The Arkstorm Scenario: California's Other "Big One"

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The San Bernardino County Museum Guest Lecture Series The ARkStorm Scenario: California’s other “Big One” Lucy Jones • U. S. Geological Survey Wednesday, January 25, 2012 • 7:30pm • Free Admission Landslides and debris flows. Coastal innundation and flooding. Infrastructure damage. Pollution. Dr. Lucy Jones will give an overview of the ARkStorm Scenario—catastrophic flooding resulting from a month-long deluge like was seen in 1862, and four larger such events in the past 100 years. This type of storm, resulting from atmospheric rivers of moisture, is plausible, and a smaller version hit San Bernardino in December of 2010 with a week’s worth of rain that impacted Highland and the surrounding communities. The ARkStorm Scenario explores the resulting impacts to our social structure and can be used to understand how California’s “other” Big One can be more expensive than a large San Andreas earthquake. Dr. Lucy Jones has been a seismologist with the US Geological Survey and a Visiting Research Associate at the Seismological Laboratory of Caltech since 1983. She currently serves as the Science Advisor for the Natural Hazards Mission of the US Geological Survey, leading the long-term science planning for natural hazards research. She also leads the SAFRR Project: Science Application for Risk Reduction to apply USGS science to reduce risk in communities across the nation. Dr. Jones has written more than 90 papers on research seismology with primary interest in the physics of earthquakes, foreshocks, and earthquake hazard assessment, especially in southern California. She serves on the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and was a Commissioner of the California Seismic Safety Commission from 2002 to 2009. She has received numerous awards, including the Alquist Award from the California Earthquake Safety Foundation and the Shoemaker Award for Lifetime Achievements in Science Communication from the USGS..

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