Milk and Honey (Part Two) (2024)

Let’s chat about that other long vaunted SoCal apocalypse, pop culture’s most prominent expectation and frequent media representation of Californian calamity: earthquakes.

Quakes are a likely culprit in the possible demise of current California. Romanticized in countless seventies B movie disaster flicks, cult classics like John Carpenter’s Escape from LA (awful, would take the B movie razzie prize for worst sequel of all time were it not for the horror that is Highlander 2) and big budget productions like The Rock’s San Andreas, earthquakes and California are immortalized in American mythology.

Non-Californians often joke about California breaking off the edge of the continent and sliding into oceanic depths after The Big One hits, shown cinematically to alarmingly ridiculous degrees in the not terribly respected Roland Emmerich epic 2012, wherein a frenzied John Cusack escapes from a crumbling Los Angeles as it literally slides and falls into the Pacific Ocean. Parodied in innumerable comedies, like Steve Martin’s LA Story, California residents tend to ignore most minor tremors. They’re as regular as the arrival of seasons are in other states.

It’s not the rattlers and the shakers that get ya. It’s the rollers. Queasy peasy city. Yuck. I remember one roller in the early 2000s, its epicenter centered near Paso Robles. It was brief, but the ground swayed and buckled and rolled, much like a waterbed does. It was so disorienting it screwed up my equilibrium for half a week.

The Northridge quake in 1994 was one of the most famous shaker events for SoCal. Its 6.7 magnitude epicenter, based in Reseda in the San Fernando Valley, shook the LA basin for the better part of twenty seconds. Its intensity was the highest ever recorded for an urban region and it resulted in 57 deaths, 8,700 injuries, and cost over $50 billion in infrastructure damages.

I was attending school in Chico when the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in San Francisco struck. 63 people died and 3,600 were injured. My roomies and I were watching the World Series between the Giants and the A’s, which is why it’s sometimes referred to as the World Series quake because it happened during the live broadcast of Game Three. Chico is about 160 miles north of San Francisco and we definitely felt it, sitting there on our ratty couches and armchairs stoned out of our gourds, wondering what the hell was going on. The destruction in the Marina district and the wreckage from the collapse of the double deck Nimitz freeway were the focuses of media coverage.

Of course, the NoCal flagship city is legend in the mythologies of earthquake because of its notorious 1906 tremor, estimated to have had a 7.9 magnitude, which leveled nearly all of preindustrial San Francisco and incurred over 3,000 deaths.

Almost all of the significant quakes of California can be attributed to the San Andreas Fault or its branching subsidiaries. It runs about 760 miles from the Salton Sea in SoCal to Cape Mendocino in NoCal. It’s a transform fault that’s part of the tectonic boundary between the North American continental plate and the Pacific plate.

We Gen X Californians have been living under the pending threat of the San Andreas busting off for the better part of our lives. The question is often posed by outsiders in why we’d want to continue living in a region that’s inevitably scheduled for outright destruction. The answer is the same for us as it is for Midwesterners who rebuild in Tornado Alley, or hurricane survivors in Florida.

Because it’s home.

Nevertheless, while we languish in the relativity of geological security – it could happen tomorrow, or it could happen in five hundred years – the unsettling truth is, estimates have grown more concerning as a result of advancing methods in predicting tectonic stress release.

In 2013, the United States Geological Survey posed an updated forecast that estimated an earthquake of 6.7 or greater happens every six years or so and that a magnitude 8.0 quake had a seven percent chance of occurring within the next thirty years.

Earthquake prediction is next to impossible as of yet, but the majority of accredited geologists agree we’re overdue. The northern part of the San Andreas ruptured in the 1906 event. The southern part hasn’t seen significant action since a 7.9 magnitude event was recorded at Fort Tejon in the Central Valley in 1857. The bottom end of the San Andreas, out there in the desert through the Morongo and Coachella Valleys, Palm Springs, and the Salton Sea, hasn’t ruptured in over 300 years. Any old time now, is what many geologists say off the cuff.

After 2019’s Ridgecrest quakes and a succession of three seismic events occurring near the China Lake naval base measuring 6.4, 5.4, and 7.1 on the Richter scale, the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America published a study which found the likelihood of a magnitude 7.5 or greater event happening on the Mojave Desert’s Garlock fault standing at 2.3%, up from a probability of .023%.

Consequently, the chances of a San Andreas event happening in those next 12 months from the summer of 2020 rose from .34% to 1.5%. Subsidiary ‘feeder faults’ could trigger the main fault line of San Andreas, and as of 2020, because the Ridgecrest quakes brought the Garlock fault closer to rupture, a Garlock quake became 100 times more likely than the previous year.

That meant the odds of a big San Andreas event had tripled. In that first week of August 2020, a ‘swarm’ of small earthquakes struck under the southeast part of the Salton Sea near the Mexican border, only the fourth time in 90 years of modern records. Swarms were recorded in recent years and The Big One didn’t erupt, but according to the United States Geological Survey, in any given week of a Californian year, there’s a 1 in 10,000 chance of a magnitude 7.0 or greater quake on the San Andreas.

The USGS claimed, again in that first week of August of 2020, because of that Salton Sea swarm occurring so near the southern portion of the San Andreas fault, odds increased to a one in one hundred chance of The Big One happening within the following seven days.

And it totes figured, didn’t it? Those apocalyptic ‘burgs near the Salton Sea, Bombay Beach and Niland and Slab City, those end times outposts I heralded earlier in this chronicle…do the desert rats need more of a reason to hype their customary doomsday vibes? One wonders how Mother Nature might make more of a wasteland out of the wasteland.

Eventually, SoCal is gonna find out. We didn’t that week. Small favors. Covid was enough to navigate, thanks very much.

A while back a group of seismologists worked up a simulation they called the ‘Shakeout Scenario,’ wherein they tried to approximate what would actually happen in SoCal if a hypothetical 7.8 quake hit somewhere in that southern desert stretch of the San Andreas fault.

The good news was, they didn’t believe grand Hollywood cataclysms like giant tsunamis leveling the Golden Gate Bridge or Santa Monica falling into the ocean, as depicted in movies like 2012 or San Andreas, were geologically possible. Tsunamis originate from seafloor quakes, like the one that set off the f*ckushima reactors to meltdown. The San Andreas Fault is inland; when it lets go, it won’t result in huge land masses slipping into the Pacific.

The bad news was, California would still have plenty to worry about, because that theorized quake would result in shocks traversing across the deserts to the coast, leveling older buildings, disrupting roads and highways, and effectively severing grid utilities like power, water, and gas. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fires would erupt, and with inaccessible roadways and water supply routes damaged, emergency personnel wouldn’t be able to put those fires out.

They’d likely keep burning, buildings to blocks, blocks to neighborhoods, then neighborhoods to cities. Utilities wouldn’t be repaired for months at the least, perhaps years depending on federal assistance or a lack thereof. California’s perpetual drought, limited water supplies, and its overtly dry climate, plus those gosh dang Santa Ana winds, would only aggravate all that fire activity.

Seismologist Lucy Jones, part of the Shakeout Scenario team, told Sarah Liezinski at Smithsonian magazine that for Southern Californians, “It’s not so much about dying in the earthquake…it’s about being miserable after the earthquake and people giving up on Southern California.” All those utilities required for Los Angeles to function, like power, water, fuel, sewage systems, communications, and roads, they’d be damaged and possibly irreparable without significant federal or international support.

Without working infrastructure, it’s logical to conclude the economy would tank and Angelenos would abandon the region. “Imagine an America without Los Angeles,” Jones posed. It was a sobering simulation and it seemed fairly rational. Crazy to think those wacky John Carpenter movies could come to fruition and the United States might turn its back on any of its major metropolises, much less the one that cranks out the bulk of its day to day entertainment.

Too much of our dystopian fiction has been self-prophetic. Some futurists say that’s the true purpose of sci-fi, to guesstimate our destinies even if they’re dark and dreary. Me, I always thought of it as escapism. Antiheroes like Mad Max or Snake Plissken reluctantly questing through wastelands looks mighty cool onscreen, but in real life there’d be less gruff derring-do and more dying of thirst. So much for that bitchin’ distressed Gucci leather jacket you bought to match the dystopian tides and times that are coming our way, yeah? You’ll be too hot and too busy trying to find bottled water than to worry about lookin’ good for the mutant battles to come.

So.

California’s numero uno scourge ain’t quakes.

It’s the fires created by the quakes.

It’s fire.

It’s always fire.

Desertification and deforestation and climate change? Fire.

Nuclear incident? Fire.

Earthquake? Fire.

Nothing lasts forever. All things end. That’s the way of this universe. At some point, the state of California will end, somehow, in some way, and it will likely end in fire. California is part of the Pacific Rim, which consists of the western shores of North and South America, the eastern shores of Asia, Australia, and all of the Pacific Islands.

The Pacific Rim, or the Ring of Fire as it’s so appropriately nicknamed, is laden with geological explosiveness, what with South America’s stretches of active volcanoes and the constantly shifting tectonic activity between the continental plates and the Pacific plate.

Our Californian quakes are burps and farts along the planet’s crotchety, tectonic backbone. If we could ask residents of the ancient supercontinent Pangea how that sometimes pans out, well…you get the gist.

Continued…

*Compiled from August 7, 2020