Magnitude 6.5 earthquake hits off Northern California coast | Hacker News Reader

Magnitude 6.5 earthquake hits off Northern California coast

latimes.com

50 pointsv4n4d1s89 comments

I'm here in SF and didn't feel a thing. I see some people on reddit felt it a little bit, and that it lasted quite a while.

I'm not seismologist, so I have no idea if this is possible, but I hope it doesn't jolt anything closer to the city loose.

Good time to remind everyone to have an earthquake bag available and a plan with your family, and be prepared for -=The Big One=-

I am in SF and felt it. I live on the 9th floor of an 11 story building. The building swayed just enough to notice it. If I didn't know what an earthquake is, I may not have realized it was one. Had I been asleep, the quake would probably not have awakened me.

There should be a mass exodus away from seismically active areas. "The big one" is guaranteed to happen, not if, but when. Maybe this is too political for this week?

What about those areas prone to recurrent hurricanes, tornados and flooding?

Tornadoes are very localized damage in comparison, but people do move away from areas with regular flooding. Hurricanes also generally discourage development even though they tend to have much smaller impacts than earthquakes.

EX: On 25 November 1839, an enormous cyclone caused a 40-foot storm surge that hit Coringa, Andhra Pradesh, wiped out the harbor city, destroyed vessels in its bay, and killed 300,000 people.[6] Survivors never entirely rebuilt the city.

> Hurricanes [...] tend to have much smaller impacts than earthquakes.

Then why are there so many more tropical cyclones in the list of most deadly US disasters than there are earthquakes?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_in_the_Uni...

And why are the ten costliest, by insured losses: 6 hurricanes, 2 other weather events, 9/11, and the Northridge earthquake?

http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2016/04/26/here-are-the-1...

Hurricanes are interesting because they _are_ announced in advance. A lot of work goes into boarding up and evacuating, and so when someone does that a few times but the storm misses the area, it creates a fatigue for the next one.

I live in the forecasted direct impact zone for Hurricane Matthew which hit a few months ago. That was an extremely scary storm to consider hitting us. Immediately after it took a turn northward, friends were already lamenting that they evacuated and swore not to again.

Hurricanes cover a lot of land, but they are also predictable reducing deaths and thus loss of life.

Earthquakes are less predictable, but far more localized. Consider, Katrina had losses from Florida to Ohio the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had little impact on Fresno. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake#...

And to where do you suggest I move? Everywhere has something that can kill you in spectacular fashion. Indiana, where I grew up: tornadoes and cold that can literally kill if underdressed. Hurricanes and trigger-happy residents in Florida. You get the point.

Or I can stay in Washington where "the big one" or an eruption of Mount Rainier might happen in my lifetime. In the meantime I won't be shoveling snow, watching my roof torn off, or shuttering my windows every other year.

I agree with your sentiment, but cold isn't a natural disaster; it's predictable and you can prepare for it systematically and people have been living through it just fine. And it doesn't destroy your entire life like an earthquake does.

Tornados do destroy your entire life though and they are quite common in the Midwest.

but unlike earthquake, you have ample time to at least save yourself, no?

No, at least not sometimes (for non-trivial amounts of "sometimes"). Take my anecdata in another comment on this thread. Partly cloudy day, something blows in from the west. Dad and I decide it's going to rain soon enough, we should head to the house. About halfway between the house and the barn, Dad says "run!". That sound of screeching metal and shredding wood? Yeah, that would be the entire roof structure of the barn being lifted up and deposited in a neighboring field. We're talking a building that has more square feet than your average McMansion. And that was a small tornado. The only mitigation for the big, freight-train-sized tornadoes is that there's usually some harsh weather to go along with it to warn you that something might be coming.

Okay, so you're not outside. You're sitting cozy in your living room watching Orange is the New Black. Tornado warning on the news, but tornadoes are very localized and you don't have a basement in your manufactured home. So what are you going to do, run to the neighbor's again to huddle in their basement for what probably turns out to be a non-event? Nah, it'll be fine. Until it isn't. And by the time it looks like you really ought to be knocking on the neighbor's door, you sure as hell don't want to be caught outside.

Now, the weather services are usually good about a heads-up, with tornado watches (could be a tornado) and warnings (confirmed sighting). A lot of towns have a siren that's goes off on a sighting. But it is quite possible to be caught unaware, and there isn't a lot of time before that giant sucky thing moving at 35mph gets to where you're at.

But tornadoes are relatively minor in their path. If there's some bad luck the path will lead right through a populated area like Joplin, but even then it's not going to ravage an entire region to rubble.

Plus if you live in tornado alley you should have a sturdy area to go to when you hear the sirens go off. They can somewhat be prepared for. People in skyscrapers in Seattle will have no time before the ground underneath them liquefies.

you can prepare for earthquakes too. we just don't do a very good job of it and have a bunch of old buildings made of bricks that aren't reinforced.

Frequency or intensity: choose one. I spent plenty of time in the basement of the house I grew up in waiting for something to blow over. I've experienced one earthquake in the same amount of time in WA, and it didn't really do much whereas a tornado was responsible for the entire roof structure we had to replace on the barn (thankfully we had left said barn for the house just moments before).

Anyway, the point is that, no, we should abandon the entire west coast only to end up reliving the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz. The universe has a lot of sharp edges, and they're everywhere.

Much of the US, if not the world is fucked if the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts.[1] That is one of the ultimate "big ones".

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_supervolcano

Hopefully by the time it's preparing to happen, humans will be able to better detect it in advance and take steps to help it vent in a more controllable way so it's not as catastrophic.

Couple of options here assuming you want to stay in the USA: http://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/safest_places_from_na...

This is where us Europeans have life easy.

Actually there's more to like in Europe than just the lack of deadly natural disasters. Good beer, whisky the variety of cultures and food being amongst my personal favourites.

There are quite a few volcanic areas in Europe - the Phlegraean Fields near Naples being an area that has been identified as being a particular risk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlegraean_Fields

I was also surprised to find that Germany has had fairly significant eruptions fairly recently (in geological terms):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laacher_See

Fortunately the volcano I can see out the window is dormant enough for there to have been a castle there for the last few thousand years... ;-)

A castle for thousands of years? ... maybe some other kind of fortification at first?

OK - slight exaggeration - castle for at least a thousand years and some other kind of fortification before that. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle

NB The volcanic plug that the castle sits on is 350 million years old - so no real danger apart from the occasional bit that falls off.

> Everywhere has something that can kill you in spectacular fashion

Not true. Well, maybe in the US but there is a whole world out there :)

Sweden (just one example) is a country completely free of any large-scale natural disasters (at least the ones that are local to somewhere, not including earth split in two and others)

Until the Russians invade Scandinavia!

>> And to where do you suggest I move? Everywhere has something that can kill you in spectacular fashion.

Michigan. If you don't mind snow. Things we don't have: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Wild Fires, Hurricanes, Deadly spiders, Deadly snakes (with one exception) Termites. We do get some F1 Tornados in some areas, but I've never seen a whole town wiped out.

We have low cost of living, lots of jobs for engineers, many people have second homes on a lake because they like to get away for the weekend. Lots of great outdoorsy places to go here.

Just a thought.

Things Michigan does have: an ungodly amount of mosquitos. I'll take my chances with the earthquakes and volcanoes. :-)

(Disclaimer: granted, when I think MI and mosquitos, I think U. P. Lower MI I don't recall being worse than anywhere else. But the U. P.'s where the fun's at.)

Indeed. I'm not sure how long it's been since you left but we even had a (very moderate) earthquake here in Indiana several (~8?) years ago. It didn't really cause any damage but it's rare enough here that it was a "big deal".

I want to say it was around 5 a.m. when it happened. It woke me up and I instantly knew what was going on (I've been through an earthquake before in California) but the girlfriend slept right through it. Many people had no idea it had happened until they heard about it on the news.

The tornadoes, as you well know, can spring up out of nowhere.

Oh, yeah, that fault in Missouri. It's been probably twenty years since I've been back, but I remember the occasional earthquake. In fact, maybe in the 80s(?), that fault was supposed to let loose the Super Earthquake that devastates the Midwest. Of course nothing happened.

And, yeah, I'll take earthquakes over tornadoes any day. Both are unpredictable, but only one stands a probable chance of destroying my wood-frame house with me in it.

It isn't too political, but it makes little sense. It strikes me as obtuse as asking that all Africans in dictator-controlled or drought-affected areas simply have a mass exodus.

Why are either of those scenarios obtuse?

Because their obviously not acute? :P

I always wondered why people live in seismically active areas so much. Then a hypothesis hit me: people need fresh water -> fresh water has usually comes from mountains -> mountains are created by seismic activity. Not sure if it's true though; does anyone know?

In the case of LA and San Francisco, they're really good places to put ports.

Mountains are caused by seismic activity but seismic activity doesn't always create mountains. In general populations tend to stick towards coasts. Many tectonic plate boundaries are either directly on the coast of continents or a little off the shelf. My intuition puts that as the more likely cause but it's impossible to prove either way for certain.

> I always wondered why people live in seismically active areas so much

Because the ones people live in are conveniently located near some combination of arable land, navigable inland waterways, large freshwater supplies, and convenient natural harbors. And, in many cases, are places that aren't prone to deadly weather events, which makes except earthquake risk a tolerable price.

Yeah, sounds like you're also pointing to the same thing I was (water).

I think the historically main reason is that volcano ash makes fertile farming ground (http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/soil.htm, http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/what-are-some-good-things-vol...)

This is really cool (thanks for sharing!) but have most/all mountains been volcanoes in recent geologic history? (I don't really know.)

I wonder if insurance prices accurately reflect the guaranteed nature of the event.

Earthquake insurance is pretty darn expensive, and most (all?) homeowner policies don't cover earthquake damage. Source: I used to be a licensed property and casualty agent in California.

There is no cost-effective way to get residential earthquake insurance in the Bay Area.

Ahh, ok, so that means the prices likely do reflect the probability accurately...

To inject numbers into the discussion: my homeowners insurance is $965 and earthquake is $1220. More than doubling the yearly bill to be sure, but it's easy to justify given bay area real estate prices.

Is your home worth between $1 and $1.5M ?

I wonder if there's an indirect way to get cheaper earthquake insurance, by investing in industries or companies that would benefit from an earthquake, or maybe by taking bets in a prediction market.

So you suggest places like Italy and Japan fully evacuate due to being seismically active?

I think about stuff like this sometimes but where can you go within the United States ? Move south or Midwest and you deal with tornadoes and hurricanes that can kill you or rip your homes off. How about East/North-East ? Low chance of Tornadoes but then be ready to get hit with Superstorms (Sandy anyone ?). If these things don't get you, be ready to deal with shit load of Snowstorms and blizzards. If nothing else, flooding will get you. So take your pick.

Hurricanes and snowstorms are predicted days, if not weeks in advance. The scary thing about earthquakes is that they can hit any time with very little warning.

> Hurricanes and snowstorms are predicted days, if not weeks in advance.

And, in the case of hurricanes in the US, still both kill more people and cause more property damage than earthquakes, both in aggregate and individually among the major instances of each class.

Yea, there aren't many places on this earth that don't see some sort of natural disaster. Maybe we'll all be living in the UK/Ireland, they don't seem to get hit by much.

We get tsunamis[1] and tornados[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunamis_affecting_the_British...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/sep/24/weather.world1

I used to live in northwest Arkansas, about 45 minutes south of Joplin, Missouri. My home had a steel tornado shelter dug into the ground. We used it several times a year when the sirens went off.

Tornadoes in the UK are a freak phenomenon. In the central and southern US, they are a regular part of life. The point being that people outside of Tornado Alley don't really get how common tornadoes are in that part of North America. In the fall and spring, they are an inevitability, along with the most intense thunderstorms in the world.

Ok, really stupid and ignorant question:

Tornadoes happen mostly where there are no trees, right? That's why they happen in dust bowls, if I'm not mistaken.

How expensive and practical would it be to re-forest populated areas to reduce the likelihood of tornadoes? Would that work? If so, have there been any serious plans to do that?

You seem to assume that the inverse correlation of tornadoes and trees is because trees prevent tornadoes, rather than alternatives like the presence of tornadoes either directly making things inhospitable for trees or being a product of other factors which make things inhospitable for trees.

That assumption is based on experience and reasoning:

I've been in many wide open places without trees, and have experienced much higher winds there than in places which have lots of trees -- for example, forest vs golf course. The trees seem to do a good job of blocking and reducing wind. It would make sense that they could do a good job of at least reducing the number of tornadoes in tornado-prone lands.

I'm sure tornadoes uproot trees as well, but I am not sure whether tornadoes are common or even possible where there are lots of tree around - such as in a forest.

I would love to be corrected if I'm wrong. And it would be helpful if the questions I raised in my previous post could be answered.

That's not really how it works. Tornadoes can form anywhere that enough warm humid air hits enough cold dry air. And that happens a lot in the Midwest/Plains region during certain times of year. Tornadoes would form there even if there were forests. The trees might stop the classic funnel cloud from touching down completely, but it won't stop the storm.

Some places in the UK do get flooding, but in most places you should be fine.

In general you are correct - although there was a tsunami ~8000 years ago caused by huge undersea landslides off Norway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

There's a difference between earthquake and tornado/superstorm/flooding/etc. in that earthquake will strike you out of the blue with literally NO warnings before, but those other disasters at least give you a time-window to prepare.

Some people just don't like getting surprised!

Colorado. Other than blizzards and wildfires in forested areas, disasters here are minimal. Blizzards aren't bad, because they are few and far between and the dry air and average above freezing temperatures mean a quick melt/sublimation afterwards.

Just don't think too much about the super volcano seething under the ground in neighboring Wyoming.

More realistically, Colorado gets severe thunderstorms and tornadoes all the time -- like the one that killed two in Limon in 1990.

If we buried more power lines snowstorms wouldn't be a problem at all (and we don't bury more of them because it would be expensive compared to the benefit).

Even when a big storm hits and exceeds the snow removal capacity of a region, it doesn't suddenly expose hundreds of thousands of people to danger, it just makes it less safe to drive (something individuals have control over) and reduces the effectiveness of emergency services.

The last of those likely has a measurable impact.

Of course it does but in a given year the typical person accesses emergency services 0 times.

That's almost wrong. There are 44.5 (edit: .44) visits to the ER per capita per year in the United States (admittedly, those are likely biased to some subset of the population). Of those visits, roughly 2 million result in urgent care admission and 16 million in hospital admission. So roughly 5% of the country has an ER visit that results in their being admitted to the hospital in some state. There's no quick way to tell what effect delayed visits would have on that but it seems like it could be significant.

[source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/emergency-department.htm]

It's 44.5 visits per 100 persons (per capita means per person).

I'm sure there would be a measurable effect from diminished access to the ER and various other services. I just think it will be small. Looking through some of the links from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Blizzards_in_the_Unit...

You do get more deaths than I thought. Many of them are attributable to carbon monoxide poisoning (totally preventable). Other major causes are cardiac arrests while shoveling and traffic accidents.

I misspoke, 44 visits per capita would be ludicrous (related: I'm curious how many hours are spent in some kind of medical practice per capita)

Thanks for following up, perhaps I'm overestimating the degradation to the ability to receive ems. Some quick searching didn't pull up any studies done on this, so perhaps it's not significant.

Sorry if that came across harsh, I was trying to correct the conversation, not be critical or snide. I figured it was a typoish thing.

No worries, there was just a bit of embarrassment and no bad feelings.

This article seems to talk about increased stress on the cardiovascular system as a result of cold, http://www.livescience.com/42568-cold-winter-weather-related...

With 4,600 deaths being delayed as a result of people leaving cold areas. This seems to suggest that a lot of people die sooner due to this?

I'm still curious about whether access to medical service harms people but can't find anyone talking about it...

Go southwest if you don't want any natural disasters. No hurricanes, tornadoes, snow, earthquakes, etc.

Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas are pretty far from those issues.

Due in large part to its size, Texas is actually the only state in the United States that's susceptible to every type of natural hazard.

Source: Worked in marketing for a P&C firm, compliance wouldn't let us publish a blog post on the topic.

> Texas is actually the only state in the United States that's susceptible to every type of natural hazard.

Texas has zero active (or even merely dormant) volcanoes, so that's at least a little bit of an overstatement.

Great Lakes Region is just fine. Don't really have tornados in Ohio that often (you're thinking like, Kansas or Oklahoma). No flooding really, no wildfires, blizzards only once in awhile (and with global warming soon to be never). Plus you aren't going to have any droughts to worry about because #GreatLakes.

Wouldn't be so certain about blizzards. Warming increases the amount of moisture in the atmosphere during the cold months, producing more blizzards. My only fear about living in the Great Lakes is that we may end up snowed under before our ready access to fresh water makes a difference in terms of climate change preparedness.

References:

http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2013/02/global_wa...

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/future-of-epic-blizzards-...

http://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Threats-to-Wildlife/Global-Warmi...

How much danger is there really? The risk of being injured during an earthquake in the modern era is pretty low, all things considered.

The big one will happen, and it's going to suck, but it won't be the end of the world. Modern structures built to more exacting standards will still be standing. Infrastructure like water and electricity will be unusable for some time, but with immediate stores of water and the inevitable aid this shouldn't be deadly. I'd be nervous about spending a lot of time in old, brick buildings, but otherwise I expect that I and most people I know will be fine. Note that this is said as a resident of Seattle - I would be way more nervous if I were on the Oregon coast.

The Big One in California is expected to have Richter magnitude below 8.0, much like the 1906 one. While that might not be much consolation, building has improved significantly and we can do a lot to prevent damage. That said, after having been in the market for a house on the east bay, I'm afraid to say that there's still a huge number of old houses with brick foundations, despite incentives to reinforce and retrofit. My biggest fear is not the shake itself, but damage to power and gas lines shortly after.

You make a good point. California is prepared.

Seattle, however, is another story. On a geologic time scale, the Pacific Northwest is long overdue for a massive earthquake and the ensuing tsunami.

And that epicenter looks like it was on the Juan de Fuca plate boundary. I see some Bay Area folks in here concerned that this was a foreshock, but I think those of us in the PNW are the ones who should really be concerned.

Portland is also apparently going to be majorly screwed in case of a big earthquake.[1] I considered moving there until I read about this.

[1] - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-...

Most people don't realize earthquakes themselves are not very likely to kill you, it's the gas leaks and fires that usually follow that cause the most loss of life and property damage.

In 1906 nearly 80% of San Francisco burned down after the quake. Most of the rubble was then pushed into the bay to create the very landfill that a lot of buildings are built on top of now.

>Most people don't realize earthquakes themselves are not very likely to kill you, it's the gas leaks and fires that usually follow that cause the most loss of life and property damage.

Citation needed. Because in most earthquakes I've known about it was the tumbling down of buildings that trapped and killed people.

Like many things depends on where you live. China you say, In a brick /mud farmhouse? Goodluck not being crushed. Some place like the USA with good building codes, it's other stuff that kills you.

> Most people don't realize earthquakes themselves are not very likely to kill you, it's the gas leaks and fires that usually follow that cause the most loss of life and property damage.

That's probably little consolation to the people who have died as a result of an earthquake.

It's kinda like saying "it's not the 20-story fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end".

I support your concept of a mass exodus away from LA due to earthquake risk. The beach was too crowded when I went boogie boarding there just before Thanksgiving. Save yourselves from all this, people!

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