San Onofre shutdown will mean tight electricity supplies

[FBaggins]

68. Yes... that's what I'm saying.

wow, well you have NO credibility on this topic now. NONE.

Lol. Shows how much you know.

on the California coast, with hundreds of miles of active faults, on a coast with thousands of miles of faults that can create catastrophic earthquakes in far and near regions, you are making it sound like the risk is as small and unusual as New York or the east coast.

Not "as small as" New York... but both are small compared to areas with actual tsunami risks. In California, a tsunami coming in means "get off the beach!". In Japan it means "evacuate the city and head for the hills!". In tsunami-prone areas, tsunami can kill thousands to even hundreds of thousands of people... in the continental US, the worst tsunami on record killed about a dozen people. We talk about tsunami (because you can have a "tsunami" even if it's too small to notice), but it's really not the same thing. The areas in, say, San Francisco that are at risk for tsunami... are the same areas that are at risk of coastal flooding from significant storms.

which means that you know so little about the region that you shouldn't be taken seriously while talking about it.

Nope. It means that you failed your elementary school lessons in geology. Your understanding clearly extends only as far as "earthquakes cause tsunami... therefore anywhere that has earthquakes is in danger from tsunami".

What you miss is that there are different types of earthquakes caused by different types of faults... and some of them cause dangerous tsunami and some don't.

To oversimplify it for you... when you have what is called a "strike-slip" fault, earthquake motion is primarily horizontal. This doesn't tend to generate significant tsunami... and happens to be what we have along the West Coast. Normal/Reverse faults (or dip and slip faults) are different. Ground motion is primarily vertical... and when it happens on the sea floor, you can get significant tsunami. That's what they have around Japan (and what we have in Alaska). What are sometimes called "mega-thrust earthquakes" form in subduction zone (where one tectonic plate is forced under another - rather than sliding sideways along it).

There is a comparatively small subduction zone off of Oregon, but that plate (Gorda) is tiny compared to the ones that create havoc off Japan.


You see "hundreds of miles of active faults" and just assume that you understand what that means... but never noticed that will all of California's quakes, they don't ever get significant tsunami? They've had dozens of incidents that are technically tsunami... but never anything significant like what we're talking about. Are you sure that I'm the one that "knows so little of the region" (where I grew up)?