20 years ago, I moved to Fremont, CA for my first real job and got an apartment on Fremont Blvd. About a month after I moved, the San Jose Mercury News had a color-coded graphic on the front page of their Local section showing the level of shaking that would occur if a long-overdue earthquake on the Hayward Fault happened.
My apartment was in a black spot. I was right over the fault. My office was also in black because it was located on “fill.”
Yeah, but....NO tornadoes!! :-)
The 1994 Northridge earthquake exposed many neighborhoods that had homes built on ‘cut and fill’ or just ‘fill’. Our home was built on rock and sustained just cosmetic damage. When we bought our next home, I went to the County Clerk’s and looked up the house to see if there had been any reconstruction permits pulled for it after the ‘94 quake. It was safe and we bought it. The odd things is, you can have one side of the street built on only ‘cut’ (leveling of the rock base) and the other side of the street built on ‘cut and fill’ (leveling the rock and filling in where there isn’t rock). The other side of our street had lots of damage......people who buy in California need to know how to evaluate the houses for sale before they buy one that will surely sustain much damage or topple in even a moderate quake.