[kydave]

My next door neighbor in a rural area of Humboldt County is a world class (i.e., they fly her around the world after earthquakes to investigate) earthquake specialist. There are several living in that area. One of her colleagues taught an environmental geography class I took up there, studying earth movements.

At College of the Redwoods, just south of Eureka, CA, he took us outside the classroom one day, pointed down the hill the school rests on, out across Highway 101 to a cow field leading off to Humboldt Bay. He pointed out the offset of the old fence lines.

One branch off the Cascadia connections, he said, comes in from the Pacific, across that field and runs East up under the college... our class room building, actually.

He said that when (not if, but when), the Cascadia subduction zone cuts loose, everyone in the classroom will go through the ceiling... We had many interesting field trips in that class around Humboldt County. It was both fascinating and frightening to know so many people, experts, in that field of geology and listen to what they had to say about the Big One (and they were always talking about the Cascadia event, not San Andreas!).

Occasionally something "new" hits the popular news and it's a big deal again for those who haven't been aware of it for decades.

I was in Humboldt for the 7.2 quakes in 1980 and 1992. It was fascinating to go out to the Lost Coast, South of Eureka and see the seabed along a long stretch of the coast newly exposed after rising about 4 feet during one of those quakes.

It will be catastrophic when it happens.