Oakland Geology

October 21, not October 17, is Oakland’s real Earthquake Day. While many of us remember the 17th vividly, the day of the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, the morning of October 21, 1868 was when the original Great San Francisco Earthquake struck. It was on this side of the bay, on our own earthquake fault, and the ground cracked from Fremont all the way to the edge of this view from the end of Pali Court, in the neighborhood just across route 24 from Lake Temescal.

The Hayward fault runs from the notch on the skyline, which is in Montclair, to the right edge behind the house in the middle distance. This part of the fault, between Mills College and Lake Temescal, is the only place that has large areas of bedrock on both sides. What that means for the purposes of today’s post is that it’s the most rugged and picturesque part of the fault and has probably the greatest concentration of million-dollar homes.

Today I invite you to review this blog’s category “the hayward fault.” I seem to have rattled on at great length on this subject. Some day the fault will rattle all of us at great length.

Today’s Oakland Tribune has an article about newly mapped faults in the Hayward fault zone; I won’t link to it because the Trib’s links die quickly. But the new Alquist-Priolo zone map can be accessed here.

This entry was posted on 21 October 2012 at 11:13 am and is filed under Hayward fault, Oakland geology views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.