Bay Area homes built on faults are slowly tearing apart

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/living-bay-area-fault-line-22087769.php

Bay Area homes built on faults are slowly tearing apart
'Your house is going to be ripped asunder'



There are two kinds of people who don’t hang pictures on their walls: minimalists, and people who live directly above a fault line.

Alex Cully is the latter. From 2016 to 2017, Cully rented an apartment in the Hayward Hills, near Garin Regional Park, that was directly on the Hayward Fault. Because two continental plates were having a shoving fight beneath the floorboards, Cully had started to forgo the normal interior decor.

“I never put up photos on the walls, and kept everything fragile either in a box or somewhere that falling wouldn’t break them,” Cully said in an email.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

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But then there are the brave Bay Area residents who live directly on top of the boundary between two tectonic plates — what, in common parlance, we call a fault line. For them, the existential threat presents itself in small, and sometimes big, ways on a weekly basis. Plate tectonics is not a slow process but something that plays out constantly on their property.