California Felt the Shake
On March 28, at around 9:09 PM, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake was reported in northwest California. Brea, Fullerton, and La Habra were the hardest hit, but the damage was minimal and there were no serious injuries. This came from the Puente Hills thrust fault, which stretched from northern Orange County under downtown Los Angeles into Hollywood. This wasn't the Big One, which many Californians dreaded.
In Richard Donner's "Superman", Lois Lane was not far from the San Andreas Fault when the Earth shook. It didn't get her, but the aftershock did, sending her car into a crevice. What followed was a dramatic scene on how the journalist of Daily Planet suffocated, slowly. This scenario is far from what scientists predict if a huge quake strucks California, which lies along the Pacific's Ring of Fire. In this region, earthquake and volcanic eruption aren't uncommon occurrences. In fact, San Francisco witnessed such tremor, on April 18, 1906, when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook the metropolis. An estimated three thousand lives were lost, making it one of the worst natural disasters in the history of America. The inhabitants back then don't have the technology that could helped them predict and prepare for such a quake, along with providing data on continents drift, the rise of mountains, and why there were too many volcanoes in the Pacific Rim. But as the decades went by, the event became sensational. Even experts said that a moderate shake could do more damage than the Big One.
The last few years saw a couple of megathrust earthquakes hit the Pacific region, the magnitude not far from what the Big One would be. On February 27, 2010, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake occurred off the coast of central Chile, which claimed five hundred twenty five lives. The Nazca Plate was the cause, the strongest that affected Chile since the 1960 Valdivia earthquake and the strongest worldwide since the 2004 Indian Ocean quake. This was followed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, a magnitude 9.0, which resulted to a tsunami that hit the coast areas of northern Honshu. A 8.2 quake hit northern Chile on April 1.
Are there clear patterns, rules, and regularities in earthquakes, or are they inherently random and chaotic? A lot of the randomness is lack of knowledge, Berkeley seismologist Robert Nadeau strongly believed.
Back to Orange County, officials assessed the damage from last Friday's quake. There were spilled merchandise and a few shattered windows. Dozens of dwellings were red-tagged. About nineteen residents were displaced. Thirteen water line breaks were reported in the city of Fullerton. "From 20 to 30 businesses suffered broken plate-glass windows, many of them along Whittier Boulevard," La Habra Police Sgt. David Crivelli said. The biggest problem was the cleaning up. "We spent most of the night just trying to clean it up so the kids wouldn't wake up in the morning and be reminded of it," Wayne Sass of Fullerton said. Residents can sigh with relief, while experts are still trying to find the exact date of the Big One.
