Gaffney owned 482 acres on Bodega Head, a strip of land jutting off from the California coast into the Pacific Ocean to form Bodega Bay. The narrow ridge of Bodega Head rests on the Pacific plate, while but the nearby town itself is on the North American plate. The fault can shift violently. During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, land close to the Head moved as much as 15 feet. Tremors are frequent. In 1958, Joel Hedgpeth, director of the University of the Pacific Marine Station at Dillon Beach, began raising cautions regarding both earthquake safety and marine wildlife health that would be affected by warm water effluent. In 1958, when Gaffney was 66, PG&amp;E proposed building a nuclear power plant on the tip of Bodega Head, virtually on top of the San Andreas Fault. Gaffney responded by inviting geologists, including Dr. Pierre St. Amand, who had studied the effects of the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile, at 9.4-9.6 on the moment magnitude scale, the largest ever recorded, as well as government inspectors, to visit the land and observe the actual visible fault lines. St. Amand's report stated that he couldn’t imagine a worse spot for a reactor.