Along with the San Francisco Chronicle's SPECIAL EARTHQUAKE CENTENNIAL PAGE, there are a great number of other articles and pieces everyday added to the paper and online at the special Page. (For my mother, I'm sending you the hardcopy papers in the mail, but there's so much online that you should check it all out too). Here's some articles of note from yesterday and today, Day 3: The Quake Damage.

And I loved this article entitled Risk of quakes adds spice to life. Here's some excerpts of this great piece:

"I'm nervous just being here right now," he said.

Chicken.

"San Francisco isn't for scaredy-cats," says social commentator Ralph Keyes, author of "Chancing It: Why We Take Risks."

Hundreds of thousands of people make San Francisco their home, and thousands more come in every day to work. Unlike farmers in flood plains or tornado corridors, who depend on their land for survival, most of us could live and work in less-risky places. We could go to, say, Minneapolis or Chicago or Phoenix, cities not likely to be devastated by natural disasters.

Yet here we are. There probably has not been a San Franciscan since 1906 who hasn't been asked, "Aren't you frightened? How can you live in place that's going to fall into the ocean one of these days?"...

"In life there are no guarantees," Garaventa said. "Every day there's a risk, so you have to live life to the fullest. You could walk outside right now and get hit by a bus. You just have to pick a place you love and enjoy it." He's right about walking outside and getting hit, by the way. From 1995 to 2002, 192 people were hit and killed by cars, trucks or buses in San Francisco. The number during that time killed by quakes: 0. (In the 1989 quake, 63 people died, and 3,757 were injured.)...

It is also true that people can't prepare for every risk, so we choose what to fear and how much to fear it. In the Bay Area, we know perfectly well we live atop a brittle, unsettled slab of earth. We know it could crack wide open at any moment. We also know there is nothing we can do about it, short of moving away. And most of us can't imagine living anywhere else.

So we live in denial to some degree -- how could we get through the day if we didn't? But we also know that nobody, no matter where they live, escapes death. Something's going to kill every one of us someday. The point is to live as well as we can while we can.

And if we do meet our end in an earthquake that swallows up the most beautiful city in America, what a way to go.