Southern California Braces for the Big One During Earthquake Drill
At 10 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2008, Southern California experiences a shaking unlike anything felt in the region in more than 100 years. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake has hit the southern San Andreas Fault near Salton Sea and impacted Imperial, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties.
The quake and its aftershocks produce between 10,000 and 100,000 landslides. Fires erupt across the region. Five high-rise buildings in Los Angeles collapse. Roads, railroads and utilities that cross the fault are ruptured. The worst damage is where the shaking is the strongest and longest, in the Riverside and San Bernardino areas. Emergency responders have to cope with chemical spills and the potential of dam ruptures. Overall, the region suffers 1,800 deaths and more than $200 billion in economic losses.
How ready are the public, first responders and emergency management officials to deal with such a scenario? That’s one of the questions regional officials hoped to answer with drills it ran earlier this week. Based on this scenario, both the Golden Guardian emergency response exercise and the Great Southern California ShakeOut — a drill for members of the public — were designed to test California’s capability to respond and recover during a catastrophic earthquake.
See Southern California Braces for the Big One During Earthquake Drill
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An unexercised contingency plan could be worse than no plan at all!
Be sure to read Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan, Philip Jan Rothstein, FBCI, Editor for valuable tips, techniques and insights.
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For some unsettling (and really cool!) video of the 1995 Kobe, Japan earthquake, see A Lesson in Recovery.
Data Centers are particularly vulnerable to earthquakes. This guide offers lots of useful recommendations for Data Processing Facility Earthquake Hazard Mitigation.
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