Hi All. Not a pretty picture in any sense of the imagination. Take Care…Don in creepy town

The Day California Cracks
Budget crises have left the state ill prepared for a big quake

It's power lunch time in Los Angeles. Media moguls are picking through their Cobb salads at Spago in Beverly Hills. Then the floor begins to move, first in undulating waves, then in increasingly violent jolts. The airy restaurant rumbles. Diners scream as the walls of the popular indoor garden room begin to shake, sending debris everywhere. Outside, along nearby Rodeo Drive, car alarms start to wail as upscale storefronts explode in a shower of glass and mannequins. A lonely poodle yaps in search of its master, who lies beneath an ornate streetlight.

Five miles to the east, downtown L.A.'s high-rises are swaying. As the 54-story Wells Fargo (WFC ) Tower buckles, a torrent of glass showers office workers along South Grand Avenue. More debris cascades down from the 72-story U.S. Bank (USB ) Tower nearby, just as the elevated 10 Freeway buckles, sending delivery trucks over its sides and sports cars into each other. In the distance, fireballs ignite where natural-gas pipelines have surrendered to the violent shaking.

It sounds like a Hollywood disaster movie, all right. But sooner or later, when the Big One hits, it will be all too real. As certain as California's sunny days, palm trees, and celebrity politicians, a massive earthquake is coming. With more than 300 faults beneath Southern California, and the giant San Andreas fault running through the state, California is a seismic time bomb. A magnitude 7 quake has a 62% chance of hitting San Francisco in the next 30 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS); the risk for L.A. is only slightly less. Such a powerful quake would cause far more damage than the temblors that shook San Francisco in 1989 or L.A.'s Northridge neighborhood in 1994. A magnitude 7 quake that struck during a workday on a recently discovered fault under L.A. would kill 7,000 to 18,000 people, says the USGS. In San Francisco, 5,800 people would die if a temblor the size of the 1906 quake again savaged the city.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_38/b3951005.htm

• The Day California Cracks