Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, he is now a post-doc at the University of Johannesburg. 
Thermochronic has already written about this, but just in case you missed it, the Great Southern California Shakeout, an interesting exercise in raising earthquake awareness amongst the denizens of Los Angeles and its environs, is taking place in November. The centrepiece of this event is a massive earthquake drill:
At 10 a.m. on November 13, 2008, millions of southern Californians will "Drop, Cover, and Hold On." Why? An enormous earthquake is in our future, and the ShakeOut Drill is our chance to practice what to do when it happens. Individuals, families, businesses, schools and organizations will join firefighters, police officers, and other emergency responders (involved in the statewide "Golden Guardian" exercise) in our largest-ever earthquake preparedness activity. Don't miss out!
ShakeOut is based on a potential 7.8 magnitude earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault. This type of earthquake occurs in southern California every 150 years on average, and the last was 151 years ago! Dr. Lucy Jones of the U.S. Geological Survey has led a group of over 200 scientists, engineers, and others to study the likely consequences of this enormous earthquake in great detail.
Of course, you'd hope that the people living in California are at least marginally aware that they're not living in the most tectonically stable region on the planet, but there's a whole world of difference between knowing that earthquakes can happen, and knowing - without thinking about it too much - how to react when one hits. Such awareness saves lives, and events like this could make all the difference for thousands when the geologically invevitable finally happens; not just in California, but in Japan, New Zealand, Indonesia, and all the other places where we've planted large cities on top of plate boundaries.
The Shakeout people have a blog, which I've added to the general feed; so no doubt we'll all be reading more about this iniative in the coming months. As for the rest of the geoblogosphere, it occurs to me that we could quite easily time an Accretionary Wedge to coincide with this...
Environment
Comments
That's a pretty long time to prepare an exercise. What odds on the earthquake striking in October? Like the Dutch completing a report on how to strengthen their dykes the day before the 1953 flood disaster. (And wasn't there a plan to improve the San Francisco fire-fighting system presented just before the 1906 earthquake?)
Posted by: Stephen | July 1, 2008 3:30 PM
So, how many of these "150 year quakes" did they average together, to get this stat? Who did the monitoring for the ones prior to 1906, which were also prior to the formation of the United States, as well as our settling of California?
Perhaps we are discovering more from Mayan Texts, than the date of our future annihilation?
Posted by: Joseph Brenner | July 10, 2008 7:57 PM