EVENTUALLY the rock slabs' pent-up pressures prove too much. In a lethal letting-go -- probably within the next two decades -- it finally happens: California comes apart at the seams.
The Big One.
Two-thirds of the state convulses in a seizure of continental proportions. For two or three minutes, the earth shakes. Mountains heave. Highways buckle. One in every 100 buildings topples to the ground. Power plants shut down. Electric systems fail. Oil refineries explode in raging infernos. Pipelines shatter. Across the region, telephones fall silent. A major aqueduct cracks. Fires everywhere, but firefighters lack water to put them out.
Between 3,000 and 14,000 people die. Another 12,000 to 55,000 need hospital care. Up to 141,000 people are homeless. The population is paralyzed. Rescuers can't get through streets clogged with rubble. For at least 72 hours, people are in the dark and they are on their own. In the words of an official California planning scenario: "Circumstances will . . . overwhelm our institutional and personal capabilities to cope."
Seismologists describe last week's quake as mere prologue in the geological drama of California under seismic stress. The final act -- more than 60 percent likely within 25 years -- could be one of the most devastating natural disasters of our times.
Experts say the earth, in a quake rumbling at 8.3 magnitude, will release perhaps 100 times as much energy as last week's quake. Damage could be $200 billion to $300 billion -- numbers that horrify the insurance industry.
"We're going to have a disaster; we're getting very close," says Tom Henyey, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center. "It's going to be at least 10 to 20 times as bad as what happened last week, in every way."
Worse, the big California earthquake for which scientists, emergency planners and national insurance companies are bracing is only one of two "Big Ones" virtually certain to strike the western United States within the next century.
"A lot of people don't realize there's another Big One waiting to happen in the Pacific Northwest -- and that we have the potential for a more powerful one," says University of Oregon seismologist Gene Humphreys.
As California anticipates an earthquake of 8.3 on the Richter scale, off the coast of the Pacific Northwest -- where the huge slab of the earth's crust known as the continental plate is sliding beneath the Pacific plate -- the stage is set for perhaps an 8.5 to 9 quake.
