G'Day!

Finding Fault in Downtown San Diego This little tour was led by Dr. Pat Abbott, a native San Diegan who earned his doctorate degree in geology from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Abbott is a geology professor at San Diego State University where he conducts research on the region's geologic history. He is the author of Natural Disasters published by McGraw-Hill. His book The Rise and Fall of San Diego describes the geologic history of San Diego. Abbott is also the producer and narrator for the developing TV series Written In Stone. (From the San Diego Natural History Museum web site.) The little blurb describing the tour noted that Downtown San Diego is full of faults-of the geologic kind, that is. With map in hand, search for and find the locations of fault segments mapped in recent years, and see how builders have adapted to them. Our 36-block trek will take us from the headquarters of the Police Department to PETCO Park to the U.S. Federal Courthouse and Horton Plaza. Bring a hand lens and observe and discuss Downtown, with all its faults. Saturday, May 8; 8 a.m.-12:30 p.m. So a little before 8 a.m. we arrived at 14th and F streets, along with about 25 others, hand lens ready to observe any and all faults - they must be really small faults! We were to cover about a 36 block walking tour examining the sites of various know faults as well as discussing the ways and means that construction can accommodate the presence of fault lines. The region that we covered encompassed the downtown areas covered by the two orange colored segments below the San Digeo in the map here. If you open the Point Loma (3.4M) PDF file on that page you will get a good idea of the area involved in the tour and the location of the known faults. So what did we learn? Well for one thing a number of public buildings lie over known fault lines - including the police station and courthouse. In addition any private development has to consider fault lines and not build 50 feet either side of the fault. This can lead to the designing of some rather interesting footprints for bulidings. You might ask why public buildings that lie over fault lines are not subject to such conditions? Oh, and the hand lens! We used those to examine the fine structure of various rocks in mini geology lessons Pat ran as we wandered around downtown.