Fault: Why the Ground Breaks, and What It Does to Cities

By Silas Rivers

Two buildings on the same street. Same decade, same ground, same ninety seconds of shaking. One was demolished. The other was reoccupied in a fortnight.

In 2010 two earthquakes struck six weeks apart. The one in Chile released five hundred times more energy than the one in Haiti, and killed about one three-hundredth as many people. Neither country chose its geology. One of them had spent eighty years choosing everything else.

Fault tells the great earthquakes hour by hour and explains the mechanism inside each one. Every chapter starts with something that happened to real people and ends with the physics that did it.

Inside you will find:

- The farm fence in California that moved six metres and stayed perfectly straight
- Why the ground can turn to liquid and lay whole apartment blocks on their side, undamaged
- A tsunami in Japan traced back three centuries to a forest of dead trees in Washington
- The refuge in Tokyo where thirty-eight thousand people died in a few minutes
- The city destroyed by an earthquake four hundred kilometres out to sea, which chose its victims by their height
- Why pulling a trapped person out of the rubble can stop their heart
- The American state that went from two earthquakes a year to nine hundred without moving an inch
- And why no fault is ever overdue, whatever you have read

Twenty-eight short chapters, sixteen hand drawn diagrams where a picture says it better than a sentence, a box of surprising facts in every chapter, and a closing thought. The book ends with a quiz and a page of sources.

For readers of Simon Winchester, and for anyone who has ever wondered what the building they are sitting in would do.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HJDXSYVR
• ISBN13: 9798173256812
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 146 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"