, a cleaning woman, glances at her nephew Brando, age nine months. He is fast asleep, contented. She has been jolted back into her past: Guatemala in 1976. A 7.5 on the Richter scale. Twenty-three thousand people dead. "I remember all of it," she says. "The houses going down, the people crying...
Bill Clinton is jerking up and down. For two days, he has postponed flying in from Washington, but even now two Richter 5.1 aftershocks startle his entourage at a "town meeting" he is holding at a Burbank airport. The news he has heard is bad. Broken freeways and the busted utilities cost a tremendous amount of money. The quake closed down 150 public schools, and there are worries about insurance coverage. It is a fact that 60% of the city's homeowners did not carry any. California Governor Pete Wilson has sent Clinton his estimated bill: between $15 billion...
Registering 6.6 on the moment-magnitude scale, a measure of earthquake energy that among scientists has largely replaced the Richter scale, the Northridge temblor didn't qualify as a Big One. (The San Andreas Fault, 30 miles east of Los Angeles, could produce a magnitude-8 quake, which would be more than 85 times as powerful.) But don't tell that to the people of Northridge and surrounding communities...
...Richter scale is logarithmic, so a magnitude three earthquake is not half as strong as a magnitude six quake...
When speaking in terms of the "moment" it is common to say that one earthquake is a thousand times stronger than another. Such a comparison is not as obvious using the Richter scale...