In the next issue of US Infrastructure

Timon Singh

Out this month, the new issue of US Infrastructure will be looking at whether California is ready for another massive earthquake.

Following the earthquake in Baja California, Mexico earlier in the year, the news issue of US Infrastructure assesses the implications of a a major quake on the San Andreas Fault. Experts agree that the next Big One becomes more and more likely with each passing year. How power lines, water systems and transport corridors perform when it happens will have a long-term impact on the state's fortunes.

"San Francisco, at the present time, is like the crater of a volcano, around which are camped tens of thousands of refugees. At the Presidio alone are at least twenty thousand. All the surrounding cities and towns are jammed with the homeless ones, where they are being cared for by the relief committees. The refugees were carried free by the railroads to any point they wished to go, and it is estimated that over one hundred thousand people have left the peninsula on which San Francisco stood."

These were the words of writer Jack London in the wake of the earthquake that struck the Californian city in 1906. A little after five in the morning on 18 April, the San Andreas fault sprang into angry life shaking residents from their beds, tearing up roads and rattling buildings to rubble. Though the quake itself only lasted around a minute, its effects would be felt for years to come. The fires that raged through San Francisco's shattered streets after the ground had become still obliterated much of what the quake did not. A comparable level of destruction would not be wrought on an American city until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans nearly 100 years later.

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Also in the next issue

As the Cape Wind project off Cape Cod moves closer to reality we take a look at what it hopes to achieve and ask whether local opposition might yet derail it.

We also speak to Ted Schultz, Duke Energy's head of energy efficiency, to hear how saving the power we already have is every bit as important as finding new energy sources.

In addition to all that, we have our usual mix of comment, analysis and news covering all aspects of the infrastructure space.