(Daily Signal)—Sunny skies, blue oceans, and palm trees are hallmarks of Southern California, but beneath the picturesque landscape lies a network of faults capable of turning deadly in a matter of seconds.
Los Angeles saw that threat firsthand in 1994, when the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake struck the San Fernando Valley, killing dozens of people, injuring thousands, and causing billions of dollars in damage.
More than three decades later, the question remains: Is Los Angeles ready for the next major earthquake?
California officials say yes.
“California is ready to respond when a major earthquake strikes,” a spokesperson for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services told the Daily Signal.
“The state has made sustained investments to protect communities, including more than $125 million for earthquake early warning, grants to help communities reduce seismic risks, and increased emergency response staffing,” the spokesperson said.
The Office of Emergency Services also pointed to investments in seismic retrofits, critical infrastructure, roads and bridges, upgraded communications, and specialized search-and-rescue capabilities.
But experts who spoke with the Daily Signal say being prepared does not mean California will escape widespread damage.
Caltech seismologist Allen Husker said the region is better prepared than it once was and praised efforts to prepare first responders, but he cautioned that the location and severity of an earthquake could overwhelm even extensive preparations.
“Definitely it’s more prepared than it has been, and it’s slowly getting more and more prepared over time,” he said.
“Earthquakes, depending upon how they occur and where they occur … will still probably cause significant damage,” Husker said.
“Just as we saw with the LA fires … you can prepare a lot and still things go awry.”
Aging Water Infrastructure Another Vulnerability
Edward Ring, director of water and energy policy at the California Policy Center, pointed to the city’s aging water system as another potential vulnerability, saying some of the city’s water infrastructure is approaching the end of its useful life.
“The very idea that we’re … delivering water under pressure through pipes that are 100 years old—sooner or later, they have to be replaced or they’re going to fail,” Ring told the Daily Signal.
According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s 2025-26 Water Infrastructure Plan, more than 30% of the city’s roughly 6,800 miles of distribution mainlines are over 80 years old.
“What we’ve got is a system that’s aging to the point where we’re going to see increasing failures,” Ring said.
Water mains are a major concern during an earthquake, particularly because earthquakes can spark fires, creating an even greater problem if damaged pipes disrupt the water needed to fight them.
The State’s Fault System
But the earthquake Los Angeles needs to prepare for may not necessarily be the massive San Andreas Fault event Californians commonly envision as “the Big One.”
California has more than 700 named recently active faults, with more than 300 in Southern California capable of producing a magnitude 6 or larger earthquake.
While the San Andreas is the state’s longest fault system, the destruction an earthquake causes also depends on where it strikes and how close the shaking is to densely populated communities.
“Everybody always talks about San Andreas,” Husker said. “The other thing is just that there’s kind of faults everywhere. There’s a lot of them, and so it’s not just the San Andreas.”
Northridge itself demonstrated that danger.
Husker noted that the 6.7 earthquake caused extensive damage in part because it occurred directly beneath a populated portion of the Los Angeles area.
“The distance makes such a huge difference,” Husker said. “So even smaller earthquakes, if they’re right under the city, can cause a lot of damage.”
Another challenge is what happens to Los Angeles after the shaking stops.
Husker noted concerns that building codes can allow structures to survive an earthquake without necessarily ensuring that they remain usable afterward, meaning California would potentially have billions in repairs on its hands.
This was noted in a report by the San Francisco Chronicle, which estimated the destruction from a magnitude 7.8 earthquake could amount to $1 trillion.
The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services acknowledged that the scale of a catastrophic earthquake remains California’s greatest challenge, with transportation, utilities, communications, housing, and other essential systems having the potential to be disrupted simultaneously across a large region.
Ring, however, said that the reality of a major earthquake makes complete preparedness nearly impossible.
“I think it would be unfair to claim that California hasn’t done much,” Ring said.
“The real question is … what’s a reasonable amount of preparation and have we done that?”
For now, California continues preparing for a disaster it knows will eventually come. Whether those preparations are enough won’t truly be known until the ground starts shaking.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.