Smith: Credible guy says, 'That's my fault'

The earthquake of 16 days ago still has Eugene Boudreau’s head shaking.

Boudreau’s an 80-year-old consulting geologist from Sebastopol who believes to his core that he long ago discovered the geological fault to which he attributes that temblor and also the magnitude-5.0 Napa quake of September 2000.

“It should be called Boudreau’s Fault,” he said. He’s fairly disgusted that the U.S. Geological Survey hasn’t done more to investigate and map the fault, and that Napa County officials shrugged off his insistence that they need to study more seriously their area’s vulnerability to earthquakes.

This isn’t a new quest for Boudreau. In an interview days after Napa’s earthquake 14 years ago, he showed me proof that he had notified authorities that he’d discovered a previously unmapped fault while overseeing the drilling of a water well northwest of Napa in 1976.

In 1983, a USGS geologist observed in a report that Boudreau had indeed located near Napa a fault that “probably extends northwestward at least as far as St. Helena.”

But Boudreau’s fault doesn’t appear on maps. When the quake of 2000 was reported to have originated with an uncharted fault, he howled.

Fourteen years later, he says he feels certain the recent quake happened not on the West Napa Fault but on the fault that should bear his name.

Suddenly the Napa/Vallejo region is drawing a great deal of attention from earthquake scientists. Already a senior USGS geologist is saying it appears the region is far more quake-vulnerable than previously believed.

He’s been quoted as saying Napa Valley’s active faults are “not very well known, they haven’t been very well mapped,” in part because they’re the “weak sibling” of California’s larger and better-known faults.

See why Boudreau’s head is shaking? Even before the 2000 quake, he pleaded that Napa County officials look deeper into the area’s faults and the risks they present.

LUCKY YOU if you never need the new emergency department/trauma center that Memorial Hospital celebrated Monday with a luncheon for the people who donated more than $11 million to build it.

Among those cheered were major donor Norma Person and the late Dr. John McDonald. The hospital’s helipad will be named for McDonald to honor his pioneering work in emergency medicine and his family’s donations to the expansion.

Others thanked were Henry and Eileen Trione, and three docs who followed their late dad, Leon Schmidt, into medicine and raised big money for the project.

Visit its garden patio and see something pretty sweet: artwork donated by builder Wright Construction in the memory of wife, mother and hospital volunteer Peggy Wright.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.