Jeff & Konnor's Blog

Granted, not as interesting to our east coast friends, but we like to stop by the U.S. Geological Survey's recent earthquake map to see what's shaking.

If you live in the Salt Lake area, you can check out the other resources to see if "when the big one hits," your home is mostly likely to (a) collapse from ground shaking, (b) suddenly drop 20 feet and collapse because of fault rupture, (c) slowly sink into the ground then collapse because of liquefaction, (d) collapse and be swept away by a landslide, or (e) become flooded and collapse when the Great Salt Lake is suddenly higher than your house.

For us, the answer is (a). We live merely in the "severe shaking" zone rather than the "violent shaking" zone, but we have a brick house built before there were any earthquake building codes. We actually laughed at our home insurance agent when she told us how much earthquake insurance was for a brick house, then told us that the insurance doesn't actually cover the brick. There's always FEMA. Wait, never mind. Keep a spare room ready for us.