Some Guy I Know is in the News

In an interview last week for an unrelated story, Robert Yeats, a professor emeritus in geoscience at Oregon State University in Corvallis, said that an imminent big west coast earthquake concerned him far less than a "big one" that might occur in Haiti, due to the large fault near the capital city of Port-au-Prince—and the poverty-driven low level of earthquake-preparedness there.

"If they have an earthquake on this fault that runs through Port-au-Prince," the death toll would be tremendous, he said January 6.

From Scientific American. I had Yeats at Oregon State for structural geology and for stress and deformation- both his area- and I think a couple of other classes as well. To make a small world look even smaller, he had started off at Ohio University in Athens. His son and I were in the same graduating high school class. Go AHS Rowdies 77! He also went into geology at OSU.

The above is a small excerpt from a two page article; it's well-worth reading. Spoiler: the magnitude of a quake is only one of the factors that influences the amount of destruction and death. And there are a number of other major cities that are at critical risk due to those other factors. SF and LA look pretty well-off by comparison.