Word: temblors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...state's drinking water supply flows through the gigantic Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region east of San Francisco Bay - and the levees that help direct the massive amounts of water south to farmlands and cities are so antiquated that many may simply collapse with a major temblor. The resulting flooding could also put California's huge farm belt, hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of residents at enormous risk...
Since earthquakes can't be accurately predicted or stopped, the key to preventing damage is to prepare. The death toll and destruction from a serious temblor often has less to do with the strength of the quake than with the strength of building codes and emergency-response plans. In the years since the 1989 quake, California has reinforced building codes, especially for public structures like schools and hospitals, while the state government has spent billions to improve the reliability of highways, bridges and roads. The Bay Bridge - which partly collapsed in 1989 - is being remade to handle the largest plausible...
...that can be costly, and right now there's little in the way of aid for homeowners who might want to quakeproof their homes. That means there are still countless older structures that aren't built to resist earthquakes - especially strong ones - and could collapse during a major temblor, which is exactly how most of the deaths in the 1989 quake occurred. "If you have a 20-story apartment building built in 1920, that structure is a collapse hazard," says Yanev. "We know the problem, but the political will is not there...
...Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics were just about to start Game 3 of the 1989 World Series on Oct. 17 when the shaking began. ABC play-by-play announcer Al Michaels managed to tell viewers, "We're having an earth-" before the signal went dead. The temblor was brief - just 15 seconds - but the damage caused by the 6.9-magnitude quake was impressive. It killed 63 people, injured thousands and caused $7 billion worth of damage throughout California's Bay Area, including major destruction to the Oakland Bay Bridge. "It was a good sized shock," says Peter Yanev, chairman...
California's responses to the 1989 quake and to a 1994 temblor in Los Angeles are instructive. First, there's the science of quake analysis and prediction. In 1989 the Bay Area had only 75 accelerometer sensors, which locate quakes and determine their intensity. Today, there are more than 200, which allow seismologists to more immediately pin down the size and strength of an earthquake as it happens. Many of those sensors have also been equipped with global-positioning system add-ons, which can determine the rate at which a quake has caused a fault to slip. Scientists...