Owens Valley Earthquake – California - March 26, 1872
The town of Lone Pine, California, two hundred miles north of Los Angeles and fifty miles west of the Nevada border, was virtually leveled when the entire seventy-mile length of the Owens Valley fault ruptured on March 26, 1872. It was one of the largest earthquakes in United States history with a magnitude of 7.4. There were fewer than three hundred people in Lone Pine. Twenty-seven of them were killed and fifty-six others suffered cuts and bruises. All the adobe homes were destroyed. The event was felt throughout most of California and Nevada, and as far as Salt Lake City, Utah. Adobe and brick buildings sustained the brunt of the damage. Minor damage also occurred two hundred and fifty miles away in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys on the western side of the Sierra Nevada. In Yosemite Valley one hundred and fifty miles to the north the earthquake triggered a landslide.
As severe as the ground shaking must have been, it was noted that no one would have been killed or hurt if the houses had been made of wood. The characteristic log homes of early settlement always provided good protection against earthquakes. Numerous depressions and uplifts occurred in and around Lone Pine as would be expected from an event that displaced the Owens Valley fault horizontally by as much as twenty feet. In one location, an area two hundred and fifty feet long sank twenty-five feet while a neighboring stretch of land of comparable size rose by twenty feet. Many comparisons have been drawn between the Owens Valley earthquake and the great San Andrea earthquakes of 1857, the Fort Tejon earthquake, and 1906, the Great San Francisco event. The extent of the land area shaken by each of these three events is comparable, as are the maximum fault displacements. All of them can be classified as great on the basis of the lengths of the ruptures that occurred in the faults but their seismic magnitudes are all much smaller than, for instance, the Alaska earthquake of 1964.
These are some of the strangest disasters we've ever heard about! Until now, we’ve talked…
New Map Shows States That May Be In Danger and Get Hit By Major Hurricane.…
How much do we know about the dark history of eugenics? Did you know that…
These are the biggest man-made disasters in human history The journey of humanity is not…
It's crucial to see how mass shootings can be prevented and it's a critical concern…
Did you know that fans killed some of the most beloved celebs in the world?…