On Thu, 07 Oct 2004 02:13:46 GMT, "Phil Scott"
wrote:


"Bob Morrison" wrote in
message
nk.net...
In a previous post Hatunen says...
Remember though, the goal of seismic structural design is
not to
save the building; it is to save lives. Even a
well-designed
building could be a total loss after an earthquake. This
is an
important consideration if buying a place, since
earthquake
insurance in California is fraught with difficulties.


Dave's information and advice appears well thought out and I
concur with
his recommendations.

My view is that the odds are about 1% that any particlar home
will be substantially damaged in the bay area.. the place is
full of hundred year old homes that have stood though all the
quakes,,,

Actually, there aren't. There have only been two significant
earthquakes in the Bay Area since 1906: Daly City 1957, which was
fairly small as these things go, mostly causing damage in Daly
City, and Loma Prieta, 1989. While that was a fairly large quake,
it was not a great earthquake. It was 60 odd miles from SF and
Oakland. For a better idea of what a not-so-large quake can do
near the epicenter look at Watsonville after Loma Prieta.

With the seismologists predicting a major quake on the Hayward or
San Andreas faults in the East May or on the Peninsula with a
probability of, what is it now? 40% in the next 30 years? there
is a rather high probability of significant damage to a
residential structure. Both northern and southern California got
lulled into a sense of complacency because there was a lull in
seisemic activity for most of the 20th century, save, for
southern California the Long Beach, Sylmar and Santa Barbara
events.

There is a good reason why insurance companies won't write
earthquake insurance in most of California.

Perhaps an analogy would be flood insurance, now almost totally
underwritten by the federal government because insurance
companies won't themselves provide flood insurance. The
requirement to buy insurance is based on theso-called "100 year
flood". This is a flood that has an occurance probability of 1%
in any given year. It sounds low, but anyone who has had
Statistics 101 should be able to calculate that the probability
of a flood over the typical 30-year lifetime of a mortgage is
about 26%.

When I ws working for the city of Palo Alto I had innumerable
occasions when homeowners whined to me that they didn't
understand why they had to meet flood zone requirements in there
new or substantially improved structure, because after all they
had lived there for 30 years and there had never been a flood.
But they were singing a different tune after the area flooded a
while back.

risks are minimal imho if you make sure to get a map
of the fault lines and be well off them..and be well off the
fill areas around the SF bay.,.. that ground turns to liquid
in a light quate...along the marina beach area 50 or more
homes, two story mostly came down and had to be rebuilt.

In solid ground away from the fault lines I think a person is
plenty save enough.

What you think matters very little here. A big shock in the East
Bay or on the Peninsula will cause widespread damage. Remember,
there has not been a big shock in the area since 1906. By all
means, don't be foolish enough to live on bay fill or old
baylands or alluvial plains, but a nearby shake can cause damage
to even homes on solid ground (of which there is actually very
little in the Bay Area, and what there is is very expensive
indeed because it will have elevation and therefore a view).

Also remember that you don't have to have your house fall down to
make repair costly.

************* DAVE HATUNEN ) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *