Unlike water, denial is in excess supply
in California. Half the residents west of the 100th meridian live
in that state, and 80 percent of them live in areas that have been
rattled by major earthquakes. Northern Californians, for example,
straddle 60 miles of the deadly Hayward fault; the late Marc
Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, notes that
those are “sixty of the most populous, industrialized,
infrastructure-dependent, economically valuable, strategically
important miles in the United States.”
In his
just-released book, A Dangerous Place, Reisner
— who had nearly completed the manuscript when he died from
cancer in 2000 — investigates why so many people now live in
harm’s way, and imagines in breathtaking detail the
consequences of an earthquake of 7.2 on the Richter scale along the
Hayward fault. The loss of life in the San Francisco Bay area would
be huge, and if levees on the Sacramento Delta were breached by the
quake, salt water from the Pacific Ocean would pour into the
freshwater Delta, creating an “80,000-acre extension of San
Francisco Bay.” Twenty million Californians to the south
would lose their water supply, as would “four million acres
of the world’s richest irrigated cropland.”
In addition to this doomsday scenario, Reisner offers a short but
thorough 150-year history of California’s earthquakes,
heedless development and battles over imported water. This
intelligent work of journalism will remind readers how large a void
exists in the field of environmental writing since Reisner’s
death.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Living in harm’s way.
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