Chris,

My thesis at Caltech in 1986 was partly on waves from the San Fernando earthquake reverberating in the San Fernando and Los Angeles basins, which followed work by Tom Heaton and another student in the late 1970's. They're slowly cranking up the accuracy of the calculations, and the Science paper was another step forward. Kim Olsen, Rob Graves, and Jeroen Tromp are currently kings of the basin reverberation simulations.

I think Graves argued surface waves focusing on Santa Monica, as opposed to the P and S waves advocated by Paul Davis.

Sorry about the technical jargon to the non-seismologists.

John