Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Earthquakes and fires

We just had an earthquake in Northern California. 5,6 on the Richter scale. "Moderate" according to the report system (but pretty significant for those on top of it). 146 km from where I live. I wouldn't have known had not a friend from Palo Alto called me and told me about it (she spent it with her daughter under a door frame).

Even though California is "earthquake land", forest fires are really a more common problem in this state. The areas of the SoCal of the forest fires were (and are) HUGE. And amazingly enough, earthquakes are actually pretty local. Just the smoke from the forest fires can effect thousands of people in areas where you wouldn't even have felt an earthquake in the other end of the area.

In the end, I'm not sure I prefer one or the other... they're pretty nasty reminders of Mother Earth's unpredictably mood...

Read more about the earthquake on fellow Swedish-Californian alien blogs: Monica, Lotta (in English) and Minten. Who all by the way had updated their blogs long before the papers wrote about it!


The San Diego fires on Google Maps. One of the two major ones would completely cover all of Stockholm. Just to give you an idea of the size...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Usch ja, vet inte vad som känns mest skrämmande (bränder eller jordbävningar). Det är svårt får en uppfattning hur stor bränderna var/är när man bara ser på en karta eller hör olika mått nämnas. På weather channel sa de nåt som fick mig få en bättre förståelse för hur stort det var/är. De sa att tänk dig att du kör hela I-5 corridor från Seattle till San Francisco och hela den sträckan kör du genom ett eldhav. Skrämmande!

JaCal said...

Anne - ja, områdena i södra Californien har varit helt makalöst stora... förskte hitta samma skala på Stockholm - men Google Maps och Earth ändrar skala mellan USA och Europa irriterande nog.