Many countries that possess seismically active areas have some regions that are more prepared for earthquakes than others, such as San Francisco being far more earthquake-conscious than Miami in the USA.  However, as a country that basically is one entire large quake zone and prepares/builds accordingly, it’s hard to beat Japan.   While it might sound like I’m writing this article about the New Year’s Day Noto Peninsula earthquake, I had actually already started to work on it before the quake.  In fact, I’m really surprised at how much damage there was because Japan is ess ..read more

Long-time readers of this blog may have noticed that new posts have been very sporadic over the last couple of years.  A series of issues kept arising, including the pandemic and various personal matters that resulted in there always being a bunch of matters that needed to be addressed ASAP and always had to take priority to writing blog articles.  That's ok, writing a blog is something that can go in fits and starts... however, the same issues have affected staying up to date with my quake preparations and making sure emergency supplies like food and medicines aren't expiring.   ..read more

I was driving in San Francisco to an orchestra rehearsal about three months ago and listening to music on the car stereo from my iPhone, and then something unusual happened in the middle of the music: there was a jangling noise and a disembodied man’s voice said something like “Earthquake!  Drop, cover, and hold on.  Shaking expected.”  A MyShake app notification was on the screen saying something about a 5.0 in Sonoma County.  I thought that was odd because a 5.0 in Sonoma County would be unlikely to cause a problem in San Francisco, but I pulled over and turned ..read more

There’s been a building boom in downtown San Francisco over the past decade, and it can be summed up in one word (several times): glass, glass, glass.  Lots of new towers going up completely covered with shiny reflective glass.  Cool futuristic gleaming towers...or a major disaster waiting to happen in the next big earthquake?  What will conditions on the street downtown among these towers be during a large quake?  I’ve wondered about this and I’m certainly not the only one, and here’s what I’ve managed to learn.   Figure 1.  Floor-to-ceiling windows in ..read more

Quaketips is alive and well, even though I haven't had a chance to write new articles since January.  However, the e-mail subscription system is changing and this affects all current subscribers.  Until now, this blogging platform (Blogger) has used Feedburner to collect subscriber e-mail addresses to automatically send new articles to them, but Google is ending this functionality at the end of June. Therefore, I'm experimenting with alternatives, and I will try to use Mailchimp, which strikes me as a very responsible service with robust options to report spam.  In setting up Ma ..read more

“Previously, on Quaketips” 2013:  MRE shelf-life follow-up: Ever wonder what a 14-year-old MRE tastes like? “Several days ago, I ate an MRE with an expiration date of 2005, and lived to tell about it.” “...May of 2011, I wrote an article about MREs in which I reported that while MREs have long had charts from suppliers showing shelf lives as long as 10 years depending on ambient room storage temperature, the official estimated shelf lives had recently been made considerably shorter.  However, I also reported that this was based not on “going bad” but instead on subjective taster opin ..read more

I’ve written two articles (here and here) about hanging pictures with Command Picture Hanging Strips (the interlocking double Velcro style), and I continue to be pretty impressed by them, but it’s important to come back a few years later and discuss how they have been holding up.  Since these work by non-permanent adhesion rather than by a physical object like a nail in the wall, we basically take it on faith that the adhesive will hold.   As it turns out, I’ve had three partial or total failures, but don’t panic; they are special cases.  None of the optimally mounted pictures h ..read more

(WARNING: This article contains graphic mentions of bodily functions and should not be read while eating lunch) I’ve got some uncomfortable news for you.  One of the first shortages in the US during the COVID-19 crisis was toilet paper, so suddenly TP is the must-have emergency supply.  However, in the aftermath of a major earthquake, if your plumbing is out of commission for a while, having emergency toilet paper may not cut it.  I mean, we have needs, if you get my drift.  Without working toilets, what are we going to do, put poop in a bag like our dogs or use litterboxe ..read more

I haven't posted an article in a while because I've been spending a lot of time handling various impacts of COVID-19 on my "day job" research, but I wanted to surface briefly to mention an important point.  Many people have face masks in their emergency kits in case they need to deal with rubble and dust after a quake.  In places like California that have had major wildfires recently, even many people who don't prepare for quakes have N95 respirators left over from those smoke episodes, and many of those masks have a "cool valve" one-way vent that opens outward and makes breathing mo ..read more

“MyShake” is:  (A) The name of a line dance from the ‘70s, (B) an earthquake early warning system interface on your phone, (C) an app that places orders for home-delivered milkshakes, or (D) a truly major typo for “asparagus.”  The answer is… B!  Yes, after lagging way behind several other countries that have had earthquake early warning systems for years (like Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Romania, Italy, China, and Turkey), the western United States is rolling out its ShakeAlert™ system, which sends alerts to enrolled cells phones using the MyShake™ app from UC Berkeley that is available for iPhone ..read more