© California Geological Survey.
In an effort to protect lives and homes, California has published an online map of all the state's major faults that could rupture the Earth's surface during an earthquake.
California has been required by state law to map the known
active surface faults since the 1970s. Those maps number in the hundreds and were cumbersome to search before they were digitized. Now that they are online, anyone can search an address - with a little help from Google Maps - to see if it's within an earthquake surface fault zone.
"Up until now, the issue for people wanting to use the maps has been determining which one of the 547 maps we've produced suits their needs. We've employed Google Maps address-matching technology to solve that problem," said John Parrish, of the California Geological Survey in Sacramento, in a statement.
Also under state law, home sellers are required to disclose whether their home is in a fault zone. These earthquake laws were enacted after a magnitude-6.6 earthquake struck the San Fernando Valley in 1971. Surface ruptures during that quake devastated California.
Only
faults that have ruptured the ground in the past 11,000 years are considered active and are included in the maps, said Bill Bryant, senior engineering geologist at the California Geological Survey. The faults also must be well-defined enough to be detected at or near the surface by a state geologist.
The maps include the San Andreas, San Jacinto, Calaveras and Hayward faults.
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