Living in Earthquake Country

There was a 6.9 quake late tonight, 300 miles away in northeastern Honshu. We felt some very light shaking just before going to bed, but we’re fine.

Associated Press: LOS ANGELES (AP) — California faces an almost certain risk of being rocked by a strong earthquake by 2037, scientists said in the first statewide temblor forecast. New calculations reveal there is a 99.7 percent chance a magnitude 6.7 quake or larger will strike in the next 30 years. The odds of such an event are higher in Southern California than Northern California, 97 percent versus 93 percent. ”It basically guarantees it’s going to happen,” said Ned Field,…

Hoo boy, maybe it’s time to get our earthquake kit in order. SJ Mercury News: Studying layers of soil in a trench they dug near the Fremont BART station, geologists recently made a startling discovery: The Hayward Fault has had a big earthquake roughly every 140 years, on average, since 1315. And this Sunday marks year 139. Calling the fault a “tectonic time bomb,” scientists Wednesday urged Bay Area residents to put together an earthquake plan, stockpile supplies and consider…

I just read that there was an earthquake about two hours ago in Oakland. I assume that everyone is ok?

There was just an earthquake 12 miles from my house. Update: The San Francisco Chronicle is on it: (03-01) 21:06 PST — A quake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.2 hit one mile northeast of Lafayette at 8:40 p.m. tonight. Various police and fire departments in the East Bay said there were no immediate reports of damage. BART reported no damage. The quake’s depth was 10.3 miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. At Stanley Middle School in Lafayette, the…

But many San Franciscans left the city permanently. Oakland’s population doubled to 150,000 between 1900 and 1910, spurred by the earthquake and developers Francis “Borax” Smith and Frank Havens. There was also a big jump in population in Marin and on the Peninsula. All these new suburbs, however, were stained by the racism of the time. The promoters of the new Rockridge Tract in Oakland distributed a leaflet that said, “It is probably unnecessary even to mention that no one…

The year was 1906, and the citizens of San Francisco must have found it a wildly incongruous sight–grown men at child’s play in the midst of tragedy. Less than three weeks before, the earth had shaken and the city had burned. The disaster began with an earthquake in the early morning of Wednesday, April 18, and when the fires were extinguished three days later, at least two hundred thousand San Francisco residents were homeless. Yet on the afternoon of May…

In 2006, Paul Boutin and I often lunch together here, in South Park, San Francisco, just across the street from the Macworld offices. In 1906, the same area was used as a refugee camp after it was leveled during the Great Earthquake. [via MeFi.] Whoa.

I was catching up on some The Party Line reading this morning when I caught the links to two articles from the East Bay Express written in February 2005 about the possibility and aftermath of a massive quake in the Bay Area. Remember the FEMA 2001 report that said that the three most likely disasters are a terrorist attack on NYC (check), and a hurricane on New Orleans (check) — and a massive quake on SF? Uh oh. What trenching…

LA Times: A 4.9 magnitude earthquake centered in San Bernardino County rattled a large section of Southern California on Thursday, the third significant temblor to hit the state in less than a week. While the quake did not cause major injuries or damage, it shook nerves across the region just two days after a 7.2 quake off the Northern California coast prompted a tsunami warning and four days after many residents were jolted awake by a 5.2 quake centered near…