April 18th this year was the hundredth anniversary of the dreadful San Francisco earthquake of 1906. San Francisco was shaken badly in that quake of 7.8 magnitude. An estimated 3000 people died, mostly from the resulting fires. The city and the surrounding bay area sit on two geological time bombs – the San Andreas and the Hayward faultlines. A shift of just a few meters on one side of either fault line past the other, will cause an earthquake of 7+ magnitude on the Richter Scale. Scientists predict an earthquake comparable to or even bigger than the one in 1906, within the next thirty years. San Francisco is now a much bigger city and the Bay Area population is many times larger than it was a hundred years ago. Many buildings including homes, sit atop or close to one of the two geological fault lines. So, those who live there – "the Faultliners, are they worried? Well, not all of them. Others are looking for buyers. If any of the readers here are "faultliners", we would love to hear from you.
(click to see faultlines) 
"They love it. They dread it. They think it’s cool. They poke fun at it. They dream about it. They measure it with marking pens. They rely on pets to warn them before it moves. They throw insurance policies at it so they can sleep at night. They proudly show it off to visitors. Then they try to pretend it isn’t there.
They are the Faultliners, living and working atop the Bay Area’s twin time bombs. One hundred years after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the thousands who straddle "the San Andreas" and "the Hayward" ponder their precarious intimacy with forces pulling their worlds apart.
"Those cracks show me I’m not the boss," said Elke DeMuynck, who has been patching her Hayward ceiling for 15 years. "But living on the fault also teaches you not to be afraid of every next moment, because you really can’t live if you do."
Occasional angst
With scientists forecasting a 62 percent likelihood of a damaging earthquake — defined as a magnitude 6.7 or greater — in the Bay Area before 2032, the decision to hang out on a fault is a deadly serious matter. But it is by no means a simple one.
For many residents, life on the fault line is a natural sitcom, rich in irony and dark humor. There is occasional angst aboveground, as the brutes below line up for their next cataclysmic casting call. Yet within the cracking eggshells of workplace and bedroom, both hope and denial spring eternal. Still, the fault zone is always there, grinding away in the back of their heads."
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “The Faultliners – The Earth Beneath Their Feet”
When I was a kid, in the early 80s, living in Pasadena, my school sounded three different alarms for three different kinds of warning drills: fire, earthquake, and nuclear attack. I can’t remember if there was any purpose for the distinction (I think all three drills involved getting under our desks, turning away from the windows, and using our textbooks to cover the napes of our necks) other than their practical effect of compounding our dread. In my dreams, I used to rehearse escapes for each kind of disaster. Small earthquakes periodically shook our house, which sat on a small fault line, and one of our area’s periodic forest fires nearly destroyed our house, so I don’t think this was only because I was an anxious child. My boyfriend, who grew up a “faultliner” in Berkeley and Palo Alto, and lived through the 1989 World Series quake, describes similar childhood nightmares.
What’s strange is how little space earthquakes occupy in my imagination now. About a year ago, more or less, I was at work in my ninth floor Los Angeles office when a woozy, rolling feeling washed over me, rocking me from side to side. I heard the building creak. My first thought was, “I’m dizzy, I should get something to eat.” My second thought was, “No, wait a minute, that must have been an earthquake.” Then I heard the voices of colleagues emerging from their offices into the hallway, echoing the latter thought. Five minutes later, a Google search for “earthquake Los Angeles” brought up the AP wire story of a minor earthquake in the area; a few friends and relatives in other places contacted me; by the next day, it was old news. I had forgotten about the incident until your post. Similarly, of all the feelings my boyfriend has expressed over the years regarding his family, still “faultliners,” none has included concern over their safety in the inevitable event of an earthquake.
Perhaps while to children everything seems beyond control and, therefore, equally worthy of concern, as adults we have a sense of agency regarding a hefty, finite set of responsibilities that occupy our attention, so that, for better or worse, we develop mechanisms to allow the things that we can’t control slip our mind: earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, etc.
Just a little pop-psychology for the day.
Those who want to prove me wrong, take control of their lives, and move somewhere out of harm’s way, should apparently move to Storrs Connecticut: http://www.slate.com/id/2126321/
(Too bad that Storrs is close to the epicenter of Lyme’s disease. Hard to eliminate risk altogether.)
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I am not sure how I would have reacted to being a “faultliner” in the Bay Area.
In my youth I was supremely unafraid of weather phenomena, even as a child. But in New Delhi we were safe from tornadoes, hurricanes and for the most part, flooding. But I did live through several earthquakes. (The most dangerous faultlines are in northern and central India because of the tectonic plates that join where the Indian subcontinent pushed up against the Himalayas millions of years ago). I don’t remember being particularly unnerved.
But after coming to the US, weather related concerns have been many. The tornadoes and blizzards in the midwest. Hurricanes and flooding in east Texas. In Storrs, CT one would probably die of boredom.
This year’s hurricane season is promising to be a particularly frightening one from what I have heard. But I have warned my husband that either we will evacuate well before everyone else takes to the streets or we will stay back and take our chances. I definitely will not do what he made me do last year when Rita struck.
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