Hi All,

I was most curious to see this Santa Rosa earthquake on the map today:

1.6 2002/05/18 08:25:27 38.453N 122.683W 6.0 3 km ( 2 mi) ENE of Santa Rosa, CA

And I started wondering how close this epicenter was to the twin quakes in October of 1969, which caused widespread damage and was felt all over the entire bay area. It's right in the neighborhood and extremely close to downtown Santa Rosa. As you can see from this list, its very close:

CDMG 1969 01 15 042809 38.51 -122.70 3.00 MLBRK
CDMG 1969 07 18 013528 38.40 -122.60 2.50 MLBRK
CDMG 1969 10 02 045646.50 38.47 -122.69 5.60 MLBRK
CDMG 1969 10 02 051421 38.50 -122.70 3.10 MLBRK
CDMG 1969 10 02 061957.10 38.46 -122.69 5.70 MLBRK
CDMG 1969 10 02 071009 38.50 -122.70 3.40 MLBRK
CDMG 1969 10 02 122705.50 38.49 -122.68 4.30 MLBRK
CDMG 1969 10 06 142807 38.45 -122.71 3.90 MLBRK
CDMG 1969 10 16 181519.10 38.53 -122.67 2.80 MLBRK

Though these quakes don't seem like much in the way of what you would expect to create so much damage, it goes to show that when you are sitting on an alluvial plain, the ground shaking intensities are considerably more elevated.

During the twin 5's my sister was eating dinner at a restaurant not far from her apartment. The plate glass windows in the restaurant broke and all the diners ran from the place. Upon arriving home to a newly constructed apartment building, she found all of the upper kitchen cabinets sitting on top of the counter-tops. Every dish and glass was broken. At that time retrofitting was common in construction, so it's not like these matters were not taken into account.

I suppose, if one wanted to, they could consider today's quake an aftershock of the 69 quakes, or open their eyes and come to the realization that the Rodgers Creek Fault is indeed on the move and our sleeping giant is making its wake up call.

Petra