San Diego County -- indeed all of California -- is an orthopedic
basket case. For millions of years, the ground beneath us has
been shattered by slow but sure, incremental changes that can be
read, by subtle observations, in the jumbled topography existing
here now. Tectonic forces have bent, broken, displaced, and
distorted our county's granitic bones; fractured its backbone
(the Peninsular Range of mountains); sliced and crumpled its
sedimentary skin; and altered the circulation of its surface
water. While California's most wrenching and violent movements
tend to take place east and north of here, close to the great
San Andreas Fault, even coastal San Diego bears the obvious
marks of a landscape broken into sliding strips during
geologically recent time. Faults with monikers such as Coronado,
Silver Strand, Rose Canyon, Florida Canyon, and Texas Street cut
north-south across the geologist's maps. Most are considered to
be relatively moribund, but not so the Rose Canyon Fault, which
may muster a magnitude 6.