Oops for the day: deleting the fault line

Steph Yin has an article in The New York Times about a little overzealous repair:

For decades, a sidewalk curb (photo) at Rose and Prospect streets in Hayward, California tracked the slow creep of the Earth along a notorious seismic fault line. Then, last month, the sidewalk record was erased by a city crew, which replaced the curb with a wheelchair-accessible ramp. The curb’s disappearance resulted in the loss of one of the most visible historical markers of the Hayward Fault, which runs over seventy miles along the eastern side of San Francisco Bay, parallel to the San Andreas Fault. Over time, as the Pacific and North American tectonic plates slipped past each other along the fault, the curb slowly pulled apart.
The resulting offset was a perfect demonstration of the Hayward Fault’s steady movement of a few millimeters a year, said Luther Strayer, a structural geologist at California State University in the East Bay. He brought his students on field trips to the curb every year. “I’m pretty disappointed,” Dr. Strayer said. “That curb belonged to all of us.”
The city had tried to fix the curb about a decade ago, Dr. Strayer said. “We wrote emails to City Hall, telling them that this is a world-class offset and asking them to please preserve it,” he said. Back then, the city agreed not to touch it. This time, however, the geology community was not so lucky.
“It’s unfortunate that the curb got repaired,” said Kelly McAdoo, an assistant city manager in Hayward, “but obviously the City Council is really interested in pedestrian safety and wheelchair accessibility in our community.”
She noted that the city government has experienced a lot of turnover in the last decade, and that there was no documentation in the city’s computer system indicating that the curb should not have been altered.
Not all geologists are as dismayed as Dr. Strayer by the curb’s razing. “I work along the fault all the time, and I’ve seen dozens of these things get destroyed,” said James Lienkaemper, a geophysicist for the United States Geological Survey.
Other disjointed curbs illustrate the fault’s slippage, he noted, though the curb at Rose and Prospect “was a particularly nice one.”
For more accurate scientific purposes, geologists maintain instruments called creepmeters, which send real-time data from the Hayward Fault to the Survey’s headquarters every ten minutes. “We know exactly what the fault is doing as it progresses toward the next earthquake,” said Roger Bilham, a geology professor at the University of Colorado.
The last five major earthquakes on the Hayward Fault occurred 140 years apart, on average. The most recent was 148 years ago.
The attention being given to the fixed Hayward curb is a “red herring”, Dr. Bilham said. The real concern is the impending earthquake, which geologists predict could register as high as a magnitude 7. “Eight million people in the area are going to be given a surprise, compared to the one or two geologists who are now missing a reference marker,” he said.
To Dr. Strayer, the curb was nonetheless a striking visual reminder of underground forces at work. “It was the 327th wonder of the world,” he said. “There was no question what was happening there when you looked at it.”

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