The two natural disasters I’m most worried about are:
1. A Carrington-scale solar storm. This was talked about in the article. We have not had any significant solar storms affect earth in the last 150 years and basically all of our electrical, computer and communications infrastructure was built since then. Grid operators are not optimistic about the idea of starting up the entire electrical grid from nothing as it has never all gone down before.
2. A repeat of the recent historic activity in the New Madrid seismic zone. This is a place where historical accounts talk about aftershocks lasting for months but in more recent times it was not so seismically active so eg building codes don’t sufficiently prepare for this. Fortunately there is not that much economic activity there but there is still a lot.
I guess number 3 would be the “big one” in San Francisco. Though the fire risk isn’t so bad nowadays I think.
Read A Dangerous Place by Marc Reisner for a pretty fascinating scenario of a major quake on the SF Bay Area's other major fault system, the Hayward Fault.
Its impact on both the Bay region and the Delta, and by extension much of the Central Valley and Los Angele, would be immense. As has been noted for the past 50 years, a major event is long overdue.
1. A Carrington-scale solar storm. This was talked about in the article. We have not had any significant solar storms affect earth in the last 150 years and basically all of our electrical, computer and communications infrastructure was built since then. Grid operators are not optimistic about the idea of starting up the entire electrical grid from nothing as it has never all gone down before.
2. A repeat of the recent historic activity in the New Madrid seismic zone. This is a place where historical accounts talk about aftershocks lasting for months but in more recent times it was not so seismically active so eg building codes don’t sufficiently prepare for this. Fortunately there is not that much economic activity there but there is still a lot.
I guess number 3 would be the “big one” in San Francisco. Though the fire risk isn’t so bad nowadays I think.