Earthquake and Tsunami Updates

SUMMARY: Darwin award winner; history can teach us something; could be worse in CA...

I misspoke about California's quakes: Report on the radio from Geologic Survey said that the Japanese quake was 3000 times more powerful than the Loma Prieta. And the maximum that is likely to ever happen in California is 8.5, not 8.0. One difference from Japan's latest quake (BTW, GS also says 7th largest ever recorded)--our faults are largely directly under or adjacent to some major population centers, not 60 miles off the coast as this one was.

We have identified a candidate for this year's Darwin Awards. Seems three guys up the coast went down to the beach to take photos of the tsunami and were swept out into the ocean. Two survived. They've currently called off the search for the third. This was right in the area where parts of Crescent City were leveled by a tsunami in 1964 (see here for the article to go with the video):



They now have a 20-foot wall protecting the town that apparently helped this time around, although their harbor and its boats are pretty much a loss. Apparently these guys didn't read up on their local history. I mean, even *I* knew about it (hence knew to go looking for it on the web) and I've never lived in the area.

My agility friends are smarter than that; the ones living near the coast were posting earlier today about how they and their dogs were moving inland ahead of the predicted tsunami landfall. No beach play today for the dogs.

And I'm glad they moved themselves. Santa Cruz harbor, just over the hill, was thoroughly messed up; lost a lot of boats and smashed others along with huge concrete monoliths torn from the harbor onto the docks, which were destroyed. That seems to be pretty much the story for the random other coastal cities that were in the line of the incoming waves with no significant protection. No other reports of injuries or deaths, thank goodness, and I haven't heard that any homes were affected, either. Still, coastal counties have been declared a Disaster Area.