The Waiting Game

"Experts" say that a California earthquake could be the "next Katrina." Well, thanks "Experts." I know that the most important thing to come out of this natural disaster and its attendant government ineptitude is the preview of coming attractions. I've seen "Earthquake" about seventeen times on American Movie Classics (who picks these "classics" anyway?) - I even saw it once when I was a kid in Sensurround. Now that Chuck Heston has started to mumble to the furniture I know that we have no real hope of surviving "the Big One."
Or do we? There is an enormous difference between hurricanes and earthquakes, and here it is: You can see hurricanes coming. Forecasting earthquakes is, at best, an arcane art. We can watch our pets for some kind of odd behavior - does licking yourself and chasing invisible rabbits count? We can read carefully the writings of Nostradamus - who correctly predicted the outcome of the 1987 World Series. We can pore over endless seismic studies and try to find some kind of pattern - California and Japan both have Disney parks and they both have earthquakes.
Okay, so maybe we're stuck waiting for the earth to open up and swallow us all. Maybe we'll get lucky and only part of the state will slip into the ocean. What is the alternative? We could just pack up and head for someplace in relative safety on the other side of the Sierra Nevadas. Evacuation seems unlikely, so we should probably prepare for the worst. We should have three days' food and water for each person, and we should have agreed upon alternatives for shelter in the event that ours should be ground into pulp. We should create alternative means of communication in case of land line or cellular telephone failure. We should have portable heating and cooking capacity. We should grow our own food, make our own clothes and live off the land the way our forefathers taught us.
I digress. We can get ready, but we don't have to panic. There will be plenty of time to panic.