Jim Berkland County Geologist for Santa Clara County from 1973 until he retired in 1994. Berkland's predictions have been either self-published in his newsleter or website, or announced in various interviews or speaking engagements. His notoriety arose from an interview published in the Gilroy Dispatch on October 13, 1989, where he predicted that an earthquake with a magnitude between 3.5 and 6.0 would occur in the San Francisco Bay Area between October 14 and October 21. The 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake occurred on October 17, just four days later. Berkland claims that government officials told him not to make any more predictions,
1989 Loma Prieta earthquake is the most studied fault on Earth. Andrew Lawson, a geologist from the University of California, Berkeley, had named the fault after the San Andreas Lake (prior to the occurrence of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) and later led an investigation into that event. The San Andreas Fault ruptured for a length of during the 1906 shock, both to the north of San Francisco and to the south in the Santa Cruz Mountains region. Several long term forecasts for a large shock along the San Andreas Fault in that area had been made public prior to 1989 (the event and