By Matt Levin, CalMatters
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California was lucky. Again.
The major earthquakes that rattled the Mojave Desert town of Ridgecrest earlier this month-—a magnitude 6.4 temblor on July 4th followed a few days later by a whopping 7.1 quake felt throughout Southern California—were far from major population centers. Damage to people and property was relatively minimal. Even Ridgecrest itself, with most if its single-family housing constructed under updated building codes, surprised earthquake engineers by emerging from the twin quakes with scrapes and bruises but no serious devastation.
For the past quarter-century, dozens of earthquakes in more remote parts of the state have stirred the low-level anxiety that Californians closer to the coast have lived with since the 1989 Loma Prieta quake collapsed a segment of the Bay Bridge, and the 1994 Northridge…
