I'm a non-Californian, so I'm not very familiar with the tectonics at play here. If there's an earthquake on this fault, how bad would it be? Would it trigger a tsunami? Would SF and LA be damaged? Could this cause "the big one" that gets mentioned occasionally? How bad would such a quake be?
One thing which isn't discussed enough is how bad the Tsunami is environmentally. The coastline of Japan is absolutely littered with crap from the 2011 Tsunami. All manner of chemicals were sucked into the nearby sea, tires, carpets, hard and soft plastics, absolutely everywhere. It almost looks unrecoverable. I know that seems like a non-issue in the grand scale of things, but Tsunami's of the past didn't do this. M…
eg: During a hypothetical Earthquake in the Bay area, the liquefaction of sand occurs, which causes underground structures to move upward due to buoyancy (think of a lower level parking garage), and the soil mass from the structure collapses.
the liquefied sand diffuses to the surrounding area after the earthquake, causing the sand beneath the underground structure to be lost, and the building will return to its original position or even collapse.