A dangerous place
"In A Dangerous Place, Marc Reisner leads us through California's improbable history and rise from a largely desert land to the most populated state in the nation, fueled by an economic engine more productive than all of Africa. Reisner believes that the achievement of this, the last great desert civilization, hinges on California's denial of its own inescapable fate. Both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas sit astride two of the most violently seismic zones on the planet. The earthquakes that have already rocked California were, according to Reisner, mere prologues to a future cataclysm that will result in destruction of such magnitude that the only recourse will be to rebuild from the ground up. Reisner concludes A Dangerous Place with a hypothetical but chillingly realistic description of such a disaster and its horrifying after effects."--BOOK JACKET.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
2people
2021–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I invite you to find yourself a copy of any or all of The Control of Nature by John McPhee, A River Lost by Blaine Harden, and Marc Reisner's books Cadillac Desert and A Dangerous Place.
- Read A Dangerous Place by Marc Reisner for a pretty fascinating scenario of a major quake on the SF Bay Area's other major fault system, the Hayward Fault.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/dangerous-place-californias-u...
Its impact on both the Bay region and the Delta, and by extension much of the Central Valley and Los Angele, would be immense. As has been noted for the past 50 years, a major event is long overdue.
- Mid-4s is where most people start feeling quakes, though the actual significance is pretty low. You'll tend to see/hear a lot of chatter online or in media.
At mag 5 there's localised damage, most characteristically of goods knocked off grocery store shelves, with glass-bottled liquids often producing a photogenic mess.
At mag 6, pre-code construction or at-risk areas (bay fill, river bottoms, sand) may see significant structural damage. The 2014 South Napa earthquake is the most recent of these, and downtown Napa was hit pretty hard, due to terrain (reclaimed river bottomlands, bay-fill, and some old masonry construction). See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_South_Napa_earthquake>.
Mag 7 is the scale of some of the largest quakes recorded in California, including the 1906 San Francisco quake. This would create widespread damage within 100+ miles of the epicentre. Marc Reisner's A Dangerous Place (2003) includes a detailed description of impacts of a mag 7 quake along the Hayward fault, which would extend well beyond the immediate region into Southern California due to reliance on delta and Central Valley water projects.
<https://baynature.org/article/book-review-a-dangerous-place/>
Mag 8 is about the upper bound of expected seismic activity on the San Andreas and related fault systems.
- Not just ag land, but the California Water Project and Aqueduct, which feeds both Los Angeles and SoCal agriculture.
One of the major themes of Mark Reisner's book A Dangerous Place, which explores the scenario of a major Hayward Fault earthquake (that's the fault running along the San Francisco Bay's eastern shoreline) would be massive levee failures in the California Delta, and the knock-on consequences of massive salt-water intrusion on not only the Delta but farming and southern California as well.
<https://archive.org/details/dangerousplaceca00reis/page/176/...>
