The good news, according to Doug Nyman, is that the trans-Alaska oil pipeline survived a 7.9 magnitude earthquake on November 3. The temblor "struck Alaska's interior, producing a 145-mile-long crack across the landscape and sending boats bobbing on lakes more than 3,000 miles away in Louisiana," reports today's San Diego Union Tribune. Doug was the pipeline's seismic design coordinator from 1973 to 1977.

The bad news is that we still have to worry about the oil spill that might happen if an even bigger quake shakes the pipeline, which crosses the Denali fault -- all the more so, given the wishful thinking that seems to have informed the pipeline's construction in the first place. "Before Nov. 3, seismologists didn't think the Denali fault could produce a really big earthquake, even though it had historically been very active, said Roger , state seismologist for the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska," reports the newspaper. "Indeed it was a sleeping giant so far," Hansen said.