A Threefold 'Thank You' to Los Angeles
Dear Los Angeles: I'm Thankful For...
-thumb-110x110-213475.jpg)
A Photo Gallery of the Things I am Grateful for This Year
I LOVE L.A.! My Thanksgiving Thanks
10 Random Albums To Be Thankful For
Yes, you are not crazy. A very quick 3.5 earthquake struck to the north of the Valley at 12:23 p.m. A quake last night in Peru, registering at 8.0, killed 450 and had aftershocks of 6.3. Today in the Solomon Islands was a 6.7 and a 5.3 in Japan (add to that a 5.3 in Hawaii a few days ago).
It may have been a dry summer, but Earthquake season might be upon us this fall.
Previously
- Now that was a 4.5 Earthquake, Los Angeles
- Getting Ready for Earthquakes in LA: An Interview with Captain Stacy Gerlich of the Disaster Preparedness CERT Unit
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
The big island of Hawai'i was also hit with one a few days ago...
thanks! I added it.
Bear in mind that we may now be coming out of the "seismic shadow" of the '94 Northridge quake -the period following a major quake, after the aftershock sequence dies away, marked by a relative absence of smaller quakes.
I've lived in LA for almost thirty years, and I can tell you that minor mag. 3-4 quakes were a lot more common in the years that preceded Northridge than they have been recently.
I was a bit startled, in fact, after last week's mag 4.6 in the Valley, by how many people remarked afterward that it was the first quake they'd ever felt while living in LA.
I must say, though, that I think these more-frequent minor quakes are a good thing. They do little or no damage, and they serve as constant reminders to keep one's quake supplies up-to-date.
[Speaking of which, I need to go swap out the canned food and bottled water in my own stash for something a bit fresher. And don't forget to check the expiration date on your caffeine tablets!
What, you don't have caffeine tablets in your kit? Take a tip from a veteran: after a major quake, you're not going to want to mess around with brewing coffee, Starbucks won't be open, and - once the adrenaline wears off - you're going to really need your caffeine. :-)
Do yourself a favor and toss a bottle of No-Doz or Vivarin or the like in your kit, right now while you're thinking about it.]
Has anyone heard the theory that all of the major quakes of the last two decades coincide with the space shuttle being in orbit? I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but it's kind of wierd...
Why? Well, to begin with, large earthquakes are more common than most people realize: there are, on average, 18 quakes a year of Magnitude 7 or greater. That's an average of about one every three weeks.
And that wouldn't include a lot of quakes that we tend to think of as "major quakes", for example, the 1994 Northridge quake (6.7), the 1995 Kobe quake (6.9), the 1989 Loma Prieta quake (6.9), or the 1971 San Fernando quake (6.6).
If you define "major quake" as "Mag. 6.0 or above", it gets even more daunting: there are an average of 152 quakes of Mag. 6+ every year.
That's roughly one every 2 or 3 days.
We tend to think of "quakes that get a lot of press coverage" as "major quakes", but that only includes moderate-to-large quakes that occur in reasonably well-populated areas.
Large quakes happen all the time in areas like the South Pacific that get virtually no attention at all in the US press.
I'd be curious to see if any reasonable definition of "major quake" could produce only quakes that happened during shuttle flights - but even if it did, I can't imagine how it could be anything but coincidence.
Do you happen to know where that rumor came from, or remember where you first heard it?
Wait, I think I've actually tracked down the source of this one:
Alice: I don't see the connection.
Jerry: You don't see the connection? Come on. Six major earthquakes in the last three-and-a-half years, and the space shuttle up in orbit for every single one of 'em. Don't you think that's a little strange?
Alice: Testing some top-secret seismic weapon?
Jerry: No, not testing. Using. Nukes are passé. We're talking weapon of the future.
Alice: Okay, but I still don't see what it has to do with the president.
Jerry: The president is in Europe at the moment, and tomorrow he'll be, uh, in Turkey. Right here, along this fault line. And they sent up a space shuttle yesterday.
Alice: Motive?
Jerry: Motive? How about fifty billion dollars, how's that for a motive? The president's cutting funding for NASA, the milk-cow of the aerospace industry. And that's a lot of milk.
Alice: Um, so... you're telling me that NASA is going to kill the president of the United States with an earthquake?
Jerry: It's not the kind of thing a Secret Service agent can, like, just throw himself on top of, is it?
-----
That's from Conspiracy Theory, a Richard Donner film starring Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. Brian Helgeland wrote the screenplay, but I understand that a lot of the "conspiracy theories" in the film were ad-libbed by Gibson.