PART ONE 



SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ATTACKED 



Basking in the sunshine of prosperity, with its 

 machinery running smoothly and satisfactorily, 

 Southern California has been suddenly shocked, not 

 by one of the occasional temblors that give variety to 

 its otherwise peaceful life, but by the utterances of a 

 geological professor, who, speaking from a position of 

 academic authority, sends forth an emphatic prediction 

 that a great earthquake is soon to take place in South- 

 ern California, implying Los Angeles, within a speci- 

 fied time of from three to ten years, and is to be of 

 destructive power like that which afflicted a sister 

 city in 1906. 



During the past year, Dr. Bailey Willis, a well- 

 known geologist, went before the Board of Fire Under- 

 writers of the Pacific and also before the National 

 Board of Underwriters in New York and made these 

 startling and alarming predictions. The immediate 

 financial result was the raising of insurance rates in 

 Los Angeles from one hundred per cent to as high as 

 twenty-two hundred per cent. The cost of this advance 

 in earthquake insurance rates has probably exceeded in 

 dollars and cents many times the total losses from 

 earthquakes in California within the period of human 

 history or those apt to be incurred for hundreds of 

 years. 



