50 Years Later, an Earthquake s Legacy Continues
Release Date:
February 4, 2021
The San Fernando earthquake struck Southern California 50 years ago, killing 64 people and costing over $500 million in damages. The quake prompted federal, state and local action to reduce earthquake risks and bolster public safety.
At 6 o’clock in the morning on February 9, 1971, the reservoir keeper of the Lower Van Norman Dam in Southern California tried to get out of bed.
He couldn’t. A magnitude-6.6 earthquake was shaking his home nestled at the bottom of the dam. After checking on his wife and child, he drove to the top of the dam to examine the damage. “It was hard to believe what I saw,” he said.
Studying Earthquakes Through Eyewitnesses Can Be Tricky
Release Date:
January 29, 2021
Scientists rely on seismometers and eyewitness accounts to identify an earthquake’s location, time and magnitude. A new study explores how the latter can be limited by socioeconomic factors, which can create biases in datasets that scientists use to characterize seismic hazards and coordinate emergency response.
As early American pioneers forged a long, arduous path across the country during the Westward Expansion, an earthquake hit what is now the State of Oklahoma on October 22, 1822.
“The trembling and vibrating were so severe as to cause door and window shutters to open and shut, hogs in pens to fall and squeal, poultry to run and hide, the tops of weeds to dip, [and] cattle to lowe [sic],” the Cherokee Advocate reported.
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As scientists increasingly rely on eyewitness accounts of earthquake shaking reported through online systems, they should consider whether those accounts are societally and spatially representative for an event, according to a new paper published in
Seismological Research Letters.
Socioeconomic factors can play a significant if complex role in limiting who uses systems such as the U.S. Geological Survey s Did You Feel It? (DYFI) to report earthquake shaking. In California, for instance, researchers concluded that DYFI appears to gather data across a wide socioeconomic range, albeit with some intriguing differences related to neighborhood income levels during earthquakes such as the 1989 Loma Prieta, the 1994 Northridge and 2018 Ridgecrest earthquakes.