California, and the West in general suffer from various disasters, and has the potential for others which happen more rarely. These disasters cost a lot of money when they happen and some are inevitable consequences of physics, some of maintenance, some are very random and completely beyond our control.
The best way to survive a local disaster is be somewhere else. Don't stand in the way of the erupting volcano, or below the dam that's breaking. So long as you CAN leave. But that's at the personal level. The govt has to deal with the disaster, though sometimes the right answer is to leave the ruin behind as a warning. Not all the ghost towns in the West are abandoned mines.
Did you know that all coastal nations in the Pacific experience Tsunamis? Any Pacific ocean quake, like the one in Thailand, is capable of generating a huge tsunami which will affect parts of the coast. Some more than others. In 1700, a major quake off the Oregon coast destroyed entire villages in Japan, which was documented by monks there, complete with woodblock prints and paintings. The wave also went 30 miles inland, knocking down entire coastal forests. In contrast, most of the Central California Coast is steep cliffs with few harbors so a tsunami is pointless and does nothing to most of it. The long slope in Crescent City north to Canada, however, Pismo and Long Beach, are both able to get some bad consequences from a tsunami. Ironically, as best as I understand the hydraulics involved, the Bay Area is largely immune to tsunami due to the narrow and deep entrance of the harbor (the Golden Gate is the gap, which the bridge is named after) and the length of the waves limits how much energy can get into the harbor. While you'd think they'd transfer energy to every shoreline and flood San Jose and go upriver and flood Sacramento... not so much. But the coasts can take a beating and there are now signs warning evacuation routes to escape incoming events, if you're lucky enough to get sufficient time to know what's coming and the alarms to sound. As we're due for a major event there, in the upper 9.6 richter scale (where the energies get really huge and the damage total) sort of like what Chile and Ecuador get, when that happens everything is gone, lots of people die, and the survivors will suffer. As it is now? There's nothing being done and the California coast is helplessly unprepared. Presumably Jefferson will do a better job.
Planning for that sort of disaster and rotating preps and assigning budget will be important. We usually do these in Veterans centers, high school gyms, any large central building where supplies can be stored and wounded treated by emergency room doctors. And its really that serious when trouble comes. Wildfires can kill from smoke inhalation too.
We need to deal with forest fires every summer and fall, and landslides and flooding follows fires. Our rainfall is seasonal, so our flooding is seasonal. We have off-times for preparation and maintenance, but LA took all the money for themselves, because they have the votes. Democracy is oppression, two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for lunch. This is wrong, but as long as they have the votes, we get flooding and disaster. I worry about disasters because rebuilding after them doesn't always happen. If the situation is bad enough, and the money isn't there, you end up abandoning a ruin and lose your shirt. Then you leave. And find the advantages of Mobility the other way.
Jefferson is underpopulated because most of the money that should have been spent there over the last century developing jobs was taken away by Sacramento taxes, the essential origin of their reason to divide. The Sacramento Valley towns are mostly Mexican farm workers, some of them second or third generation, others still with green cards or illegals. I think there will be no more illegals once Jefferson exists as a legal entity within California. The US Border Patrol is prevented from sweeps because amnesty threats by the President would turn them into Democratic party voters, two or three times each per election, in a blatantly illegal partisan power grab. This is war against the middle class, and the middle class is losing. Because half of them vote for the people destroying our existence. Democracy itself has failed. Without a Middle Class, America is only poor people and rich overlords who exploit and kill them. That's the reality.
Naturally, there's a couple other things we have, that happen rarely. The Southern End of the Cascade Range is in California, at the Feather River. A bit north of that end is Lassen Volcano, which last erupted in 1910. There are lovely pictures of it. The blast went northeast, tumbling house-sized blocks of rock and covering the area in ash, which drifted in the wind afterwards. Keep in mind that in The West, 1910 was still mostly unpaved roads, people on horseback, and only starting to get electricity in towns. It was still the Old West. To Geologists, Lassen is considered an active volcano and is being closely monitored for its next activity. As volcanoes tend to do their thing, their activity, for thousands of years, Lassen will go off again. Same with Mount Shasta, a fabulous stratovolcano, like Mount Fuji in Japan, with the classic cone shape and about 20 feet short of being the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states, 14,000 something feet tall. With a few eruptions it could be the tallest. Essentially, these volcanos are disasters which must be planned for. They will go off again. There will be people here, too.
There are a number of towns on the flanks of Mount Shasta, including Shasta City as its western base. Interstate 5 goes right past this town, and Mount Shasta, and in the event of eruption the road may close, depending on how it goes. It should alternate between ash, which is disruptive and annoying to potentially fatal, most of which should drift north on the breeze, to slow flows of magma down the flanks, covering the ash and providing an erosion resistant cap. The ash could shut I-5, of course, but it would likely be temporary, such as with a blizzard, which they get more often. Trucks can end up lining up in nearby towns, waiting for snow to clear, doing the run from San Diego to Vancouver, BC. The train goes through there too, running alongside the road, until winding off to deal with the slopes trains can't cross in winding turns and switchbacks before arriving in Ashland. The large sloping grassland north of Shasta is quite the vista, and the air being far from pollution is very clear, very pristine. Its one of those places worth parking your RV or trailer to enjoy it.
Just be aware there's some tinfoil hat types, and meth, and no real jobs so the town is a glorified truckstop. Of course, so is Reno. Too many western towns are like that, a place to buy gasoline, replace your snacks, and head on down the road to a real destination. This is why I obsess over geography. If there's no geographic reason, towns die once the initial settlement reason is exploited, such as a mine or timber. Here in California, there are many places which were encampments that got some stone buildings due to fires and then the mines played out and the town abandoned it for the next play. The next mine site. Ghost towns. This is what happens when your resources lack durable value.
Jefferson will be an interesting state because its two big volcanos and all the smaller ones up in the Modoc Plateau lead to desert and high lakes in the Klamath in one corner, but seacoast on its western side, barely developed due to few harbors, all needing serious work. Those harbors need dredging, and some hard decisions made about fish. When peak oil hits properly, even the diesel fuel for dragline fishing will stop being available, which means the Canadians and Japanese won't be coming here to our shores anymore. Presumably, the fisheries will get a chance to massively increase their numbers and sustainable fishing, at higher catch levels, can be made as we transition into sail powered fishing boats rather than diesel power. That won't happen overnight, and any graduate of the US Naval Academy can design a boat, as it is part of the program there, but you still have to build them. And anchor them. With the strong north winds and the Alaska current (aka Longshore Drift) responsible for the nutrients that feed the fish on our shores, you have the available power supply and food supply to have an industry. Its more work than diesel, but you can still have electric winches to run the nets. You just can't do things quite as easily. This is important. Because those jobs are careers that feed families and rebuild the economy on the coast, a place abandoned by the fussy Hollywood and silicon valley narcissists running Sacramento and deciding where the taxes go. Being abandoned by Sacramento is why Jefferson is forming. The coast is under threat from Tsunamis, and has been hit by them in recent years.
This leaves the other three regions of the state to discuss. The central valley is dependent on water, and threatened by floods, made worse by wildfires which cause erosion, which fills reservoirs which are supposed to catch floods before they hit the lowlands and flood everywhere. Same with levees holding back the rivers. Of course, water being expensive and coming at the wrong times of year doesn't fix the fact that rain shadow makes the western side of the Sacramento Valley north of woodland a largely dry area that's undeveloped. A pity, since it could become fields and orchards if only there were water available. The mountain range between the Sacramento Valley and the Pacific ranges between 3000 and 5000 feet for the most part, is craggy, formerly volcanic, heavily faulted, and gets frequent bad wildfires. They are very challenging to drive through since the roads wind and climb and descend. Its quite twisty. A bad place to break down. The few communities are often leftovers from logging camps, usually with a stable water supply since the local aquifers are generally refilled by winter rains, and there are no jobs. Logging was banned by people who don't live there. The locals subsist on growing pot and doing meth till their teeth fall out. Its pretty horrible. The one legal industry is wine. Planting and tending grapes and turning those grapes into wine keeps a small number of people employed long term, and that's great, but how many wineries can California support? At what point does the market get so saturated the values of the wine drops below the cost of production? And then what are you going to do?
Southern California has most of the tension on the San Andreas Fault, Southeast of Riverside heading for San Diego. Currently, unless the area undergoes serious deformation in the fault zone, it will crack and you should expect an 8.3 quake there, which will wreck freeways in LA and cause big landslides. The groundwaves will damage homes and break water mains and mix the water with sewer and poison everybody with cholera. Also, cost billions to fix, which will take years of trenching, pipe connections, thousands of miles of piping, and hundreds of thousands of man-hours. After the quake the only sane thing to do is leave the area. I hope they don't come here. Bunch of commies.
In the North, we ALSO have the San Andreas fault. And a bunch of other faults too. There's a big one running up the West side of the Sacramento Valley from down near Patterson all the way to Redding. There's so many faults. Pretty much every valley in the Coast Range has a fault in it. And some of the mountains too. Easterners DO NOT understand just how many faults there are. Or that most of these faults are capable of generating 7.0 quakes, enough to wreck your town, dam, road, bridge, sheer off your well and start landslides moving. These things are potent. Jefferson knows this, and people who are from here know this. We accept it. And we also know that our homes get damaged but rarely collapse, even in a big quake. Replace some windows maybe. Wood frames are good this way.
But our real problems come from fires, landslides that follow fires removing the brush the prevents erosion, and then flooding from the landslides filling in reservoirs to act as a flood control buffer. That's the trifecta of disasters in California. And fires generally follow drought, which lasts for years at a time, but also happens annually every summer. Fire season, as we call it locally, starts once the grasses dry in June, and lasts until the first hard rains come in October. Until the ground is soaked and the grasses lie down to rot from the water, we are at risk. We accept that risk, and we deal with it. That's just life in California. That's what we trade in order to ride around in convertibles and have good tans almost year round.
Its my hope that Jefferson State, and the other states that arise from the Six States division, practice sane methods for disaster preparation and mitigation. I don't expect bankruptcy or cruelty, just measured response to do a reasonable amount to keep small disasters from becoming large ones. That's all.
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