
Tamara Sussman
Los Angeles is constantly threatened by a variety of natural disasters: raging wildfires, giant mudslides, and—above all others—earthquakes. The arrival of “the big one” is generally regarded as a matter of when, not if, for Southern Californians. Despite that devastating inevitability, life goes on, more or less blissfully, and existential dread is largely sublimated or enacted in an endless procession of Hollywood spectacles. (Roland Emmerich’s 2012, in which the City of Angels slides swiftly into the Pacific Ocean, is only the latest.) Less dramatic, if no less frightening, is a list of recent