Earthquake Forecasting Update – January 10, 2012

The Earthquake Forecasting and Earthquake Triggering Processes research work that I have been doing for a long, long time is primarily intended to save lives. I don’t sell earthquake forecasts.

Although I am totally supportive of efforts to keep people from dying during earthquakes by improving building construction, I believe that most people in the international disaster mitigation community would agree that in many impoverished nations, the needed building construction improvements are not going to materialize. As a consequence, the only realistic way to make sure that those lives are not lost is to forecast a destructive earthquake and get people out of its way.

The work that I have been doing is following what I believe is a logical path. And as I said in other notes, it is now time to add another dimension to these efforts. That particular addition involves getting the U.S. government to take a stronger interest in the science of earthquake forecasting.

This is not an easy task. And unfortunately, there is such strong opposition to this that it might not even be possible at this time. Earthquake forecasting is a controversial subject. And elected, appointed, and hired government officials and scientists etc. are generally terrified at the thought of getting involved with anything that could get the general public and news services angry with them.

As part of this effort, during the first week in January of 2012 I had a meeting with several attorneys that are with a law firm that I have worked with in the past. As many people are aware, government officials and scientists in Italy are presently being tried on manslaughter charges associated with the April 6, 2009 earthquake in Italy that reportedly claimed more than 300 lives. And what I wanted my attorneys to do is provide me with a legal opinion regarding what the liability of U.S. government officials and scientists etc. might be following a highly destructive earthquake along the U.S. West Coast etc.

Those attorneys are people who work for what I believe is one of the most highly regarded law firms in the state where I live. And like probably many or even most law firms here in the U.S. they have taken legal action against government agencies in the past on behalf of their clients. But is spite of that, and to my considerable surprise, they were in my opinion absolutely astonished when I described for them in detail, my experiences with how government officials think and why they are motivated to do this or that.

To summarize things, most of my actual forecasting research and also my own forecasting program are now moving along at slower speeds. And I am focusing much more attention on getting U.S. government officials moving.

There are quite a few different approaches that I am planning to use to accomplish that including providing them those officials some legal opinions regarding this subject. And I believe that one or more of those approaches actually long ago got the attention of some high level government officials. It remains to be seen if present efforts will be successful with getting them to stop behaving like boat anchors and do something. I have been successful quite often with that type of work in the past. But not many of my past efforts involved confronting such a thoroughly entrenched foe.

The following is an indirect link for my new “Web Site News” Web page. There has been not been too much to announce on that page so far. But it would probably be worth checking now and then.

http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/News.html

These are personal opinions.

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