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Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California

latimes.com

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Re: Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California

#61

Post by FPGAhacker »

wwweston wrote: post #26
rjurney wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small earthquakes are a good thing, not a bad thing. They relieve stress on the fault without having a major slippage. I think.

The stress-relief model makes sense to me, but apparently it doesn't work that way: https://www.sfgate.com/earthquakes/article/do-minor-quakes-p...

It does, and the article affirms this. However it's a question of relative magnitude. The energy dissipated by the smaller quakes is dwarfed in comparison to larger quakes. The energy of a 5.5 quake is on the order of 1/1000th the energy of a mag 7 quake.

Re: Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California

#62

Post by otterley »

richk449 wrote: post #58
saagarjha wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CEA will quickly run out of money and I won't be covered anyway. I don’t understand why insurance companies can run out of money whenever they need to pay claims. I’m sure they know they’re going to go under, why can’t they get insurance on themselves?

What’s the incentive to purchase insurance? It will reduce their profits. If you are an executive of a company offering earthquake insurance, better to just keeps profits high now, make a high salary, and when the big quake hits, declare bankruptcy and walk away.

They'll take a hit in their ratings if they do. Insurance companies are rated by independent analysts such as A.M. Best, Moody's, and Standard and Poor's. Customers, especially large customers, research issuers before purchasing insurance, and a poorly-rated company is likely to get fewer customers.

Re: Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California

#63

Post by skwb »

saagarjha wrote: post #53
TimTheTinker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear how a CEA policy makes financial sense for a standard single-family, owner-occupied house. The only affordable plans have massive deductibles and only partial cost coverage. If "the big one" hits, it's likely that: (a) CEA will quickly run out of money and I won't be covered anyway. (b) The whole community will be ruined so assuming all of my family is still alive we'd best move somewhere else anyway (a…

> CEA will quickly run out of money and I won't be covered anyway. I don’t understand why insurance companies can run out of money whenever they need to pay claims. I’m sure they know they’re going to go under, why can’t they get insurance on themselves?

Most insurance works on the basis that we have some underlying risk (probability) and resulting cost (multiplied together gives us the expectation) of annual payout. A lot of these funds however are financed through CAT bonds [1]. The idea of CAT bonds is that the sort of financial business cycle (a la 2007/8 housing market crash) are decorrelated enough with other financial movements that you "shouldn't™" both have a bad natural disaster and a sudden shift in the business cycle. However, a lot of these insurance companies are then further reinsured with specific contractual limitations so that ideally the fund won't run out.

In the real world, the government can act as insurer of last resort and use tax dollars to with financing (though these usually are ideally set up with the initial fund).

[1]. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/catastrophebond.asp

Re: Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California

#64

Post by jorblumesea »

JDazzle wrote: post #18
ralusek wrote: post #7

I feel like we're woefully underprepared for earthquakes. It feels like pushing away technical debt on a societal scale.

There are so many building regulations, and grants to help older buildings meet standards that were not in place when they were built, awareness and education campaigns, and built-in procedures and policies in place that a regular California resident doesn't need to let the fear of an earthquake take over their life. California is as prepared as any state can be for an earthquake and it is constantly looking for bett…

There's lots of regulations, but the regulations seem flawed by design. For example, in California at least, buildings need to be built to survive earthquakes, but not necessarily be functional.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-earthquake-legi...

In the event of a larger quake, you might survive the initial shock but a high percentage of your city, including new buildings will need to be torn down.

This represents a huge loss to a city in economic terms. Imagine if downtown LA lost 50% of its office buildings and apartment buildings. Compare this to Japan where buildings survive and are required to be usable. Japanese engineers are shocked at what they consider to be American substandard building codes.

The US govt has even concluded that better and stiffer building codes would save billions a year: https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nibs.org/resource/resmgr/docs/MS_C...

Re: Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California

#65

Post by iamtheworstdev »

benmarks wrote: post #49
dawhizkid wrote: post #38

I'm pretty sure much of SF (marina, south beach, mid soma) are partially built on landfills are considered "liquification zones" by the city.

I think the term you're looking for is "liquefaction map" - I only know this term because we're exposed to the risk here in Charleston, S.C.: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/15/18311670/earthquake-map-cali...

That is scary to me. Should it be scary to me? In regards to liquefaction zones and earthquakes? I mean, i recently built a fence and the moisture in the ground made me conscientious of liquefaction when tamping for my gravel and posts, how does this play out for SF in an earthquake?

Re: Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California

#68

Post by TremendousJudge »

otterley wrote: post #59
saagarjha wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CEA will quickly run out of money and I won't be covered anyway. I don’t understand why insurance companies can run out of money whenever they need to pay claims. I’m sure they know they’re going to go under, why can’t they get insurance on themselves?

They do, in fact! It's called reinsurance, and Gen Re (owned by Berkshire Hathaway) is one of the biggest issuers of reinsurance.

Alright, I'll bite. Does anybody issue insurance for the reinsurers?

Re: Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California

#69

Post by gregcrv »

nostrademons wrote: post #28

Note that this quake was not on the San Andreas - it was in the Eastern California Shear Zone, a separate fault system near Death Valley. The epicenter was about 125 miles away from LA, and almost closer to Las Vegas (which also felt this quake). The limited damage was largely because it was far away from any populated areas - the nearest cities are Ridgecrest (pop 27,000) and Trona (pop < 2000).

Also the area used be have some volcanic activity which is now limited to hot springs and geothermal plants. But you can still see a lot of lava fields when you drive there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_Volcanic_Field

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