Disaster-recovery expert Ken Topping and other members of the Cambria FireSafe Focus Group want all North Coast residents to be completely informed and ready for any catastrophe.

In three previous informational forums this year, the Focus Group has addressed a host of do-and-don’t readiness issues.

The group is hosting a fourth session from 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, April 24, at the Veterans Memorial Building, 1000 Main St.

Topping (a former general manager of the Cambria Community Services District) will discuss more about preventing disaster losses and recovering after the catastrophe.

“Prevention and recovery are two sides of the same coin,” Topping said. “The more you prepare in an effort to prevent losses, the less difficult it will be to recover and get back on track after the disaster.”

He’ll also ask attendees for their questions about preparing themselves, their homes and their community for fire, flood, earthquake, landslides and other disasters, as well as about governmental rules that may need tweaking.

“We need to know where the gaps and overlaps are that make prevention a less effective crazy quilt,” Topping said in an April 9 phone interview. “I think there are a lot of holes, kind of like Swiss cheese.”

Cambrians have banded together in the past to advocate for change, including their successful campaign to temporarily remove the county permit fee for taking down trees deemed hazardous by Cal Fire. No healthy trees could be removed under this streamlined process.

At the forum, Topping and Focus Group members will answer any questions they can, and do research later to find answers to other queries, publicizing the responses later.

Those who have questions now can email them to group leader Shirley Bianchi at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Topping also will discuss the plan to form a VOAD group (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters) to help the community be more disaster-prepared. A sign-up sheet will be provided for people and organization that wish to participate in the VOAD process.

Do you have a news tip for Village People, Village Voices or the Village Square business bundle? Please send it to Kathe Tanner at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. While we may not be able to publish every submission, we’ll use as many as we can.

An earthquake of preliminary magnitude 5.3 struck 38 miles (61 kilometers) off the coast of California Thursday afternoon (April 5), rattling Los Angeles.

That's a moderate quake in the grand scheme of things, and common enough in the region of the San Andreas fault, where LA sits. But the event was still dramatic enough to make people sit up and take notice. Several Twitter users took to the platform to ask if others had felt the quake. [What Causes Earthquakes?]

"This is a very interesting earthquake," Mark Legg, founder of the consulting firm Legg Geophysical, Inc., in Huntington Beach, California, told Live Science, adding that he's been anticipating such an earthquake, as a magnitude-5-plus temblor occurs there about every six years. The last one, a magnitude-6.3, struck in December 2012, he said.

The earthquake occurred near a complex region of several faults called the East Santa Cruz Basin fault zone, Legg said. These fissures in the Pacific Plate are located offshore around the Channel Islands; they were most active during the Miocene epoch (between about 20 million and 5 million years ago), Legg said, though they still produce earthquakes today. That's because they sit snugly on the Pacific Plate, whose motion toward Alaska is impeded by a bend in the San Andreas Fault and the Western Transverse mountain ranges, "which block the smooth northwest movement of the Pacific Plate," Legg said. 

(The San Andreas Fault, which marks the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, is not a straight line, but rather has lots of bends and other "cricks" along its path.)

Today's earthquake seems to have struck at a spot where a major collision is occurring along a boundary between the Western Transverse Ranges and what is called the California Continental Borderland.  

"Sometimes, there are thrust earthquakes along this boundary, other times there are strike-slip earthquakes as the WTR [Western Transverse Ranges] tries to 'escape' around the bend in the San Andreas fault, as the Pacific plate moves to the northwest," Legg wrote in an email.

A thrust-type quake happens when the earth on one side of a fault jumps upward and over the other side; a strike-slip earthquake means both sides of the fault move mostly horizontally, as happens along the San Andreas Fault.

If this all sounds complicated, don't worry, it is.

"I like to think of the southern California region as a major crustal 'Shear Zone' composed of many faults working together (or against each other sometimes) to enable the Pacific Plate to move on its way to Alaska," Legg said. "It is not a simple process, and that is what makes it extremely interesting to scientists like myself and many others.

The LA region experiences an earthquake of this magnitude about once a year, 

There's a 1-in-20 chance that today's temblor will be followed by a larger quake in the coming weeks, said John Vidale, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. He added that the more likely scenario involves a series of much smaller aftershocks that may be too weak for anyone to even notice.

"There is a slight chance that this is a foreshock, but as time passes, that probability diminishes rapidly," Legg said. 

There are no reports at this time of any significant damage from the quake, and there may not be any in a region well-prepared for temblors.