Arizona Preparing For Post-Earthquake Inflow Of 400,000 Californians

As we've pointed out many times before,a powerful earthquake hammering California is a geological inevitability. In the coming decades, a magnitude 7.1 or 7.3 earthquake - similar to the deadly quake that rattled central Mexico last year  - would almost certainly strike a densely populated part of the state (the San Andreas fault runs through most of California, as the map below shows), potentially leading to tens if not hundreds of thousands of casualties.

The local economy would lie in ruins and it would take years to for the area to recover.