[Fox News] Is the East Coast on the brink of a major earthquake — and are we prepared?
The earthquake that struck the East Coast earlier this month was felt by an estimated 42 million people and luckily caused little damage, but what are the chances of a bigger, more powerful quake striking the area? And if it does, what could it look like — and are we prepared?
The April 5 phenomenon was a 4.8 magnitude earthquake centered near Whitehouse Station in New Jersey, which is about 40 miles west of New York City.
Shaking was felt from Washington D.C. to Maine, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and it followed a much smaller, 1.7 magnitude earthquake in New York City on Jan. 2.
Earthquakes are rare along the East Coast, with the most powerful one in the last 100 years hitting in August 2011, clocking 5.8 on the Richter scale. It was centered in Virginia and felt from Washington, D.C. to Boston.
4.8 MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE STRIKES NEW JERSEY, SHAKING BUILDINGS IN SURROUNDING STATES
Before that, an earthquake in South Carolina in 1886 is understood to have measured between 6.6 and 7.3 on the Richter scale. There is no definitive measurement of that quake since the Richter scale has only been around since the mid-1930s, but the tectonic shift still killed 60 people.
Professor John Ebel, a seismologist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College, tells Fox News Digital that when quakes start breaking 5.0 on the Richter scale, damage begins to occur.
For instance, the devastating earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria last year measured 7.8 and resulted in the death of nearly 62,000 people as tens of thousands of buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged.
California’s Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, meanwhile, measured 6.9 and caused 69 deaths, and the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the Golden State clocked 6.7, killing 57 people. Thousands more were injured.
“As you go above magnitude five, the shaking becomes stronger and the area over which the strong shaking is experienced becomes wider,” Ebel says. “So if you get a magnitude six, the shaking is ten times stronger than a magnitude five. So had this month’s earthquake been a 5.8, rather than a 4.8, then we would be looking at damage to unreinforced structures in the greater New York City area.”
“Now I have to qualify this and say that in the past few decades, New York City has had an earthquake provision in its building code while New Jersey, New York and Connecticut have all adopted some version of earthquake provisions in their building codes,” Ebel explained. “So modern buildings that are put up today will actually do quite well, even in strong earthquake shaking… If you have a magnitude 6 or even a magnitude seven.”
In terms of the Tri-state area, Ebel says that the region has had smaller earthquakes, but it’s been spared anything that’s been significantly damaging.
An 1884 quake in Brooklyn did cause limited damage and injuries. Seismologists estimated it would have measured in the region of 5.0 and 5.2, while a quake jolted Massachusetts in 1775 in the region of 6.0 and 6.3.
WHAT TO DO DURING AN EARTHQUAKE AND HOW TO PREPARE
“In 1884 there were things knocked from shelves, some cracks in walls that were reported, particularly plaster walls, which crack very easily if a building is shaken,” Ebel said. “There were some brick walls that had some cracks and people panicked because of the very strong shaking.”
A magnitude five earthquake hits the tri-state area once every 120 years, says Ebel, who penned the book “New England Earthquakes: The Surprising History of Seismic Activity in the Northeast.”
“The question is, can we have something bigger? And in my opinion, yes we can,” he said. “We can’t predict earthquakes, and we don’t know when the next one is going to occur, but we do have a low, not insignificant probability of a damaging earthquake at some point.”
Ebel said that the April 5 earthquake has left seismologists baffled since it didn’t occur on the Ramapo Fault zone, highlighting just how hard it is to predict the phenomenon from occurring. The Ramapo Fault zone is a series of small fault lines that runs through New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Spanning more than 185 miles, it was formed about 200 million years ago.
“Right now it’s a seismological mystery,” Ebel said. “We have some earthquakes in our region where we don’t have faults mapped. But that’s even true in California. Not every earthquake occurs on a known or mapped fault in California, so there are still a lot of seismologists have to learn about the exact relationship between old faults and modern earthquakes.”
Ebel noted that buildings aren’t the only thing to consider when earthquakes strike. In the California quakes, overpasses crumbled while the electrical grid can go down too, causing electrical surges and fires.
Toxic chemicals were knocked off of the shelves of a chemistry building in 1989 and the building had to be evacuated, Ebel said.
“And you think about hospitals and some industrial facilities having that situation,” he explained. “So you have these things that are not catastrophic necessarily, but are going to be a real problem.”
And an earthquake doesn’t necessarily have to rattle land in order to cause destruction.
A jolt out at sea could trigger a dangerous tsunami, like the one on the edge of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in Canada in 1929. It was felt as far away as New York City.
Waves as high as 23 feet crashed on the shore, according to the International Tsunami Information Center, with up to 28 people losing their lives.
“A tsunami is not necessarily a very high probability event, but it’s one that we have to think about also,” Ebel says in relation to the East Coast.
The Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 was triggered by an earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
Ebel says a tsunami similar to 1929 could cause a storm surge along the lines of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, where 43 people died in New York City.
“The threat of an earthquake is not as great as in California, but it’s something that we have to take into account and have emergency plans for and have building codes for,” Ebel says. “Our state and local emergency management agencies in all the northeastern states do earthquake planning — what we call tabletop exercises — where they pretend an earthquake occurs.”
“So those kinds of preparations are made on a regular basis,” he concludes. “Building codes are constantly being reevaluated and approved, not just for earthquakes, but for fires and chemical spills and all kinds of things. So we’re getting more prepared all the time.”
[Fox News] Get a handle on your time: Google Calendar tips and tricks
Before we get into it, I’ll acknowledge what you may be thinking: Using Calendar means handing over even more info to Google.
Win an iPhone 15 worth $799! I’m giving it to one person who tries my free daily tech newsletter. Sign up here while you’re thinking about it.
SEE WHAT THE HOME YOU GREW UP IN LOOKS LIKE NOW AND OTHER MAPS TRICKS
Sure, but here’s my take: For the sake of convenience, most of us choose a Big Tech company or two that we’re OK sharing a lot with. If you use Gmail and Google Maps, adding Calendar to the mix won’t make much difference in terms of privacy.
Here are some ideas to get the most out of it
Spoiler: A lot more than just meetings and dentist appointments. And yes, you can definitely use you preferred calendar app for all these things too, if Google isn’t your thing.
Let’s get to the tricks
FIX AUTOCORRECT IF IT’S DRIVING YOU DUCKING CRAZY
A little know-how goes a long way in getting more out of your everyday software.
Know when people are free: I use this daily at work. Put your cursor in the box labeled Search for people under the Meet with heading. Everybody in your organization should be searchable here, so no more setting meetings no one can attend. You can also create a new meeting, add guests and click Find a time under the date to see the attendees’ availability side by side!
WATCH OUT FOR THE NEW ‘GHOST HACKERS’
Automatically share meeting minutes: In your meeting details, click Create meeting notes under the event description to generate a Google Doc that automatically gets shared with attendees. It includes a built-in outline with the meeting date, attendees, notes and action items. Pro tip: Attach additional notes, docs, slides or whatever else to the meeting so no one’s looking around for them later!
Never miss a beat: When setting an appointment, simply click Add Notification. Choose how long before the event you’d like to be reminded. Boom! Whether it’s 10 minutes or a day in advance, Google Calendar’s got your back. No more oops moments.
You know I have more amazing tips up my sleeve. Get more Google Cal secrets.
Get tech-smarter on your schedule
Award-winning host Kim Komando is your secret weapon for navigating tech.
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[Fox Business] Breaking the college mold: Father-daughter ironworker duo champion the rise of vocational learning
Vocational enrollment is up among younger Americans as the toolbelt generation takes shape, and one nurse-turned-union ironworker thinks it’s a good opportunity for students to secure their futures.
“I think going into a trade school is a great opportunity because, with a lot of trade schools and especially apprenticeship programs for the union, by the time you’re done, and you turn out as a journeyman, you don’t have any debt that you have to worry about,” Tiffany Younk, a Michigan-based ironworker, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday.
Tiffany said the “go to college” mindset was drilled into her mind as a younger millennial. She decided to deviate from that path and follow in her father’s footsteps in trade labor after realizing the traditional college route — and her earlier dreams of becoming a graphic designer as well as her later venture into nursing — weren’t satisfactory.
“I told her, ‘You can be whatever the hell you want,'” Robert Younk told Fox News Digital. “And I think that women can be whatever they want.”
ALABAMA TRADE SCHOOL OFFERS STUDENTS AN ASSOCIATE’S DEGREE AND A CHANCE AT HOME OWNERSHIP
Robert, who retired from ironworking in January, said he spent approximately 35 years in the trade. When asked to give advice for young adults who are on the fence about enrolling in trade school, he said it’s “the only way to go.”
“Back when I was growing up in the ‘60s and early ’70s, it was preached back then by my father, ‘trade schools, trade schools, trade schools.’ We didn’t have the money to go to trade school, but we lived 250 miles north of the big cities, up in the country, so it wasn’t an option up here,” he said.
Robert praised a multimillion dollar training center his union funds.
“I’m sure quite a few of the ironworkers across the country have [something] like our training center,” he said. “We have a multimillion dollar training facility. We could teach these young kids anything from welding to rod tying and conveyor work, putting a building together and working with cranes, and they can come out of that four years later not in debt.”
With skyrocketing college costs, it’s a far less expensive option than earning a traditional four-year degree.
“We paid very little for our tuition. I think it was like $180 a year,” Tiffany explained,” I think $96,000 is what it costs to send somebody through our apprenticeship, and that’s not my debt. Collectively, [as a union] we all pay for that together, so I think trade school or an apprenticeship is a great avenue to go down.”
MIKE ROWE CALLS GEN Z THE NEXT ‘TOOLBELT GENERATION’ AMID INCREASING VOCATIONAL ENROLLMENT
Tiffany and Robert were among the thousands of trade workers who poured their time and effort into renovating Michigan Central Station, a historical landmark in Detroit slated to reopen this summer.
In the process, they bridged the gap between work and family, working together as a dynamic father-daughter duo.
“There are a lot of sons out there who work with fathers sometimes, but you very rarely ever see a father-daughter team,” Robert told Fox News Digital.
“I know a couple of women in our trade that’ve gotten a chance to work with their father but for a short time. Either they retired or they got on different jobs.”
The two spent three years together in the field, and Robert used his background in welding to train Tiffany.
AS GEN Z OPTS OUT OF BLUE-COLLAR WORK IN AMERICA, EXPERT SHARES BENEFITS OF LEARNING A TRADE
“She got good at it, and she’ll never have to worry about a job ever again,” he said. “As far as any kind of welding job, she’s good at it, and she’ll stay good at it.”
“I actually postponed my retirement by three years just to work with her,” he added.
Tiffany said her father was one of her biggest influences when she considered entering iron work. It had been a part of her life from an early age, she recalled, noting she had spent time with Robert on job sites since she was about three or four years old.
“Around that time, when I was three or four, I would spend the weekends with him in our shop up north at home, learning how to weld, and doing that kind of stuff with him,” she added.
They each described a sense of pride in their work, of being able to point to the buildings they helped construct and knowing they had contributed to something significant.
“Nothing I have felt so far that matches that,” Tiffany said. “And it’s just really neat to contribute to something.”
[Fox Business] EV owner and car enthusiast says all electric push was ‘foolish’, predicts hybrids will be better transition
The rapid push to adopt electric vehicles (EV) as the primary mode of transportation in American society is slowing and one auto expert and car enthusiast predicts hybrid vehicles will be the way forward.
David Tracy, a former auto engineer and co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Autopian, a car enthusiast website, told Fox News Digital that the future of electric vehicles lies with hybrids because they provide users with both an electric and gas-powered option at any given time. Tracy said he is a proponent of EVs, but also described himself as a diehard gasoline car fan, and was candid about the upsides, as well as the downsides, to owning an EV.
Tracy said the practicality of an EV depends on an individual’s circumstances, what kind of driving they do and where they live. He believes it will be a long time before the U.S. has the infrastructure and consumer compliance to completely switch over to EVs, especially because one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption is charging availability. For drivers who don’t have access to an EV charging station where they live, for example, he said a hybrid is the way to go.
“I think, ultimately, the push is to reduce CO2 emissions,” Tracy said. “That means independent of whatever method you used to get there, we got to reduce emissions. So some automakers are focusing on hybrids, some automakers are focusing on electric cars. The overall goal, though, is to reduce emissions through whatever means necessary.”
In the coming years, he predicts the auto industry is going to be pushing more hybrids because “the marketplace has spoken.”
“The interest in electric cars is still there, it’s still growing, but it’s not growing as fast as it did before and that indicates that people want hybrids,” he said. “A lot of automakers … they said, ‘No, we’re done with hybrids, we’re going straight to electric cars.’ That, I think, was a bit foolish. People are not ready.”
“Not everyone’s ready to go fully electric, and everybody knows that,” he added. “But offering hybrids, I think, is where we’re going to go in the near term and it’s going to be a combination of fully electric cars – and for many people that’s a great solution – and it’s going to be hybrids. I think between those two, it’s going to eventually converge to electric, but you’ll have hybrids in the interim as the infrastructure builds up.”
Tracy owns eight cars, two of which are electric, a first generation Nissan Leaf and a BMW i3 with a gasoline range extender built in.
“They’re great on maintenance, they’re fun to drive, they’re cheap, you can get them reasonably cheaply because of federal rebates,” he said. “If you have a place to charge, they’re fantastic. Now, some of the downsides, of course, the infrastructure isn’t perfect, and especially if you don’t own a Tesla, there’s some planning that you’re going to have to factor into any trip. If you want to buy a new one, even with rebates, they’re a little bit pricier, but they’re basically getting there in terms of cost parity.”
But, he admitted that “there’s no question there’s still some work that needs to go into making sure that charging stations are operating and available.”
“I wasn’t really concerned because I live in the L.A. area where the infrastructure is not that bad. It’s actually pretty decent relative to the rest of the country,” he said. “Once you really arm yourselves with the right [charging locator] apps, you can actually not only know where pretty much all the charging stations are, but what is their reputation for uptime.”
“If you live in a place where gas costs are high, it’s great to not have to pay $5 a gallon or even $3, nobody likes paying for gas, so that’s great,” he added. “If you can charge at home like I can or at work, man, having an electric car is a godsend, especially here in California where gas is over $5 … It’s a such a great thing.”
He said that experience changes if you live in an apartment, for example, and you don’t have a place to plug in consistently.
“You could go to a public charger and plug in once a week and try to remember to do that, and some people do that, [but] it depends on where you live, that may not be something that really works well for you,” he said.
Tracy said it is important that people weigh factors in their lifestyle, including the EV infrastructure in the community and the type of driving they do, before they buy an EV. But, he argues an EV is a great option for people simply commuting to and from work every day.
“I live in Los Angeles, where a 50-mile commute takes like 2.5 hours, so on any given day of the week, I’m not really driving more than 50 miles and I have a place at home where I can charge,” he said. “An electric car for me is perfect, and it’s actually way better than a gasoline car for someone in my circumstances, but that may not be the case for everyone.”
Tracy said that for a road trip, for example, drivers have to break the EV camp into Tesla and non-Tesla models “because Tesla’s infrastructure is so far beyond that of really anyone else’s.”
“Luckily, Tesla is starting to share that infrastructure with automakers,” he said. “You can do road trips in Teslas, it’s not a big deal, they charge pretty quickly. You have to plan it more than if you had a gas car, but it’s not really a big deal.”
CAR DEALERS THROW COLD WATER ON ELECTRIC VEHICLES VERSUS GAS OPTIONS: ‘I WOULDN’T FEEL SAFE’
“If you don’t have Tesla’s supercharger capability, you have to plan it better,” he added. “You have to make sure you’re using your [charging locator] apps and, yeah, it’s a game of planning and some people don’t have the patience for that.”
Tracy also discussed how maintenance is “much easier” when it comes to an EV.
“You don’t have to do an oil change ever, you don’t have to even do brakes pretty much ever because it uses the motor as a regenerative brake, so it slows you down using the motor instead of the actual brake pads,” he said. “There are some challenges, but man, there are some real benefits, too.”
“You won’t have dumb things like [dealing with] the transmission failing and camshaft position sensors failing, it’s just that much simpler to maintain,” he added.
Tracy said he is aware many Americans aren’t ready to make the jump to an EV, which is one of the main reasons he thinks hybrids are an even better answer.
“If you don’t have a place to charge it every day, the idea of having only an electric car, there are lots of people who are kind of just not ready for it yet,” he said. “They’re skeptics and I think a hybrid is a great transition for those people.”
Despite the EV push and the hybrid demand, Tracy said America is a country that was built around gasoline cars and products and he recognizes that many consumers aren’t eager to make the switch to an EV.
“If you don’t feel like doing it, if you don’t feel like driving an EV, no one’s taking your gasoline car away,” he said. “That’s not going to happen. You may find that the new cars at the dealership, more of them are going to become electrified. You might have to choose a hybrid, which you will like, by the way, I guarantee it. If you’re going from a gas car to a hybrid, especially if it’s an automatic transmission, they’re great cars these days, so it’s like it’s not really going to feel like a hit as long as there’s a hybrid option.”
[Fox Business] Google parent Alphabet delivers first-ever dividend; shares soar
Google parent company Alphabet joined a handful of rival tech giants paying dividends, announcing its first-ever planned payout during its latest quarterly results, which were driven by momentum in search and plans to be even more dominant in AI.
The $0.20 cash dividend will be paid June 17 to shareholders of record as of June 10 for all three classes of company shares A, B and C. The search giant also authorized $70 billion in new share repurchases. The company is sitting on $108 billion in cash.
“We’ve had a share repurchase program for quite some time that we’ve been growing over the years. And we felt, as I said, that this further strengthens our overall capital return program. You know, to be clear, I’ve talked about the capital allocation framework for quite some time, and it does remain the same”, Ruth Porat, Google President and Chief Investment Officer told FOX Business’ Susan Li.
Porat was most recently CFO, and a search remains underway for her replacement in that role.
Shares rallied in after-hours trading, sending the market value past $2 trillion and adding to the 11% run-up this year.
CEO Sundar Pichai doubled down on the company’s commitment to advancing AI throughout its businesses after revenue topped $80 billion, up 15% from a year ago, and profits jumped 61% to $1.89 per share.
ORACLE WILL RELOCATE HEADQUARTERS TO NEW CITY
“It was a great quarter led by strong performance from Search, YouTube and Cloud. Today, I want to share how we are thinking about the business and the opportunity more broadly. Of course, that’s heavily focused on AI and search” Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, told investors on the earnings conference call.
Sundar recently made headlines for firing a group of workers who staged anti-Israel protests that led to protests for other causes in the office. In a detailed memo, he said such acts would not be tolerated in the workplace.
GOOGLE FIRES WORKERS WHO PROTESTED IN THE OFFICE
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which is also in the AI race, initiated a $0.50 cent dividend earlier this year, which was paid March 26. Facebook’s parent company reported results Wednesday, Zuckerberg warned heavy AI spending may take a while to pay off.
“As we’re scaling CapEx and energy expenses for AI, we’ll continue focusing on operating the rest of our company efficiently, but, realistically, even with shifting many of our existing resources to focus on AI, we’ll still grow our investment envelope meaningfully before we make much revenue from some of these products,” he told analysts and investors tuned into the call.
Shares tumbled 10.56%, the worst session since Oct. 27, 2022. Shares have still gained over 24% this year.
Other tech giants paying dividends include Apple and Microsoft. Amazon remains the holdout.
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