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To a fault: Anniversary of a disaster
SPECIAL SECTION: Marking the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake.

By GARY A. WARNER
Register Travel Editor

You don't throw an anniversary party for a killer,
but this week Californians are doing just that.

Perhaps it's the lack of malevolence.
You can't blame the planet for doing what
comes naturally, even if it rips cracks
in the Earth, topples buildings and people die.

It was 100 years ago that the Big One
hit California, proving to be one of the
most spectacular field days for the
future science of plate tectonics.

In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906,
the Pacific Plate and the North American
Plate broke along the 296 northernmost
miles of the 800-mile San Andreas fault.
Some areas lurched up to 20 feet.                                   San Andreas Fault at Carrizo Plain
                                                                                Photo by Mark Rightmire
                                                                                Copyright: The OC Register
Though the quake lasted less than a minute,
fires raged for four days. Thousands died.
Billions of dollars of property was damaged.
The legend of California as "the earthquake state"
spread around the world.

This isn't just another dry anniversary. Scientists now know that the 1906 quake wasn't the
biggest to ever hit California.

Even bigger ones may yet come. As soon as years. No longer than decades.

To mark the 100th anniversary, the Register Travel section will explore perhaps the state's
most underappreciated – and most widely feared – tourist attraction.

One of the stories:

My Fault: Living along quake faults
Californians living along quake faults have learned to balance fear and fatalism

By GARY A. WARNER
Register Travel Editor

I was born two miles from the San Andreas fault in San Bernardino. I went to Woodrow
Wilson High School in Long Beach, rebuilt after the 1933 earthquake.

I rode out Sylmar in 1971 on a waterbed. My college dorm at Berkeley was a few yards
from the Hayward fault. A month after moving home to work for the Register, the 1987
Whittier Narrow quake hit.

I reported on the 1992 Landers quake. I held my infant son under the door jam of our
house in Orange during the 1994 Northridge quake.

I'm hardly alone among Californians, whose lives have been shaped by sudden jolts in
the dead of night, "drop-and-cover" earthquake drills at school, and seeing the first
seismic waves of a small temblor on the surface of a cup of office coffee.

On my recent 1,000-mile drive along the San Andreas fault, I met dozens of Californians
with family legends and personal tales of life on the fault line.

Each expressed a mix of fatalism and fascination over living up close to such titanic
geological forces. It was this sunny disconnect that might explain potential buyers
checking out frequent for-sale signs I saw on property just feet from the fault line.

At the Salton Sea, I ran into snowbird Joe Parsons who comes down each winter from
British Columbia to the Coachella Valley. He's a volunteer at the Salton Sea Visitor Center,
where most people come looking for tips on wildflowers. But some, like me, come
seeking the San Andreas.

"It's right here, just across the road," he said. "They say we're safe here because of the
land. It's kind of silty. But if it happens, it happens."

Lucile Jones studies the San Andreas as a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in
Pasadena. After a detached discussion of earthquake forecasting, I asked her if there
was any place on the fault that she found especially exciting.

"Two road cuts – I-5 and Route 14," she said. "In both exposures the fault is spectacular.
At Route 14 at Palmdale Lake, you can see overturned sediments in amazing disarray. At
I-5 the fault is a 1-kilometer-thick band of fault gouge – a clay formed as the fault has
moved and ground down the rocks into tiny bits."

Janet van Boxtel has lived in Parkfield, the self-described earthquake capital of the world
for 11 years. She's OK with selling the seismic jitters to passersby. But the real thing can
still be unnerving.

"The last big one we had was in 2004," van Boxtel said. "The branding irons hanging from
the roof jingled and the wine glasses danced on the shelves. It was about a 6.2. We get
three or four earthquakes a day, but they're under three, so you don't even notice them.''

Terry Carpenter, a British expatriate living in San Diego, had driven off her planned course
down Highway 101 just to visit Parkfield.

"I had read about this city with all its earthquakes and I thought, that's something different
to go see," she said. "When I lived in England, I thought everybody in the West was a
cowboy and you had earthquakes all the time."

At Mission San Juan Bautista, I chatted with Bruce Johnson, from Santa Cruz, who took
his daughters, Kelly and Katie, both 6, to the backside of the church to show them the fault
and explain the meeting of the two plates.

"I wanted them to see this, so that they will remember," he said. "They haven't had much
experience with earthquakes. I grew up in Santa Cruz, so we always had earthquakes.
They became second nature."

I arrived in San Francisco to one of those brilliant clear early spring days. It was a Sunday,
and the streets filled with bicyclists, joggers and walkers. Near the south base of the
Golden Gate Bridge, I met six women, classmates from Stanford, out to celebrate their
60th birthdays. I asked if any were California natives. Five pointed to Betsy Eisenhardt.

She was born and raised in San Francisco, a descendent of the legendary denim mogul
Levi Strauss. The year 1906 quake is part of family lore.

"I had great-grandparents who were living here, and their house was damaged in the
shaking," she said. "So they put my grandmother, who was a baby, into a car parked on
Octavia Street hill for the night as the city burned all around. The next day they left to go
down the peninsula."

Despite the family history, Eisenhardt said she rarely thinks about earthquakes, even
though she lives in the Marina District that was the center of damage in San Francisco
from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

"I'll feel the house shake and I'll think it's an earthquake, and then realize it's a truck going
by," she said. "Then I'll feel the house shake and think, it's a truck. Only there was no truck.
It was an earthquake. You just live with it.''

The San Andreas runs across the Golden Gate and into Point Reyes National Seashore.
In the tiny town of Olema, Carol Watt explained that she had moved away from earthquake
country, only to return.

"It's just something you learn to live with," said Watt, owner of the Olema Trading Post. "I
grew up here, it's just the most beautiful place I know. I'm an optimist, I guess. I own
property in two places on the San Andreas fault – here and in San Juan Bautista. I know
there are earthquakes. But I just love California."

No one summed up the California attitude toward earthquakes better than Alphonse
DeRose. We chatted one afternoon near Hollister as he leaned against a wall, one hand
in his pocket, one holding a glass of wine. One foot on the Pacific Plate, one on the North
America Plate. The fault cuts through the center of the winery building outside Hollister
that DeRose owns with his father.

DeRose is fatalistic about the implications of living and working directly on top of one of
nature's most deadly forces.

"We're actually safer here than being farther away," he said, taking a sip of his Zinfandel.
"Anyway, you can't spend all your life waiting for the Big One."

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