California Earthquakes

I remember the Tehachapi Earthquake when I was a boy.  We lived in Inglewood, California (near LAX).  It was a magnitude 7.5 (Richter scale) earthquake (USGS, SCEC) on the little known White Wolf Fault.  Cracks in the living room wall were filled with newspaper before my father plastered over the filling and repainted.

Then I got married and there was another earthquake.  As I recall I was shaking in 1969. It was 1971 and my wife and I lived in Hollywood in a second floor apartment.  The deadly Sylmar earthquake was 6.6-magnitude temblor according to the USGS, http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1971_02_09.php.

The magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake started on January 17, 1994 at 5 seconds before 4:31 a.m.  My family was a mere five miles away from this event.  No one was hurt.  Dishes were broken.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) states that the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906 was between 7.7 and 8.3 magnitude.  Equipment was not as sophisticated as today’s technology and that accounts for the range.  Different seismologists have developed different conclusions.

The start of the third game of the World Series between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants and the city was rocked and rattled by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake. Buildings and bridges collapsed, fires broke out, and 59 people were killed. 

On June 28, 1992, the most powerful quake to hit the U.S. in 40 years struck Landers, California. It measured 7.4 on the Richter scale.

From Wikipedia: The University of California study on “the next big one”

A study completed by Yuri Fialko^[9] has demonstrated that the San Andreas fault has been stressed to a level sufficient for the next “big one,” as it is commonly called; that is, an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or greater. The study also concluded that the risk of a large earthquake may be increasing more rapidly than researchers had previously believed. Fialko also emphasized in his study that, while the San Andreas Fault had experienced massive earthquakes in 1857 at its central section and in 1906 at its northern segment (the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), the southern section of the fault has not seen a similar rupture in at least 300 years.

How big will the “big one” be in California?  No one seems prepared to give an estimate.