California gets prepared for the Big One! Great California ShakeOut earthquake drill going on right now as new study finds strong jolt would knock out cell service, communications

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Great California earthquake drill on October 21 2021, Great California earthquake drill on October 21 2021 earthquake, big one, california preparedness
Great California earthquake drill on October 21 2021 The Great Shake Out

The next big one, it’s not a matter of if. We all know it’s a matter of when!

People in government offices, businesses and schools throughout Southern California will stop everything for a minute Thursday to “drop, cover and hold on” during a statewide earthquake preparedness drill, now in its 13th year.

The Great California ShakeOut of 2021 is scheduled for 10:21 a.m. More than 7.5 million Californians are slated to participate in the drill, according to the ShakeOut website.

The objective is to prepare people for a 7.8-magnitude earthquake or larger along the southernmost portion of the San Andreas Fault. The U.S. Geological Survey says there is a 31% chance of a magnitude-7.5 earthquake or higher hitting L.A. in the next couple of decades.

Now, a study by the USGS reports that a major earthquake in California is likely to knock out many communications services for days or weeks, including the vast majority of cellphones in the areas closest to the epicenter.

The widespread disruption would imperil the public’s access to 911 operators and lead to delays in reporting fires and calls for medical help.

Cell towers are vulnerable to sustained power outages. The same goes for cellular equipment on power poles and buildings at risk of extreme shaking, liquefaction and fire, the USGS said.

California’s cellphone networks have been notoriously unreliable during blackouts that occur during life-threatening emergencies, such as during wildfires in 2019, where wide swaths of the San Francisco Bay Area were cut off from cell service for significant periods.

In a grim estimate of the challenges, a magnitude 7 earthquake that struck on the Bay Area’s Hayward fault could leave Alameda County — its likely hardest hit area — able to provide only 7% of the demand for voice and data service after the quake. That is identical to the communications service failure in New York City after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when 93% of cellphone calls failed.

The findings in the USGS study are one of many vulnerabilities uncovered by the government agency, which will formally present its findings at a news conference at 10:30 a.m. Thursday. Prior to the conference, California will participate in the annual ShakeOut drill, in which people are asked to drop, cover and hold on as they should during a real earthquake.

The report comprises about 780 pages, adding to nearly 600 pages of findings released since 2018 on the so-called HayWired scenario. The report is the third volume in a series of reports researched over six years focused on a future earthquake on the Hayward fault; the final volume was written by 20 main authors and 80 contributors.

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The dangerous Hayward fault

The Hayward fault has been called a “tectonic time bomb,” and a major quake on it represents a nightmare scenario because it runs through densely populated areas with old buildings, including directly beneath the East Bay cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward and Fremont.

The Hayward fault is one of California’s fastest moving, and on average, it produces a major earthquake about once every 150 to 160 years, give or take seven or eight decades. It has been 153 years since the last major quake — a magnitude 6.8 — on the Hayward fault.

The USGS estimates a magnitude 7 quake today on that fault could result in at least 800 deaths; hundreds more could die from fire following the quake, which would make this scenario California’s deadliest since the great 1906 earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco.

In this hypothetical seismic scenario, electricity services could be out for weeks, while gas and water service could be interrupted for months. The USGS estimates an East Bay resident could be without water from six weeks to six months, and water supply outages could hobble firefighting efforts.

The USGS report said the region’s backbone commuter rail system, BART, could see its Hayward train yard heavily damaged or collapse, while train stations in Oakland, Hayward and San Leandro could be so damaged that it could take one to three years to repair them.

The USGS simulations for the kind of ground shaking that could occur are far worse than for what BART was designed, meaning even some seismically retrofitted facilities at the Hayward train yard could be destroyed, the report said.

While BART’s earthquake safety program was designed to keep commuters alive during an earthquake, some sections of the system — including parts of the East Bay — are not equipped to keep the transit service operational after a severe quake, the report said.

The USGS also identified more than 50 bridges at high risk for damage and collapse, and noted it could take three to 10 months to repair them. Many are along Interstate 880, a key artery connecting Oakland to San Jose; other freeways at risk include Interstate 680 between Fremont and Pleasanton and Interstate 580 between Oakland and Pleasanton.

With so many freeways that could potentially be damaged, “emergency response, evacuation and debris removal would be hampered and recovery … could take longer than anticipated,” the report said. Destruction to East Bay freeways could be so bad it may be easier to flee by heading over the bay to the west, toward San Francisco and San Mateo County.

Damage could turn some areas into ghost towns, a phenomenon that happened in parts of Los Angeles County the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake of 1994.

Neighborhoods across the East Bay, such as those in Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, Alameda, San Leandro, Hayward, Castro Valley, Union City and Pleasanton, are at risk for having more than 20% of their buildings suffer extensive damage or be destroyed. That’s a potential tipping point in which people may decide en masse to leave their homes or workplaces — even if they’re still structurally intact — because their neighborhoods have ceased to function normally.

A similar effect occurred following the magnitude 6 earthquake that hit Napa in 2014. Some retrofitted businesses remained standing but could not immediately reopen because neighboring structures that had not been updated were so badly damaged that potential aftershocks could send them crashing into the seismically safe structures.

California is not ready for the Big One

In a hypothetical quake on the Hayward fault, between 720,000 and 1.45 million residents are at risk of being displaced from their homes, the USGS said.

Old buildings are a major risk. In places like Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward and Alameda, there are many so-called soft-story apartment buildings, with flimsy first floors housing carports that can collapse in an earthquake, as well as old, vulnerable brick and brittle concrete residential buildings.

While Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco have passed mandatory retrofit laws for soft-story apartment buildings — as have cities such as Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Pasadena in Southern California — many other cities have not.

Unless more is done to retrofit these apartment buildings, whose rent is generally lower than for newer structures, there could be a dramatic worsening of the supply of affordable housing if these structures are heavily damaged or destroyed in a quake.

California stands to suffer $74 billion in cumulative property damage, with 1 million residential buildings and 39,000 nonresidential buildings damaged, in a major Hayward fault quake. Losses from the interruption of business would be caused mostly by property damage, but worsened because of disruptions to the supply of water, electricity and communications.

There could be a wave of mortgage defaults, a deterioration of mental health and persistent blighted property, which could be exacerbated by years of significant aftershocks that could strike farther away from the fault, including underneath the Silicon Valley cities of Palo Alto, Cupertino and Sunnyvale.

The economic losses could send the Bay Area into a recession for five to 10 years. Nearly half a million jobs could be lost, and there would be an 8% drop in its gross regional product compared to the region’s expected growth. It could take even longer to recover if there are shortages of workers, higher costs of construction and decisions by big employers to grow jobs outside the region.

In the most heavily damaged areas of the East Bay, as many as 40% of businesses could see their operations disrupted “by extensive or complete building damage in central Alameda County and western Contra Costa County,” USGS officials warned.

Old single-family houses and apartment buildings need to be seismically strengthened; so does infrastructure, such as systems that send water, electricity, fuel and communications to homes and businesses, the report suggested. More new housing, built to modern-day standards, needs to be made available before the shaking begins, and governments need to plan for a long-term recovery with a plan to finance it.

Even simple strategies could help dramatically. Telling the public to minimize voice calls and rely on text messaging would help preserve capacity for the 911 system. Telephone companies could restrict the number of phone calls a person could initiate every hour.

Telecommunications systems could be made more reliable if permanent backup power is available, either through batteries that last less than a day, along with generators that can run for three days before needing to be refueled. Seismically vulnerable infrastructure, such as old water distribution pipelines, need to be strengthened.

California has made significant strides in improving earthquake safety; $80 billion has been spent since 1989 in the Bay Area alone on earthquake improvements, including $20 million each on upgrades to bridges and freeways; $19 billion on hospital retrofits; and $6 billion on water supply systems.

But that money hasn’t been spent evenly. There has been four times as much investment on earthquake safety in San Francisco on a per-capita basis compared with the East Bay, according to Anne Wein, a coordinator of the USGS report.

Los Angeles has made some improvements in recent years. In 2015, L.A. passed an ambitious seismic safety effort requiring soft-story apartments and brittle concrete buildings to be retrofitted. Of more than 12,500 potentially vulnerable soft-story buildings in the city, nearly 7,000 have been retrofitted.

The L.A. Department of Water and Power has also installed more earthquake-resistant mainline and trunk line pipes in recent years, intended to keep hospitals and other critical sites operating after a quake.

And there are still vulnerabilities

Most cities in California, including Los Angeles, have not required retrofits of potentially vulnerable steel buildings, which Santa Monica and West Hollywood have done. A USGS study in 2008 has said it is plausible that five unretrofitted steel buildings around Southern California could collapse in a hypothetical magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

Wein said it’ll be important for people to think of preparedness not only as making one’s own home or business seismically ready, but also the surrounding community.

After all, what use will it be for a home or business to remain standing, but everyone else in the neighborhood is in disrepair?

If I’m the only person in my whole neighborhood who retrofits, it won’t really help the neighborhood,” Wein said. “It won’t even really help me.” [LA Times, ABC7]

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7 Comments

  1. That area looks like it has plenty to worry about. Especially if you consider all the abortions, satanists, and sodomites.

    Most of the good people started moving out in the 70s. Sorry but it’s true.

    Good luck if you are a normal ( not a weirdo) person.

    • Landlines out here ( in the mountains ) are tied to satellite now. Probably most places. When I moved out here in the middle of nowhere I had what I thought was a landline. So, my thinking was, if cell service is wiped out, I still have a landline. Not true.

      Landlines are not like the olden days. Our cell service is garbage too, even with wifi, it sucks. Everything here sucks except you can shoot tresspassers (aka zombies), and put up razorwire, barbed wire, and secure property much better.

      When California is destroyed by cataclysmic events, neighboring states will experience zombie hordes trying to steal, rape, and rob. It is inevitable, unfortunately.

      • I’m hoping that I have built up an immunity to it naturally, as Ive been in close contact with a few people that are fully vaccinated. Met them the same day they had their vaccines, even shared a joint with one of them and that is meant to be the most infectious risk possibly. I am highly asthmatic too, so far all is well.. been almost a month since saw one and a few weeks for the other. Fortunately Australia has very strong UV and fresh air, probably helps kill off the airborne better whilst outdoors.

  2. ank you Strange Sounds , Great articles, we ask people mass exit California ASAP..Time is up soon. The artificial shortages created by the Mafia Globalist and over 100 ships waiting to disembark is recipe for great quake to happen? Shortages of food will be in North America..
    Prepare Prepare NOW! Dark Winter is coming sooner than you think!!!

    World War 3 is in full motion Israel is put for the Army 1.5 Billion Dollars away for attacking Iran without contact. Also arm the citizens of Iran slowly to make final move against terrorist regime of Iran.
    Revealed: China ‘has tested TWO hypersonic orbital nukes capable of breaching missile defences’ as panicked analysts say it ‘defies the laws of physics’ and is unlike any weapon the US has

    China has carried out two tests of an orbital vehicle believed to be a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile
    First test took place on July 27 while second took place on August 13, intelligence sources have claimed
    Scientists are still trying to work out exactly what the ‘weapon’ is capable of and say it appears to ‘defy the laws of physics’ and is unlike any technology the US has developed
    Beijing has acknowledged one of the tests, but says it was actually launching a ‘peaceful’ civilian spacecraft

    Can you see connecting dots yet and also we shall see new strain of Corona will kill you in seconds?
    Mohamed was attack Iran Afghanistan and many places force them Islam on them. GHAZA in Afghani means luch but in Arabic is Taam
    and Ghaza in Arabic means the Camel Urine.. We for 1400 years saying i want my camel urine! see influence of Arabs on Middle East?

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