The San Andreas fault is “locked and loaded”and ready to fire off one or more very large earthquakes. That’s according to Dr. Thomas Jordan, Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC.
“We can’t predict earthquakes. We don’t know when they’re going to occur. The point is, enough energy has been stored within the San Andreas fault system that is capable of producing one or more very large earthquakes. Such an even could happen tomorrow, but it might not happen until decades from now.”
The last big San Andreas quake was the Fort Tejon Quake back in 1857.
“That’s a hundred and fifty-nine years ago. What makes that an interesting number is that If you look at the geology of that fault and investigate when previous earthquakes occurred, they seem to happen about every one hundred to a hundred and fifty years. So, we are, in some sense, slightly overdue.”
So what’s going on? Why is the “Big One” at least nine years late to the party? Dr. Jordan admits that something is not adding up.
“The entire Southern California earthquake system has been very quiescent for one hundred years. And we scientists who are studying this are puzzled by that. Our models don’t actually satisfy that constraint; they don’t reproduce that behavior.”
Nevertheless, Dr. Jordan says we should take advantage of this continued lull in big seismic activity to make the region as earthquake-survivable as possible.
“Mayor Eric Garcetti has taken some leadership in this and has a plan to make the City of Los Angeles more resilient to large earthquakes.”
He says it takes the government to coordinate the programs and infrastructure improvements that make it more likely L.A. can survive the next big one.
Dr. Jordan was a guest on 790 KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning Show with Doug McIntyre and Terri-Rae Elmer.
By Sandy Wells
