Note that this quake was not on the San Andreas - it was in the Eastern California Shear Zone, a separate fault system near Death Valley. The epicenter was about 125 miles away from LA, and almost closer to Las Vegas (which also felt this quake). The limited damage was largely because it was far away from any populated areas - the nearest cities are Ridgecrest (pop 27,000) and Trona (pop < 2000).
Also the area used be have some volcanic activity which is now limited to hot springs and geothermal plants. But you can still see a lot of lava fields when you drive there.
It does, and the article affirms this. However it's a question of relative magnitude. The energy dissipated by the smaller quakes is dwarfed in comparison to larger quakes. The energy of a 5.5 quake is on the order of 1/1000th the energy of a mag 7 quake.
I'm in the mountains in San Bernadino (Lake Arrowhead / Big Bear) and I felt it pretty good. Shook the door to the bathroom. Thought my wife was being impatient.
"Only 10 percent of California's 7 million plus homeowners have earthquake insurance – and the number has dropped by more than half since the deadly quake" (2014)
You can get an estimate for an earthquake insurance policy with the California Earthquake Authority.
I'm not clear how a CEA policy makes financial sense for a standard single-family, owner-occupied house. The only affordable plans have massive deductibles and only partial cost coverage. If "the big one" hits, it's likely that:
(a) CEA will quickly run out of money and I won't be covered anyway.
(b) The whole community will be ruined so assuming all of my family is still alive we'd best move somewhere else anyway (and a rebuild or undamaged house wouldn't sell).
(c) Some kind of government bailout or community help program will be available.
For smaller earthquakes, it's likely I'd either fail to meet my deductible or be unable to pay the non-covered portion (which has to be paid out first before they'll begin to pay for further repairs).
Am I wrong, or is there something I'm missing? I wish this weren't the case.
Different country, but for the Christchurch earthquake in 2011:
- our equivalent of CEA (EQC) did indeed run out of money, although it’s mostly reinsurance and govt backed
- insurance companies went under, because even for a small city (400k), costs ran to $40 billion
- it’s now very very expensive to get earthquake coverage, in some parts of the country you are paying multiples of what less earthquake prone parts of the country pay, so people don’t bother. so they’ll lose everything next time, and we’ll foot the bill as a country
Scale of California probably means amplification if these effects, hundreds of billions in losses.
> CEA will quickly run out of money and I won't be covered anyway.
I don’t understand why insurance companies can run out of money whenever they need to pay claims. I’m sure they know they’re going to go under, why can’t they get insurance on themselves?
Most insurance works on the basis that we have some underlying risk (probability) and resulting cost (multiplied together gives us the expectation) of annual payout. A lot of these funds however are financed through CAT bonds [1]. The idea of CAT bonds is that the sort of financial business cycle (a la 2007/8 housing market crash) are decorrelated enough with other financial movements that you "shouldn't™" both have a bad natural disaster and a sudden shift in the business cycle. However, a lot of these insurance companies are then further reinsured with specific contractual limitations so that ideally the fund won't run out.
In the real world, the government can act as insurer of last resort and use tax dollars to with financing (though these usually are ideally set up with the initial fund).
Insurers often issue reinsurance for/with each other.
Both insurers and general reinsurance firms will some times sell their risk to investors (in the capital markets) through vehicles such as Insurance Linked Securities. An ILS provides one form of risk transfer. There are others.
In both cases, if the risk is tied to say, catastrophe insurance, then this offers (investors) returns uncorrelated with the stock market.
What’s the incentive to purchase insurance? It will reduce their profits. If you are an executive of a company offering earthquake insurance, better to just keeps profits high now, make a high salary, and when the big quake hits, declare bankruptcy and walk away.
they're much more sophisticated than that. they'll do things like say the damage was caused by wind, not water. they'll influence forecasters to call it a "super-storm" instead of a hurricane, and for an earthquake, something equally creative:
- the building was defective/you didn't have it inspected by our experts, so maybe the foundation already had cracks from the last EQ, in that case we can't pay the claim
- insurance only covers up to 5.0/6.0
- although it was reported as a 7.5, you live 4 miles away from the epicenter, meaning the EQ was likely below a 6.0, in which case your policy doesn't kick in/we'll only pay 30% of your claim
- the EQ cracked a water main/gas line, and most of the damage to your house is from the flood/fire, which isn't covered under EQ policy. try suing the insurance of the utility company.
- we determined that fracking is likely the cause of this quake, in which case it's manmade and not covered. you can sue the oil company though.
- we checked the seismometer and we dispute the USGS reporting that it was a 6.0/7.0/8.0/our geologist has published research saying that current methods of measuring earthquakes are in question. so although we don't need correct science to collect your premium, we do need perfect science to pay any claims. Or if you settle now, we'll pay 40% of your coverage or else you can try to sue us and maybe get paid 10 years from now
- we don't cover the specific region where all the earthquake damage occurred/that requires a different policy
- we only cover incidental/secondary damage, like clocks falling off the wall (which, of course, you must have a receipt for and will be paid minus depreciation and deductible). your policy doesn't cover utility line damage, structural damage, or earth-moving damage.
They'll take a hit in their ratings if they do. Insurance companies are rated by independent analysts such as A.M. Best, Moody's, and Standard and Poor's. Customers, especially large customers, research issuers before purchasing insurance, and a poorly-rated company is likely to get fewer customers.
Some risks are just uninsurable, even for countries. Large scale flooding and earthquake damage caused so much loss that no one can afford to pay for it. The US is lucky it can issue debt cheaply.
I understand why people keep bring up earthquake insurance, but it's not that many of us haven't considered it. It can be expensive to the extent that you are better off reinforcing your home rather than spending any money on said insurance. "The expensive deductible related to earthquake insurance are sometimes as high as 15% of the value of the home, which has many homeowners giving the insurance a second thought."[1]
Most insurance companies bailed out of the business of earthquake insurance after Northridge because when it happens, the claims are enormous. The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake was an indirect factor that lead to the Panic of 1907 due to the high volume of insurance claims.
I think the general consensus is that you'd be better using your money to get a construction loan to brace and bolt your home to resist earthquakes. I was quoted $175/month for earthquake insurance. That translates into a $25-30k loan. You can do a lot of structural improvement for that.
When I looked into it, adding on earthquake insurance would cost more than my regular homeowners insurance, and like you said would still have a huge deductible without even covering most of my belongings
Furthermore, if a big quake happens, insurance companies are going to go broke paying out claims. Homeowners are going to be at the back of the line meaning most of them aren't going to see a dime.
Why? So the sleazy insurance companies can deny or only pay a small percentage of your claim?? No thanks, the insurance industry has reduced itself to a rent seeking, regulatory capture machine with nearly zero value proposition for customers at this point.
There's a few articles that go into a loosely defined faulting area dubbed the Walker Lane[1][2][3] in which it's theorized that the East Pacific Rise (a rift), under the Gulf of California, may be expanding directly north. I know some geologists were surprised at first at the 7.4 Landers earthquake in 1994, and the article goes into that the Walker Lane seems to follow US 395, so I wonder if this is just a continuing extension of geologic activity associated with it.
There are so many building regulations, and grants to help older buildings meet standards that were not in place when they were built, awareness and education campaigns, and built-in procedures and policies in place that a regular California resident doesn't need to let the fear of an earthquake take over their life.
California is as prepared as any state can be for an earthquake and it is constantly looking for better ways to be prepared.
There's lots of regulations, but the regulations seem flawed by design. For example, in California at least, buildings need to be built to survive earthquakes, but not necessarily be functional.
In the event of a larger quake, you might survive the initial shock but a high percentage of your city, including new buildings will need to be torn down.
This represents a huge loss to a city in economic terms. Imagine if downtown LA lost 50% of its office buildings and apartment buildings. Compare this to Japan where buildings survive and are required to be usable. Japanese engineers are shocked at what they consider to be American substandard building codes.
Because Japan has way more earthquakes. Relatively, we are pretty well prepared in references to buildings. Now food supplies and power? I feel like people aren’t mentally prepared for that.
Nah, there's just not a whole lot in that part of the world.
When I lived in that general area, there was a 7.1 or 7.2 and I think there was one death. IIRC, it was due to a heart attack and locals joked it was in reaction to the amount of liquor bottles broken in some liquor store because photos of the broken bottles got splashed all over the papers as one of the bigger points of damage.
A train was derailed in that quake and I think someone broke their arm but no one died because it was going unusually slow for a passenger train, having been scheduled behind a slow-moving freight train.
We had aftershocks for weeks that interfered with my sleep. Some of the aftershocks were above a 5.0.
This was also relatively remote. If it had been, say, the East Bay, where there’s high population density and lots of older homes with unreinforced masonry foundations, the situation would look a lot different.
I was living in east bay during that time and just returned home from school. When the earthquake hit I could see the road create waves like a flipped rug. Fortunately no damage to our house.
If we are splitting hair, a 6.4 can technically be more dangerous compared to a 6.7 if the waves and the oscillation of the building coincide and amplify.
I didn’t feel it in West LA but my cat became extremely spooked. He was in an ultra hunting mode, flat to the ground and scanning the room. I never seen him act like this especially for this duration. He wouldn’t eat treats or respond to anything.
I wonder if it was just the vibration of the ground or if there’s some other factor alerting him.
Cats can probably feel or hear the p waves, which humans usually do not notice, and which travel faster than the more noticeable (to humans) s waves.
Here's a video of a bunch of cats in a cat cafe in Japan whose sleep is interrupted by an earthquake. They all wake up and start looking around about 9 seconds before the shaking starts, probably due to sensing the p wave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ-p9qOhBv4
That is scary to me. Should it be scary to me? In regards to liquefaction zones and earthquakes? I mean, i recently built a fence and the moisture in the ground made me conscientious of liquefaction when tamping for my gravel and posts, how does this play out for SF in an earthquake?
Disclaimer: I am a geologist, but I'm not a P.G., hence all that I say on this topic is bullshit. p.s., Does your conference have beer? If it doesn't, I'm not going. I mean, I'll be so happy when AGU rolls around, because, man, I'm thirsty.
It should be scary. Soil liquefaction is one of the main failure modes of small structures in earthquakes. Take a look at the map for your area to know if it matters for you.
You probably meant "land fill," not "landfills." Only a handful of things are actually built on landfills in the Bay Area, and all the neighborhoods you mentioned are built on fill. There are ships under Soma, though.
Luckily, this was far from population centers - epicenter about 10 miles from Ridgecrest, a town of 30,000 people
just south of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, and
just east of US 395, about 80 miles east of Bakersfield.
So it was apparently widely felt but Ridgecrest-China Lake, where it seems to have been felt the most, is not very close to the major populations. You can see this from cgoecknerwald's second link showing the locale of one of the major aftershocks.
I don't know, but anyway... If you happen to be under dried chiles when they shake, be sure to keep your eyes closed because the pain could make an earthquake much more pleasant. Been there done that, and that pain lasted hours... ouch!
On a more serious note, the anecdote might suggest that the earthquake produced very high frequency oscillations. Dried plants are relatively light and stiff so that a larger but slow displacement might be harder to spot by looking at them, but they could be much better at transmitting fast oscillations.
In the Loma Prieta earthquake Santa Cruz and Watsonville were badly damaged. But their was very little information getting out. So a lot of the coverage was San Francisco and Oakland. There is an inverse correlation between how bad a disaster is and a reporters ability to get any information.
The new early warning system did not trigger in L.A. Authorities said the projected damages wasnt big enough. The warning system is supposed to give seconds to tens of seconds of warning to turn off equipment and seek cover.
