“Earthquakes never come back exactly the same way,” Solene L. Antoine, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, told the Los Angeles Times in 2025.
Most Californians tend to focus on “The Big One,” and its potential damage. But most hazards come from events like the magnitude six earthquake in 2014 near South Napa,” Sarah Minson, a research geophysicist with the USGS Earthquake Science Center, said last year.
“You can prepare for earthquakes, and they’re very survivable,” Minson said. “California is well built for earthquake safety… Your building is not supposed to be a threat to your life in an earthquake,” she said, but added that hazards remain inside.
“You can have bookcases, things that can fall on your head. Right now I’m looking up at the ceiling tiles in my office,” she said. “So what we say is, if you feel shaking, please drop, cover, and hold on to protect yourself from anything that might fall on you.”
Most injuries, she added, come from people trying to move during quakes — tripping, falling, or running outside where facades or air conditioning units may fall.