Hi EQF. I have to agree with you on one hand about the recall, but no one really knew where the spending was going with Gray Davis. The State of California was already in the red so who knows where it would be with Gray Davis. My vehicle registration is going up 300 percent and on a fixed income I can ill afford that.

For over a century, scientists have been trying to answer this question, searching for ways of predicting when and where earthquakes will strike. In the process, they have looked at everything from emissions of radioactive radon gas to the howling of dogs as possible "precursors" ­ the telltale signs that would signal the imminent arrival of a major quake.

And, occasionally, scientists seem to have succeeded. On 3 February 1975 a swarm of small quakes struck Haicheng Province in Manchuria. Believing them to be precursors of some far more serious event, Chinese geophysicists issued a warning that a major quake would strike within the next two days. Sure enough, less than 24 hours later a major quake did strike, registering 7.3 on the Richter scale, but not before an evacuation had been carried out, allowing thousands of lives to be saved in the first successful prediction of a major quake.

Or was it? To this day, the events around the Haicheng earthquake prediction are surrounded by controversy, with skeptics claiming that it was little more than a coincidence. Their argument draws strength from the fact that the same Chinese team had made a prediction some months earlier, based on the same type of precursor ­ but that quake had failed to materialize. And whatever the supposed breakthrough made by the team, it failed to save the lives of the 240,000 who died in Tang Shan the following year, in what remains the most lethal earthquake to strike this century.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji unveiled new regulations demanding that those making a prediction provide solid scientific support for their claims, with penalties for those who make false predictions. This followed a spate of over 30 so-called predictions in China over the last three years which halted businesses and production lines, and every one of which has turned out to be a false alarm.

In Japan the nearest it got to do this job was in 1983, when a foreshock was held as a pointer to a subsequent main event of magnitude of 7.7 within the sea of Japan. The only snag was that the two events occurred 12 days apart. The Japan Research Institute concluded that had the emergency measures been introduced for 12 days running -- trains stopped, banks, post-offices, and departmental stores closed, the costs would have amounted to more than 700 billion yen a day ($6.4 billion a day in US currency) more than the cost of the damage! If memory serves there were 104 people killed during the quake.

I would hate to be the person who called for an evacuation of the Bay Area and then not have the quake occurred when it was supposed, or not at all, or in some other location. It would be a miracle if the people didn’t take the person out and hang him. I can imagine what the response would be when the next quake prediction was made. No one would respond. Take Care…Don in creepy town
Reference

http://www.indianexpress.com/ie/daily/20010313/ian13041.html
http://backissues.worldlink.co.uk/articles/05051999175314/06.htm