The 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake occurred last month, which (in)famously struck the San Francisco Bay area before the third game of the 1989 Bay Bridge World Series between the Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants. The quake measured 6.9 on the Richter scale and caused upwards of $12 billion in insured and uninsured damages, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Due to the coverage of the game, which was about two hours from beginning, it was one of the first natural disasters captured in real time on television as it occurred.

The anniversary was marked last month by Risk Management Solutions (RMS), which released a report that modeled a 7.2 magnitude earthquake along the Peninsula segment of the San Andreas Fault, which is located in the San Francisco area. Amongst other conclusions, it estimated that a quake of that size could cause $4 billion in losses due to residential damage, and $12 billion in commercial losses.

Perhaps scarier than billions in losses is another figure in RMS' report: the residential earthquake insurance take-up rate across California is estimated at 12 percent — an unforgivably low figure. Even at its peak, earthquake insurance take-up rates barely reached 36 percent, RMS said. Let's forget about Loma Prieta for a minute. Since then, the last earthquake to cause serious property damage was the Northridge Earthquake in 1994. It's been all quiet on the western coast since then, with just six statistically significant quakes occurring, none of which caused notable damage on a grand scale.