Let's sell the entire Berkeley campus on the open market. That utterly prime real estate would probably bring several billion dollars. Use some of the money to build UC Merced, ship all those Berkeley professors and students off to the new campus, and then share the profit among the other campuses. Advice on what to do before and after a quake, from the San Francisco Chronicle , October 1999. Before the earthquake Preparing your home Governor's Office of Emergency Services One major contributor to amount of damage in an earthquake is the strength of the soil and sediment under a structure.
Some soils can turn to liquid gel in an earthquake.
This site has maps showing the danger of liquefaction in many of the earthquake-prone areas of California. At this site you can see what sort of damage a city can expect if a fault you pick goes off. Pretty neat stuff. New maps show areas of the East Bay that would be susceptible to liquefaction in the big earthquake that may be coming soon along the Hayward Fault. And here are the maps , as well as others for San Francisco and Southern California.