‘The Big One’ isn’t imminent for California, expert says

Monday’s 4.4 magnitude earthquake in El Sereno and last week’s 5.2 magnitude shaker in the Bakersfield area have served as wake-up calls for many Southern Californians. But they aren’t necessarily omens for a shaky, quaky immediate future.

Yehuda Ben-Zion, Director of the Statewide California Earthquake Center and Professor of Earth Sciences at USC, told KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman the earthquakes are indirectly linked and they’re not necessarily a trend.

“The entire subsurface of California is intersected by a network of faults, a web of faults. So in that sense, everything is linked,” he explained. “But there is no direct, clear, you know, worrying link between those separate earthquakes. They just tend to pop up and they will continue to pop up.”

Ben-Zion said larger earthquakes in the state are unavoidable. Generally, he explained, people don’t need to be apprehensive over earthquakes. But on a geological time scale, California is deforming and it’s an unstoppable plate motion.

“So yes, we are in for very large earthquakes, but they are not imminent and we have no information that can indicate when,” Ben-Zion said.

Despite this unavoidable fate, he explained there’s no reason to sound the alarms. The recent earthquakes may have rattled Southern California, but the events aren’t showing any accelerated activity that will lead to “The Big One.”

Earthquakes similar to Monday’s don’t rattle Ben-Zion. He felt the 5.9 magnitude Whittier Narrows quake in 1987, which did rattle him a bit because he witnessed cracks forming firsthand. Ben-Zion noted after the Whittier Narrows and the Northridge earthquakes, there were phases of retrofitting that helped cool concerns.

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“We cannot stop the earthquakes, but we can, as a society, can definitely stop the earthquakes from being problematic, let alone catastrophic, for society by continuously retrofitting,” he said.

Ben-Zion said the correct strategy is to consistently work to increase the resilience of the communities.

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