What’s the safest big city in California in an earthquake?
Want to be safe from earthquakes in California? You’d face summer scorchers, winter flood threats and full-time politicians. But temblors don’t threaten people living in Sacramento.
In the state capital — River City, Sacratomato, City of Trees — earthquakes are seen only on TV. Here, you’ll escape the Big One.
“Sacramento is one of the safer places,” acting State Geologist Tim McCrink says. “We don’t have that many active faults in the area.”
Based on historical records and fault maps, Sacramento is unquestionably the safest earthquake refuge of all California major metropolitan areas.
The most unsafe? You already know. “The worst places are the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles,” McCrink says. “They’ve got most of the faults.”
As a native Californian, I’ve long been curious about this. Fear of the Big One has always lurked in the back of my mind, as it has for millions of Californians, I suspect.
Growing up in Ventura County, I was bounced around frequently by quakes. In 1971, I covered Gov. Ronald Reagan inspecting devastation from the magnitude 6.6 Sylmar quake in the San Fernando Valley that killed 65. In 1994, I tagged along as Gov. Pete Wilson looked over damage from the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake that killed 57 — and destroyed my sister’s condo.
I worked at the L.A. Times downtown for a while, always wondering if that old monolith might suddenly crumble in a quake.
But bad quakes aren’t inevitable everywhere in California.
Eastern San Diego County is relatively safe, but downtown San Diego has a dangerous fault. A large swath of northeastern California and the western Sierra are fairly quake-proof.
The north coast from Oregon down into Monterey County is riddled with faults. So is the south coast from Santa Barbara through Orange County.
And there was a magnitude 6.6 San Simeon quake in 2003 that killed two and injured 40. So the central coast isn’t completely immune.
“All that faulting over the millennia has produced some beautiful mountains along the coast,” McCrink says. “The downside is we have to live with earthquakes.”
Why is Sacramento practically quake-proof? “For the same reason; it’s pretty flat,” UC Davis geology professor Michael Oskin says. “Topography and earthquakes pretty well correlate in California.”
So if it’s flat — like the Midwest — it’s normally good shelter from earthquakes.
Sacramento residents may not need to consider earthquake insurance, but they should buy a flood policy.
Neither quakes nor floods are covered by ordinary homeowners insurance. Wildfires are — if you can find a policy. They’re becoming increasingly hard to buy in high-risk fire zones. Consumer complaints have increased nearly 600% in the past decade, says Michael Soller, spokesman for the state Insurance Department.
So there’s no escaping some category of potential calamity in California.
They can even be linked.
On Christmas Eve in 1955, a Feather River levee collapsed north of Sacramento, flooding 90% of Yuba City and drowning 37 people. That provided momentum for eventually building a flood control dam upriver near Oroville.
Gigantic Oroville Dam was completed in 1968. In 1975, after the reservoir was filled, scientists believe it triggered a magnitude 5.7 earthquake.
The Oroville quake had lots of repercussions. It killed another big dam project near Auburn. Opponents found a risky fault under the site.
And it prompted legislators to close the state Capitol for a few years so the historic old structure could be retrofitted — even though there’d never been a significant quake in Sacramento’s history.