What Would a Large Earthquake Do to Downtown L.A.?

The Claremont tunnel beneath the Berkeley Hills on the east side of Oakland is a water supply tunnel that serves over 800,000 customers in Richmond, Oakland, San Leandro and neighboring communities. One of the unique things about the tunnel is that it crosses the active Hayward Fault. Most of the time when you talk about designing for earthquakes you’re talking about designing to withstand the seismic forces. In this case, the designers needed the water transmission tunnel to withstand up to 7.5-ft of offset due to fault slip and still maintain a minimum level of service. (Photo credit: Sue Bednarz, Jacobs Associates, Inc. by way of Civil Engineering Magazine)

This post describes the relatively recent Claremont Tunnel Seismic Upgrade Project as reported in Civil Engineering Magazine (May 2008, v. 78, no. 5, pp 58-63, 96-97).

[…]

There is nothing funny about landslides, particularly when you consider the tremendous loss of life that happens all the time around the world, most recently in Taiwan, China, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. But the well known humor site, the Onion has taken a pretty good crack at this usually unfunny subject in their video “news” clip Reporter In Helicopter Pretty Sure Landslide Down There Somewhere. Its a very amusing video that’s really about journalists and their attempts to get the scoop about a story, not really about landslides at all. Click through for the embedded video. Happy weekend. […]

In 2009, an unfortunate earthquake near L’Aquila, Italy caused the death of 309 people. The Italian authorities decided that a group of some six expert geoprofessionals were guilty of manslaughter for failing to predict the […]