there are plenty of things you can do to prepare and plenty of people even in the biggest disaster (or, especially) that will have time to wish they had prepared.
IMHO your mocking is dumb.
I just saw a report of a …
“Strong earthquake strikes off Papua New Guinea”
Is it just my imagination or does there seem to be an extremely high level of earthquake activity happening these past 2 or 3 weeks as compared to previous years?
I still have an ominous feeling that all these small quakes indicate we are likely to get hit by a very large quake in the near future.
Oh, I was raised in your neck of the woods. I lived in Idaho Falls when the Teton Dam burst, and it was quite spectacular even that far down stream.
I dimly remember the Hebgen Lake earthquake of 1959. We drove up there after the quake to look at the damage. 28 people died.
Now I’m on the west coast of Oregon, and all the experts predict a big one here in the next 30 or 50 years.
Depending on the cite, there are on average 16-19 earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher per year, or 1.5 per month. There’s indeed been a total of seven mag 7+ quakes since April 1st, which is above the norm – HOWEVER, as with any statistics, it’s normal and expected for some months to be busier or quieter than the average; there were NO quakes of that size during the first three months of this year, for example.
You’re not alone in that feeling…but speaking statistically, the likelihood of a future great quake doesn’t change even after a cluster of “smaller” quakes (except for the general fact that each quake has a 5% chance of being a foreshock to a larger event.) In fact, having smaller earthquakes is a GOOD THING – every quake relieves pressure which has built up along the fault lines.
So, tell me. Do you think I should stop posting whenever The Drudge Report issues a headline of some earthquake?
Yes.
I don’t like the Drudge Report on general principle. :rolleyes:
but I do think you should post whatever you want! life is short - cliche, sure, but it’s valid.
There are a lot of things you can do to prepare besides a “go” bag.
Look around where you and your family sleeps. Are there objects that could fall over and cause injury? Things like lamps, picture frames, bookcases…
Do you have emergency lighting? Do not depend on that flashlight on the night stand. It may have flown across the room, making that flashlight difficult to find without said flashlight. Emergency lights that are attached to the wall are better.
And do you have emergency lights on your stairway and in your kitchen? A lot of the minor injuries caused by an earthquake are bloody feet that are cut when one goes into a dark kitchen where plates and glassware have spilled out of cupboards and lie broken on the floor.
Do you have an emergency contact that is outside of the area? Do all of your family members living locally know of this contact? It can be quite difficult to make a phone call accross town, but can be much easier to make a phone call to another state. If everyone locally calls that outside contact, then everyone can know everyone else’s status.
Lots of quake activity globally; it could happen. Soonest possible? Not sure. I think CA has a full Beach Boys summer coming no matter what though personal guess.
I think you have more to worry about with the Cascadia subduction zone than what happens in California. Subduction events are usually quite a bit more powerful than those strike/slip movements that occur in California. Here is another report that posits that the Cascadia has a return interval of between 400 and 600 years and since the last big one was 300 years ago, you should probably start planning to relocate in about 100 years or so. 
I personally have no idea. I live in Boston, and we have had a few quakes, and if a cup rattled, that would be the extent of it. There have been tiny quakes that I never even felt them. Maybe just one. It is amusing to us.
I know it is serious to a lot of people, and I worry about them. I saw a so called “expert” on the news a little while ago, and he said it is a question of when will it happen, not if it happens. He was talking about California. I remember the last quake they had, and it was pretty bad, so I wish them all the best. Very, very, scarey.
Define “big” and “soon”, and whether proximity to human population is a factor, and I’ll start crunching the numbers for you.
In a press conference following the recent 5.1 in California, Lucy Jones from the USGS said: “We’ve never found a pattern of ‘building up’ and then you get the really big earthquake. That’s not the way earthquakes work, most of them are random.”
when I read this I thought of the OP.