![]() So the Big One is the worst-case scenario? The scenario doesn’t say where hundreds of thousands of newly homeless people will go, but it seems likely that plenty would head south - to here. The scenario also envisions power and water outages, fires, broken freeways and lots of chaos. But an estimated 48,000 people would suffer injuries and 1,800 would die in SoCal. Only a handful of casualties are expected in San Diego County, which would be spared serious damage. In others words, some of us wouldn’t even notice it while others would rush outside to see trees sway and pools slosh from side to side. Researchers expect the quake here would feel much like the Friday night Ridgecrest quake did. Back in 2008, researchers projected what would happen to Southern California if a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the southern section of the San Andreas fault. In any given year, the probability of the Big One is 3 percent.” Are we in big trouble here when the Big One hits? “But the cycle time for breaks and earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault is 130 years, so we are way overdue. That’s over 300 years ago,” physicist Michio Kaku told CBS News last week. segment of the San Andreas Fault was 1680. It’s expected to release tension through the “Big One” - a quake of magnitude 8.0 or higher. Scientists don’t believe that the large Ridgecrest quakes had any effect on the San Andreas fault, which remains locked and loaded. The quake destabilized a larger fault, which produced the 7 magnitude quake on Friday night.” When’s the Big One coming? ![]() “It’s on a fault that wasn’t even named, and it’s not clear it was even mapped. The first big Ridgecrest quake last week, the 6.4 magnitude tremor that struck on July 4, “was on a fault that’s much smaller than the Rose Canyon Fault,” Rockwell said. Unknown faults can also - surprise! - set off nasty quakes. Most notably, the San Jacinto Fault and the Elsinore Fault - which have set off major quakes in the recent past - run through remote East County. ![]() There are plenty of other earthquake faults in this region. Up to 2,000 people could die here, about half in a tsunami caused by the quake, according to a preliminary projection released in 2017. (The 1906 quake in San Francisco would remain the worst). Under one scenario produced by scientists, a 6.9 magnitude quake on the fault would be the second-most devastating and deadly earthquake in U.S. Still, he said, “there’s certainly enough strain to have a magnitude 6 earthquake, which could be quite destructive.” How might a big quake on the Rose Canyon Fault affect us? On the Rose Canyon Fault, the average recurrence is every 700-800 years, and the last one was about 300 years ago.” “The Rose Canyon Fault is certainly capable of upwards of a magnitude 7 quake,” San Diego State seismologist and geologist Thomas K. Indeed, the fault roughly follows I-5 from downtown to La Jolla and Highway 52. (Jones is known as the “Earthquake Lady” for her many media appearances after Southern California earthquakes, and she updated reporters and the public immediately following the quakes last week.) Why are we in danger?Īs Jones noted, San Diego’s Rose Canyon Fault runs smack through the middle of the city. In fact, Jones believes we’re in the “worst of both worlds” because the risk isn’t high enough to scare people into taking action to protect themselves and not low enough to ignore. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones in a 2018 interview with Voice of San Diego. You only look like a low-risk city becomes of the comparison with Los Angeles and San Francisco,” said retired U.S. “In any other state, San Diego would be considered a high-risk city. How do we stack up when it comes to quake risk? And while the San Andreas Fault is too far away to shake us much, the dreaded Big One could still pack a punch here. It’s quite possible for San Diego to be struck by a homegrown quake as big as the 7.1 magnitude one near Ridgecrest that startled many of us Friday night. Still, we should be rattled about seismic safety here. Just about every other part of Southern California from El Centro to Santa Barbara has seen much more destruction and death. Throughout our recorded history, quakes here have done fairly little damage and only taken a single life. On the earthquake front, San Diego County has been been sitting pretty - so far. Brews & News: Voice of San Diego Live Podcastsĭowntown San Diego / Photo by Sam Hodgson.San Diego's Quake Risk Is Big, But Not 'Big One' Big | Voice of San Diego Close
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