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a     If I walk along certain streets in the town of Hayward, I can see how the earth creeps and shifts.
b     It’s something that we Californians just live with.
c     And Californians well know that this prediction could  be right.
d     Nobody knows for sure, but at all times California is on the alert.
e     Geologists believe that displacements have been occurring for 15-20 million years.

Vprašanje 1

California awaits  "The Big One"

Back in the 1980s,  scientists completed a ten-year survey on the earthquake risk in California; and they came up with an alarming prediction.  The next "Big One", that massive earthquake that Californians know is coming, could well strike by or shortly after the year 2018. California often experiences earthquakes, and a "big one" is sure to hit the state again some time soon. Larry Wood, who lives virtually on top of the "Hayward fault", knows what it is like to be in an earthquake.

California is known all over the world for its size, its sun, and its surf, its glamour and its optimism. But it is known too as "Earthquake Country " — a truly vulnerable region where big devastating quakes have occurred in the past and could happen again. It is unlikely that a disaster on the scale of recent disasters in Italy or Japan could occur in California; California has learnt from its past disasters, and most buildings are designed to withstand major quakes. Nevertheless, Californians are worried. When will the next big quake strike the state, and where will all the shaking and crumbling and rocking begin? USGS scientists predicted a 50% possibility of an exceptionally big quake of 8.3 sometime before 2018, somewhere along the San Andreas or Hayward faults.

Responsibility for California's earthquakes lies in the fact that the state sits atop the famous and terrifying San Andreas Fault. This fault rocks and quakes often and unexpectedly as the earth's tectonic plates shift along fault lines that run 700 miles from the Mexican border to the north California coast. It is almost unbelievable that more than 20 million people should choose to live along this fault; but because their state has prosperity, an ideal climate, and a wonderful ambiance, Californians take a laissez-faire attitude to the potential danger.

Living in the hills above the Hayward Fault, I know all about the danger. Like many Californians, I buy costly earthquake insurance for my home. In some places, the town looks as if the architects and builders made big mistakes in construction, because the buildings are out of kilter.

Actually, what has happened is that the streets have cracked and shifted, so that curbs no longer meet. Houses have shifted, so that walls are uneven. Buildings have interior and exterior cracks that can't be prevented, because the slowly shifting earth causes an inexorable movement in foundations, walls and streets! . The drift can be measured — in the present decades — as a displacement of two inches per year, on average. It doesn't take an expert to figure out what moving part of a building two inches a year will do to that structure. During the destructive 1906 earthquake, in some places the earth moved as much as 21 feet!

Scientists now know that major earthquakes occur at about 150-year intervals along the San Andreas fault; but in the future, they will probably not happen unannounced. Scientists can now better predict when a quake is coming, by foreshocks and other techniques discovered in the studies they are constantly undertaking, so Californians can normally fo to bed  at night without worrying whether the house will fall down around them while they are sleeping.

Still, with or without a warning, the next Big One, when it comes, will still do enormous damage.



Adapted from http://linguapress.com