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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (36469)	3/2/1999 7:01:00 PM
From: lorrie coey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Is it about to happen?

To: Ish who wrote (36469)	3/2/1999 9:02:00 PM
From: iandiareii	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Ish Mike Davis is your only man for a wicked so-cal doomsday scenario. He does a terrific job covering the usual suspects -- earthquakes, droughts, wildfires -- but also throws in street gangs, riots, tornados, and even the growing taste the local mountain lions are acquiring for "slow, soft animals in spandex." The book is Ecology of Fear : Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Henry Holt & Co., 1998). Here's a snip from a favorable NYT review: With ''Ecology of Fear,'' Davis is back with more bad news, delivered with his usual brio and a new emphasis on natural history. The whole Los Angeles megalopolis has been built, it seems, under a set of terrible delusions about the region's habitability. Everyone knows that the city must import water to live, that it is prone to earthquakes, fires, mudslides, droughts and the occasional flood. But who knew about the two ''megadroughts'' that, according to recent research, parched California during the Middle Ages -- one lasting 220 years, the other 140? The most severe modern drought has lasted six. Try to picture what a couple of centuries of nothing but blue skies would do to Southern California today. Then there is a newly discovered geological form, the ''blind thrust fault,'' buried deep in the earth and apparently posing a major, previously unsuspected earthquake threat to Los Angeles. According to Davis, moreover, the city has accumulated an enormous ''quake debt'' during the 210 years since the last truly catastrophic earthquake shook the area, and may now be emerging from the ''stress-relaxation shadows'' that such huge quakes provide. ''The urbanization of the Los Angeles area has, it seems, taken place during one of the most unusual episodes of climatic and seismic benignity since the inception of the Holocene.'' search.nytimes.com ian