

Significant damage could extend to San Diego and Imperial counties.Īnd a magnitude 7 earthquake rupturing 52 miles of the Hayward fault east of San Francisco could produce significant, damaging aftershocks farther away from the hardest shaken areas beneath Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward and Fremont. Geological Survey said in the 2008 report.Ī magnitude 7.71 aftershock could affect communities such as Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Coachella, Thermal, Mecca, Imperial Valley, Brawley and El Centro. “This event would cause substantial further damage throughout the San Gabriel Valley, perhaps increasing the financial losses and deaths by 20% to 30%,” the U.S.

Location, time of day, building codes and other factors make a big difference. The magnitude of an earthquake isn’t enough to determine how much death and destruction it will cause. Science & Medicine Why some huge earthquakes cause great destruction while others do little damage It’s therefore plausible that a magnitude 8.2 earthquake on the southern San Andreas fault, rupturing from near the Mexican border, through Los Angeles County and ending in Monterey County, could result in a subsequent earthquake in San Francisco, Jones said. “We aren’t going to see it everywhere 1,000 kilometers away, but we’re going to see it.” “So out to something like 1,000 kilometers, we have an increased chance of having earthquakes,” Jones said. So the fault length that ruptured in the Turkey quake - about 125 to 185 miles long - would produce a higher chance of follow-up earthquakes as far as 620 miles from the mainshock fault’s ruptured length, according to Jones. In addition, subsequent earthquakes a distance of roughly four times that of the ruptured fault length of the mainshock are considered “triggered” quakes. That means the Santa Monica Bay quake, roughly 250 miles from the southernmost end of the ruptured San Andreas fault, would be considered an aftershock of the 1906 San Francisco quake. This includes blind thrust faults, like the quake along the Raymond fault that destroyed homes in Northridge in 1994. On January 17, 1994, an earthquake rocks Los Angeles, California, killing 54 people and causing billions of dollars in damages. Fortunately I did not suffer any significant losses from these quakes, but I am securing my cupboard. Such a quake would be ‘so powerful that it causes widespread damage and consequently affects lives and livelihoods of all southern Californians,’ a report says. In the metropolitan Los Angeles area, every type of fault is present. Then, one month after our return to Los Angeles, we were shaken out of bed by the Sylmar quake. California An earthquake the size of Turkey’s would bring devastation, death to Southern California
