Don, as I have stated, I am working both directly and indirectly with probably a fairly good percentage of the top earthquake forecasting researchers in the world. And what I do not know about the history of forecasting earthquakes I can assure you they know.

You should once again examine the data on my 133.html and 132.html Web pages. Those are the times when some of what I am convinced are probably the highest quality earthquake precursor data on the planet were detected. Can you see any clear patterns in those data? I think it would be something of a miracle if you could.

The very important point here is, those data are showing that many and perhaps even most precursors are probably not following easily predictable patterns.

Well, you have to use whatever is available. So what I have done during the past 15 or so years is keep processing those data using different evaluation procedures. And I now have a way of processing them which I feel can produce some extremely valuable earthquake forecasting data.

My present evaluation procedures do not say that an earthquake will definitely occur here or there. Rather they generate a type of probability table. They might say that there is a 20% probability for a certain time period for the Los Angeles area and a 5% probability for that same time period for the San Francisco area.

If I am expecting an earthquake then what I would usually do is give that information to other forecasters and government officials in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And they would hopefully look at their own data and try to determine if it were likely that the expected earthquake would occur near their city. In most cases it would not.

Unfortunately as I have been saying, at the present time there are no organized networks anywhere that I know about which most people can use to share these types of data. And I have to do the best that I can with contacting different group on my own. That is starting to change now as things are getting more organized. I am now part of an informal international forecasting information sharing network.