October 10, 2012, 12:05 AM
The swarm of earthquakes that rippled through Imperial County in late August has exposed more fissures in the state's system for identifying and fixing school buildings considered structurally unsound. At Brawley Union High School, an Aug. 27 inspection of the school's ...
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September 28, 2012, 12:05 AM
A large earthquake in one part of the globe can trigger earthquakes elsewhere, according to new research by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and UC Berkeley. The global aftershocks are fairly immediate, taking place within a week of the original large quake, the researchers said....
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September 6, 2012, 12:05 AM
SACRAMENTO – A proposal to study seismic safety improvements for public schools – which won initial legislative support – quietly died in an Assembly committee during the last weeks of the legislative session. The measure, SB 1271, focused on whether schools should allow...
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May 8, 2012, 12:05 AM
A Los Gatos school district's decision to halt construction of a new elementary school over state geologists' safety concerns has inflamed a local mountain community and highlighted the difficulty of building schools in seismically vulnerable areas. Los Gatos Union School District...
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March 27, 2012, 12:05 AM
Federal auditors are calling on officials in California to forgo more than $17 million in unused disaster aid set aside following severe storms, flooding and mudslides that occurred in 2005 and 2006. They’re also questioning an additional $13 million used to rebuild a school in San Luis...
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August 30, 2011, 12:05 AM
In 2004, Liberty High School had just laid new carpet, finalized a fresh paint job and installed up-to-date air-conditioning units when the Liberty Union High School District learned the campus was on a state list of school buildings that may be unsafe in an earthquake. Alarmed and trying to...
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July 15, 2011, 8:59 AM
After the devastating tsunami damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, seismologists in the United States are focusing on a potentially dangerous fault system near the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California.
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May 20, 2011, 12:05 AM
Scientists may have found a way to predict earthquakes. According to a team of NASA and Russian space and physical scientists, in the days before the March 11 Tohoku earthquake in Japan, the atmosphere directly above the epicenter rapidly heated up. In a presentation delivered in...
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April 25, 2011, 12:05 AM
Gov. Jerry Brown’s office announced last week that he signed two bills that provide up to seven years of deadline extensions for seismic upgrades at some of the state’s riskiest hospital buildings. Like many things in Sacramento, though, the bills are complicated and rely on...
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March 23, 2011, 12:07 AM
Trying to get a handle on what is happening with Japan's nuclear power plants has not been particularly easy. Since the tsunami inundated and then crippled the Fukushima plants we’ve read, heard or seen stories about: radiation plumes wafting across the Pacific to California;...
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March 18, 2011, 4:16 PM
Federal officials said today that a Sacramento radiation detector found a miniscule amount of a radioactive isotope that is consistent with material released from a stricken Japanese nuclear reactor complex.
A joint Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy press release says the...
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March 17, 2011, 12:05 AM
As Californians closely watch the catastrophe at Japan's nuclear plants, many engineers are also studying the failure of a dam in Japan’s northeast Fukushima prefecture. The extent of the damage is still unknown.
"One dam failure is too many," said Nicholas Sitar, a professor...
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March 16, 2011, 12:06 AM
A report by the state hospital building agency shows that most of the highest-risk buildings will be retrofitted by their deadlines in 2013 or 2015. All but two of the California hospital buildings with the highest-known risks of collapse said in reports released by the state last month that...
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March 16, 2011, 12:05 AM
In just the past year, three major earthquakes have rocked the Pacific Plate. There was last week’s 9.0 temblor off the coast of Japan; the February quake that toppled Christchurch, New Zealand; and the magnitude 8.8 that shook Chile last year. If you were to look at the Pacific...
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February 28, 2011, 12:06 AM
Although they are nearly 10,000 miles apart, the magnitude 8.8 Chilean quake of 2010 triggered smaller microquakes here in California. Just hours after the megaquake shook Chile, toppling buildings and generating tsunamis, dozens of small quakes were recorded throughout the San Joaquin Valley...
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