Hi Kiddo. To put things in proper prospective that 3 trillion yen is equal to $29,182,879,377 USD. I wonder how many hits California could take at those costs?

This is one of the reasons that Japan is backing away from earthquake prediction. While it may be all well and good to get the people out of harms way they can’t move the buildings and the infrastructure. For all the money that has been spent on earthquake prediction they have yet to make one single prediction.

The thinking now is to build for the strongest quake that can occur in a given region and then hope for the best.

As you well know were a quake such as the one that recently occurred in Japan were to occur on the Hayward Fault there would be an estimated 1700 road closures. It would take BART 3 years to recover. There is no estimate as to how long it would take small business to recover. In fact they may never be able to recover.

The following is from a study done in 2002. It isn’t very pretty. Take Care…Don in creepy town

A repeat of the 1906 magnitude 7.9 earthquake, the worst case scenario for the Bay Area, is estimated to result in about 5800 fatalities if it strikes during working hours. This estimate is comparable to the approximately 6000 deaths caused by the 1995 M6.9 Kobe earthquake that occurred in the afternoon directly beneath an urban area with a population of 1.52 million people. Most scenarios, however, have maximum projected fatalities on the order of several hundred, reflecting the success of earthquake-resistant design and construction practices in California, particularly in residences.
The loss of life is predicted to be highest if an earthquake occurs in the early afternoon when people are working in commercial buildings with varying vulnerability to quakes These predicted mid-afternoon fatalities are generally about 5 times higher than values predicted at 2:00 AM when the population is assumed to be in wood frame residential units.

Because all ten of the scenario earthquakes in the loss estimation study strike much closer to the urban core of the Bay Area than magnitude 6.9 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the projected number of uninhabitable residences for all ten scenarios will probably exceed the 16,000 made uninhabitable by the Loma Prieta quake. For example, the Association of Bay Area Governments has estimated that more than 150,000 uninhabitable residences will occur in a M7.9 repeat of the 1906 earthquake or a M6.9 rupture of the entire Hayward fault.

These loss estimates are believed to be minimum ones, in part because of a lack of detailed and representative building inventory in the Bay region, as well as the fact that damage to specific facilities or lifelines, such as the Hetch-Hetchy aqueduct system, Bay Area ports, and transportation systems, is not included. For example, a recent Bay Area Economic Forum study on the seismic vulnerability of the Hetch-Hetchy system estimated potential for tens of billions of dollars of losses related to failure of that system alone in a major earthquake.

The East Bay I-880 corridor along the Hayward fault would experience the most proportional property damage of the entire Bay area, a result of dense development directly along and next to the Hayward fault and the fact that earthquakes on this fault, while lower in magnitude than those on the San Andreas fault, have higher odds of occurring.

For all Hayward fault earthquake scenarios, severe shaking is predicted to extend westward across San Francisco Bay onto the soft soil sites on the San Francisco Peninsula and the made land/artificial fill in San Francisco. In fact, San Francisco’s financial district, which is largely built on pre-1906 bay fill, is approximately equidistant from the Hayward and the San Andreas faults, making it vulnerable to large earthquakes on both sides of the Bay.

• Bay Area Quake