(TNS) - It’s now way easier to find out if you live in a California earthquake fault zone.
The California Geological Survey has published an easy-to-use interactive map online — type in your address or share your location on your smartphone, and, voila, you’ll know if you stand in a fault zone.
Or, for that matter, a place at risk of liquefaction or a landslide unleashed by an earthquake.
What these three zones have in common is the risk the ground can break in an earthquake, and not just be shaken.
“When the ground breaks under an existing building, there’s a higher chance that the building will collapse,” said Tim McCrink, supervising engineering geologist and program manager for seismic hazards for the California Geological Survey.
State lawmakers ordered the creation of these maps decades ago as a matter of public safety. But they have been published either in paper form or in unwieldy PDF files, and they were a nightmare for prospective home buyers trying to figure out whether their possible dream house was in a hazardous zone.
No longer.