We KNOW how to ELIMINATE their danger.
We certainly know how to eliminate all avalanche danger at ski resorts, by using dynamite to "shake" a mountain (at night) to cause all the loose snow to fall when no one is around to be hurt. We can do essentially the same thing regarding most earthquakes.
We can use standard mining technologies to make many vertical boreholes in rock, exactly down into a known Faultline, then we lower (standard) dynamite charges down into those boreholes, and artificially trigger the dynamite to shake the earth to release the pent up Tectonic stresses in a known Fault. Of course, we only do that after we have provided free food and beer and concerts and sports games out in the desert, to get everyone away from the Faultline for a day, and where we also move zoo animals to a different zoo for a day. After that "artificial earthquake" there will be no more Tectonic stresses for fifty years of wonderful safety!
Earthquakes are generally events that we know WHERE they will occur. They are very dangerous because we do not know WHEN they will occur. We can solve that problem by artificially triggering the earthquake, on a day when we have already evacuated all the people and animals from the region. We already do this same process in artificially triggering snow avalanches in ski resorts, using dynamite and at night. The avalanches are unavoidable natural events which can kill people but by artificially triggering them to happen when no one is around to be hurt, the avalanche problem is eliminated. I want to do that same process for earthquakes such as the San Andreas and the Hayward in California.
Human Nature is exasperating. For more than six years, I have tried to present a very logical way to keep as many as 300,000 people alive in Southern California, and absolutely no one seems to care. If people in Southern California don't happen to be relatives or friends, do their lives not matter? After the fact, people grieve over 58 people murdered in Las Vegas and 1800 people who died in Hurricane Katrina, but before the catastrophes, no one seems willing to lift a finger to try to save lives.
I believe I have long known how to keep as many as 300,000 people alive, so I feel an extreme responsibility to save them. But rather than actually even try to help save many lives, people each explain their personal excuses for not doing anything. In explaining why they will not do anything, many mention that they have children or are dog owners. I see. They don't want to have their children think that they might go out of their way to save innocent lives. I was raised to think that we each should take action toward Good Deeds at some times. I feel very lonely in trying to save the lives of immense numbers of people in Southern California.
Actually, there is a similar (but much deeper) earthquake that is also very overdue in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska (on an island called Rat Island). Very few people live there and it might be an ideal place to do a demonstration of this technique, after moving the few dozen residents there for a 2000-mile "vacation to Anchorage. A deep borehole, down to the actual fault-line, filled with dynamite. could artificially trigger the overdue Rat Island earthquake.
A year before Hurricane Katrina, I tried to get dozens of Louisiana Officials and College Professors to be concerned that the entire city of New Orleans was poorly protected by dirt levees and still is seven feet below sea level, and I tried to suggest a possible method of (slowly) raising the entire city of New Orleans ten feet vertically (over several years). The fact that I could not get anyone to listen to my concerns, does that mean that I should feel some responsibility for the 1800 deaths that night? Well, I do.
Thirteen years ago, I learned that one of the largest and tallest hydroelectric dams in the United States, the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona is definitely eroding loose from the very soft Navajo Sandstone it was installed in. Even the Main Engineer of the Dam mentioned hiking out to see enormous amounts of water seeping through that porous sandstone from the 320 PSI high pressure water in the bottom of the huge (two trillion ton) Lake Powell Reservoir. But even in 2005 when we talked, he said that if he would even hint at such a danger, the "politics" are so intense that he knew that he would be immediately fired and replaced. So, whether anyone cares or not, absolutely nothing will be done to avoid one of the tallest hydroelectric dams in this country suddenly coming loose and falling over, which will suddenly release around two trillion tons of water in Lake Powell to go down through the Grand Canyon, which will kill many people. During our technical conversation in 2005, I mentioned a simple and cheap addition, of devices called Geodimeters, which could constantly and precisely monitor the exact position of the top of that Dam. Nothing will keep the Dam from falling over, but it seemed to me that the people in the Grand Canyon downstream should be given a few hours to try to climb up out of the Canyon before suddenly drowning. But like San Andreas and Katrina and more, before the disasters, absolutely no one seems willing to lift a finger regarding many innocent lives and deaths. Human Nature.
This concept was first recognized around one week after the disasters of 9/11/01. For the following ten years, I realized that if I would disclose the complete information regarding the method I had realized, it might unintentionally enable terrorists to do the exact thing that I wanted to avoid, so I remained silent. I now realize that there is a way to present this overall concept in a way that is too complex for terrorists to be able to easily accomplish, which is why this presentation is now being placed on the Internet in March 2011, immediately after the terrible Japanese earthquake. My desire is that the USGS, the Governor of the State of California, and the President of the United States might see why this suggestion must be done, as soon as possible, and that they would contact me to learn the more precise way that I have known for ten years regarding how to do this procedure. They must actually do this before any terrorist or terrorists discover what I already know. This presentation was first placed on the Internet in March 2011.
Virtually everyone seems to concede that a huge and destructive earthquake is going to occur in southern California. More than that, everyone seems to have conceded that many tens of thousands of Americans will die in the process!.
I agree that it cannot be avoided, but I believe I have discovered a way to make sure that no one will die due to it occurring.
In addition, this presentation will explain how all future dangers of natural earthquakes in southern California can be absolutely eliminated! Similarly, other earthquake-prone areas such as Japan, Chile, New Zealand and Indonesia could use the same procedure to ensure their own safety for many decades.
For some years around the 1970s, endless news reports caused California residents to be terrified regarding the certainty of this coming doom. But it seems that the effect of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" eventually took over and now, few people seem to actually have much fear about it. Instead, it is now most common that people make jokes about the earthquake that is coming.
The recent earthquake in Japan might get some California residents and legislators to give more serious thought about just how horrific the coming California earthquake is going to be and the tragedy of an astounding number of Americans dying within a few minutes. Especially when this presentation explains how NO Americans need to die from ANY coming earthquakes!
That blase attitude seems to be due to the fact that it is conceded that it is such a hopeless situation, and that there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do to keep it from happening. So people in California seem to have generally chosen to live lives of Denial. They live as though there is no actual danger, where they briefly have fear when the many moderate tremors occur, but where they choose to avoid even thinking about what they call "The Big One" that they all know is coming.
California has chosen a poor approach to dealing with this matter. They recognize that the earthquake(s) cannot be avoided, so their attitude is to try to make every building, structure and pipeline in all of California to be built so massive that structural damage might be reduced. That is a valid approach, but it is immensely expensive. The general idea has also shown to be a dismal failure in hundreds of previous times when mankind thought it could prepare for natural events, such as countless massive concrete ocean breakwaters which came loose or came apart when a severe storm occurred. Worse, there happen to be millions of buildings which were built before those laws went into effect and they will sustain massive damage. Unless California Legislators are willing to order that half of all the buildings in California be demolished and rebuilt to newer, higher standards, it is not really much of a solution. It may result in saving half of the people who would have died, and that is certainly a good goal. I propose that it is important to save all of the people who might have died in coming earthquakes.
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The Japanese earthquake of March 11, 2011 actually occurred out under the Pacific Ocean quite a few miles away from any land. Minutes later, the city of Sendai, Japan, with over 1,000,000 people, was essentially wiped out by a 24-foot-high wall of ocean water which went through their city at very high speed. No one will probably ever know how many people died in Sendai that day. Ships out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean have started encountering large masses of debris, where recognizable houses and cars are obvious. Some experts are now predicting that over the next five or ten years, people on the Pacific beaches of the United States will be finding items that had come from Sendai, Japan and other nearby towns and cities that were wiped out.
As Japanese rescue teams got to nearby smaller towns which had had 10,000 and 20,000 people, where absolutely nothing is left, it certainly seems that the death toll will eventually be very high. I personally think that if Japan gets off losing less than 200,000 lives to the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami, they will be fortunate. It was one of the largest earthquakes which has ever been recorded, described as a 9.0 on the Richter Scale.
That was an earthquake that occurred many miles away from land. The Haiti earthquake of January 2010, was far weaker, only about a 7.1 on the Richter Scale. The Japanese earthquake released as much energy and power as many thousands of earthquakes like the Haiti one. But the Haiti earthquake was under the land where people lived. Even though Haiti was a far more moderate-sized earthquake, more than 250,000 Haitians died from that earthquake. (There was no significant tsunami due to the earthquake having occurred under land.)
The Richter Scale is a logarithmic scale, where each number describes an earthquake with a released power of exactly 100 times that of the next lower number. This is why the Japanese 9.0 was around 8,000 times more powerful than the Haiti 7.1. Or, in different terms, the Japanese earthquake was similar to a collection of about 8,000 separate Haiti earthquakes.
There are two tectonic plates which are trying to "slide past each other" in California. One popular joke is that California will "fall into the ocean." That will not occur! The southwestern portion of California is on a tectonic plate which is trying to move north-north-westerly, compared to the rest of the State.
The central reason that slip-faults cause dangerous earthquakes is that the hidden contact surfaces of the two adjoining Plates are each rather roughly textured. The tectonic energy cannot easily be released. This does not allow the slipping motion to occur smoothly and evenly. Instead, various sections of each of the Faults can and do get stuck. They remain stuck until sufficient stress has accumulated to break it loose, which then results in an earthquake.
The central problem for southern California is that the last time that significant movement occurred in a major portion of the San Andreas Fault was around 1854, more than a hundred fifty years ago. At that time, very few people lived in southern California, and it was before any devices to measure earthquakes had yet been invented, but that was certainly a severe earthquake, which destroyed most buildings and killed many of the people. There are now more than twenty million people living in that region.
A different portion of the San Andreas Fault structure released in 1906, which caused the famous San Francisco Earthquake. A substantial portion of that city suddenly jumped around 20 feet horizontally. Unfortunately, that sudden motion of the ground caused many thousands of buildings to be ripped loose from the ground and destroyed, but also caused many stoves and other sources of flame to fall over and cause fires that destroyed much of the rest of that city. In 1906, the population of San Francisco was still not enormous, so only a few thousand people died that day.
In 1989, during a professional baseball game, another earthquake occurred in that same region, as more accumulated stress was released. In that 83-year interval, several feet of NNW movement of the Pacific Plate had occurred which had not been able to have its energy released, until the friction was overcome in 1989.
In southern California, the fact that the last major earthquake occurred around 1854 is the critical fact. The Pacific Plate IS moving NNW a few centimeters every year, without doubt (as compared to the North American Plate). Many researchers had all agreed that by the 1970s, an accumulated stress of around twenty feet of horizontal movement was pent up in those rocks of the San Andreas Fault (since 1854). They had measured that the relative motion of the Pacific Plate was around 5 cm (or two inches) each year. So they multiplied that by the 116 years between 1854 and 1970 and got 232 inches or roughly twenty feet of accumulated stress trapped in the rocks.
Many researchers had also experimentally studied the mechanical strength of rocks and determined that around 20 feet of accumulated stress was probably the greatest amount that the San Andreas Fault should be able to withstand before breaking loose and causing an enormous earthquake, So they made highly publicized predictions of a magnitude 7.5 to 8.0 earthquake which they expected to see occur DURING THE 1970s.
It has not yet happened!
No scientist yet actually knows why a major earthquake did not occur in the Los Angeles area during the 1970s.
The public seems to have chosen to believe that the scientists were completely wrong since no tremendous earthquake occurred in the 1970s when those scientists said it would.
But the Pacific Plate has certainly not stopped moving NNW. So the stresses in the rocks of the San Andreas Fault have continued to increase. We are currently (2011) looking at 157 years since the last major earthquake in the Los Angeles area. At two inches Plate movement per year, that implies that 314 inches of pent up movement is now ready to be released, which is over 26 horizontal feet.
The fact that scientists cannot figure out why the earthquake has not occurred is relatively unimportant. We know it is going to happen. Most researchers are now in agreement that the rocks could not possibly withstand the accumulated stresses which would be present in 2030, so they are all certain that a major earthquake will occur in the Los Angeles area before the year 2030. Using the standard mathematical analysis used regarding such things, this increased internal stress (2011) would likely cause around an 8.2 to 8.7 earthquake in southern California, if it occurred today. That would be around 25 times more powerful than the Haiti earthquake was last year (which killed 250,000 people).
How many of the millions of buildings in southern California will be able to remain standing when the ground under them suddenly jumps sideways by 26 feet? Some buildings will survive that great a stress, but many may not. The people who will happen to be inside those houses and buildings that collapse will be in severe danger. But similarly, if you happen to be standing outdoors, 18 feet away from a building that will suddenly jump 26 feet in your direction, at very high speed, you will be hit by that moving building! The same is true if you happened to be standing 12 feet away from a utility pole or fireplug that will jump 26 feet in your direction. Many dangers occur during an earthquake, especially severe ones.
This is a situation which needs to be addressed, now. To simply sit back and wait, as though it may not occur if we wish hard enough, is simply not acceptable. With the lives of more than twenty million Californians hanging in the balance, are we really willing to simply wait until we watch more than 300,000 Californians die horrific deaths on TV?
The answer is NO, we cannot.
And as fellow humans, we must save them!
I want to do the only remaining course available to us, where no one would die!
In addition, this process can eliminate even the chance of any future earthquakes in southern California!
This could only be done by the USGS under the supervision of the Governor of California and the President of the United States.
The release of all that pent up energy in the San Andreas Fault cannot be avoided. It must be released. Ten years ago, I discovered how to cause that to happen at a precisely planned time.
I even thought of a way to test this idea. Under the distant western Aleutian Islands, on Rat Island, extensive Tectonic Plate movement has accumulated. Better, only a few dozen people live on those islands. Maybe they could be rewarded or given a two-week vacation somewhere. Then, the Hole-boring machinery could be brought in and the quarry dynamite charges lowered into the borehole(s). Again, checking that all animals and people had been evacuated, the dynamite charges could be triggered. If everything is well instrumented, we might know if the dynamite charges were sufficient to trigger an actual earthquake to occur there. There is virtually no downside to this test, as no structures larger than tents exist on any of those islands and the USGS could erect even better tents for the residents there.
So my suggestion is for the government to call a "Bank Holiday" and absolutely shut down everything in southern California for one single day. This would be announced ahead of time for months, so that everyone was aware of what was coming. We all know that there would be millions of people who would not cooperate, so I propose that prior to that date, all zoos temporarily transfer all their animals to other zoos, and similar for Hospitals and similar operations. And around dawn of the planned day, all the electric companies would shut down all electricity to everything in the southern half of California. The gas companies would do the same. And the municipal water supplies. So if any individual would decide to try to stay, they would have no electricity for lights or TVs or computers, they would have no cel-phone service because the cel-phone towers would have no electricity, and they would have no gas for cooking or heating. Police and Civil Defense people would then go around each city to get any people who had not yet left, during the morning of that day, to put them on buses to transport them away.
And Where would 20,000,000 people Go for a day?
To a Wonderful Day of Fun! The State of California would announce for months ahead of time that they would provide a picnic for all Californians on that day! Actually, a thousand picnics, each of which would host 20,000 guests. FREE FOOD! and FREE BEER! And every form of entertainment that the State of California could think up, games, contests, gambling, mimes, jugglers, and a thousand other diversions.
The idea is to get most of those twenty million people to want to drive two hours out into some safe field out in the desert or similar. All the people would know that there would be no electricity or gas or much else anywhere in the Los Angeles area until at least midnight, so they might as well stay and enjoy themselves!
At each of those picnics, a PA announcement would alert everyone that the ground may shake a little at EXACTLY NOON (and possibly a few more times in following minutes, but all done by two p.m.). But that there was plenty of time to remain and stay and enjoy themselves, as each neighborhood in the Los Angeles area would need to be checked by experts regarding structural safety of all houses and other buildings, and regarding making sure that underground gas and water and electric lines had not broken during the earthquake(s). Once the experts had confirmed that a neighborhood was again safe, electricity and gas and water would be turned on again for that neighborhood, and all of the picnics would have big screen bulletin boards that would tell those residents that they could return to their homes at their convenience.
Before anyone returned, bulldozers and backhoes could clear away any streets that had gotten debris on them. Also, since there would be no pressure in the buried gas and water lines, any lines that had gotten broken due to the earthquake(s) could be easily and quickly repaired.
Given that the ground might suddenly move as much as 26 feet horizontally, it also seems likely that some older or faulty wooden utility poles would shear off at the ground and need to be replaced. Pre-planning would have stacks of new utility poles along with cranes and diggers and other needed equipment left in the empty cities. Again, with no electricity in any wires, a crew should be able to replace such a utility pole in a few hours and re-string the wires back up on the new pole!
In other words, with good planning, by midnight of that same day, nearly all streets should be clear, nearly all broken gas lines and water lines replaced and repaired, and nearly all electricity supplies repaired. So when the people came home from their fun day at the picnics, they should see everything as they had left it, with a single exception. inside their homes, they probably would find a real mess to clean up, as everything would have fallen off of shelves and furniture would have fallen over (due to the walls of their house or apartment having suddenly moved as much as 26 feet sideways!).
But that is not bad in contrast to mourning the deaths of at least 300,000 Americans, and dealing with fires and gas explosions everywhere. (Each picnic area would have enormous kennels to house all the pets of the guests at that picnic, as pets could not be allowed to remain for the "planned earthquake(s)".
Yes, there would certainly be thousands of homes that experienced structural damage or even destruction due to the earthquakes, and possibly even some bridges and buildings would require repairs or replacement rather than immediate re-usage. That would have happened in any case when the Natural earthquake occurred.
Yes.
A method has been known for at least fifty years, which I will now describe. It is not particularly "precise" regarding knowing exactly when the earthquake would occur, which has always been seen as a tremendous disadvantage. Roughly a week after 9/11/01, I had discovered a precise method, by which you could set a clock, but which I will not describe here! That information would be Only for USGS experts who might actually arrange to do this procedure.
The long Known approach, which is also known to work, involves getting thousands of powerful water pumps, and boring thousands of wells, at very precise locations which are actually into the actual Faults. By 1970, this approach was described by a number of geologists, as providing a "pressurized lubricant" (water) into the fault. That idea is simple. The pressurized water would both push both sides of the fault slightly apart, which would enable the rocks to more easily slide past each other, and also provide a lubricant to the rock surfaces which would reduce the Coefficient of Static Friction, that is, more easily enable the rocks to begin sliding. You Know this effect regarding your car's tires on a road surface. You normally have pretty good traction (high Coefficient of Static Friction), but after a rain has wetted the pavement surface, that Coefficient drops quite a lot, which more easily allows your tires to break loose from traction.
The injection of massive amounts of water into a Fault Plane is essentially that, with the addition of the high water pressure also pushing the rocks on the two sides apart to also more easily slide.
The greatest problem of that method for my "one day project" is that no one can ever tell how much water is needed to break it loose, so exactly when the earthquake would occur could required hours or days or even weeks or months of water being pumped down into the fault before it would all suddenly break loose.
You cannot evacuate the entire southern half of California for months while such a project attempted to release the accumulated stresses in a Fault!
The brilliant Nikola Tesla spent more than a decade in researching resonance and vibrations. Around 1898, he built a small "resonator" which he bolted to one of the main structural iron beams in the Manhattan building in which his laboratory was then operating. For some hours, the frequency of his resonator was not matched with that of the structure of the building so only occasional vibrations occurred in different areas of his lab. But eventually, the resonator frequency matched that of the resonance of the building, and the small alarm-clock-sized resonator began to cause the entire building to start violently vibrating! Tesla was not aware of it, but many people in nearby buildings were terrified by what they thought was an earthquake occurring! That included Police Officers in at least one nearby Precinct. They had previously had many complaints about the loud noises and bright flashes of light from Tesla's lab so they immediately went up to his lab (in the Garment District of Manhattan). Just as they broke through the door, Tesla was using a sledgehammer to destroy the Resonator! In following years, Tesla thought about the relationship between earthquakes and his resonator. But natural earthquakes and the Earth have very low resonant frequencies, where Tesla's devices could never have matched the frequency. Very late in Tesla's life, in the 1930s, he again tried to learn whether his Resonator might trigger natural earthquakes (but again, the needed Resonant frequency is very low for an earthquake, far under 0.01 Hz, which mechanical devices cannot easily produce). The point here is that even the brilliant Nikola Tesla explored ways of possibly causing natural earthquakes, at a time when residents might accurately know and then move away from. I don't think that Tesla's approach really had any real chance of artificially causing an earthquake at a specific moment, because of the Resonance issues. I am convinced that the only practical way of accomplishing this is by using explosives (dynamite, TNT) which are electrically triggered like modern quarry mining is done, where each detonation occurs at a time which can be planned to within 0.001 second. This has been well developed and proven in building demolitions, where each building accurately implodes and collapses in on itself, safely.
My specific approach is somewhat different than the water-powered approaches in that I do know exactly when the pressure would be released, and so when the earthquake would occur.
There might be an alternative of timing dozens or even hundreds of smaller earthquakes, maybe a minute or two apart. Maybe milliseconds apart. The goal of releasing all the stresses in the rocks would still be accomplished. But such an approach might cause less structural stresses in houses, buildings and bridges. Would it make any difference? I do not know, and USGS experts would need to make such a decision.
Clearly, there is value in having as many houses and buildings and bridges not need major repairs after such an effort.
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Carl W. Johnson, Theoretical Physicist, Physics Degree from University of Chicago