I hear the term 'overdue' applied particularly to earthquakes, rather than any other naturally occurring event. Does this mean 'overdue' in the same sense that rolling a six is 'overdue' if you've not seen one after six rolls?
Practically we have no control over earthquakes (except maybe with fracking) and no way to really forecast them.
Another idea I wish would work is getting energy from lightning strikes. I guess it's not practical, but if it could work, "powered by lightning" sure would sound awesome. :-)
If you roll a dice 10 times and don't get a six, the probability of rolling a six is still 1/6 for the next roll. However, as the time since the last earthquake increases, not only does the probability of one increase (unlike dice which has a constant probability) but also the likely magnitude of it increases as well.
The equivalent with dice would be you roll a non-six 10 times in a row, and instead of 1/6 probability of rolling a six, you now have a 1/3 probability of rolling a six and a 1/100 probability of setting off a nuclear explosion.
It wasn't so much the probability model (independent or otherwise) I intended to question (hence my very poor choice of the die rolling analogy), but the choice of describing an event as 'overdue'.
At the risk of introducing another down-voted analogy, presumably hurricanes have a probability of occurring based on things like ocean temperature, time of year etc., but I don't think I've ever heard the phrase 'the east coast of the US is overdue a hurricane'.
The author has a reasonable idea in applying survival analysis to estimate the probability without making any assumptions about the underlying model.
An interesting thing about the hazard function with earthquakes is that it isn't always monotonically increasing; I've done this analysis on some other faults that show a very high hazard in the years to decades after an earthquake, and then the hazard drops down and doesn't recover until the far right tail of the distribution. This reflects temporal clustering of earthquakes, which is something we're gradually becoming aware of.
This idea of a time expectation doesn't seem to match your explanation (which seems more intuitive to me).
How about injecting some extremely viscous fluid deep underground within the plate boundaries?
So it can release the shear force over months or years rather than seconds. Something like pitch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment)
Of course, the major problem with trying quake mitigation strategies might be the legal responsibility if you cause a quake.
Getting a high-melting-point fluid down there might be done by dissolving or suspending it in water that is allowed to boil off, or having a heated injection pipeline.
Silicone and silicate lubricants are viable at those temperatures. Might not be viscous enough, though.
A low melting phosphate glass might work.
When volcanos/earthquakes etc. are said to occur every N years, that's averaged over geological periods. An event that occurs on average every 100 years over tens or hundreds of thousands of years could be occurring once every 10 years some millennium, or once every 250, 500 or 1000 years for some time span.