The earthquake in Washington obviously was the government's fault.

A fracture in the earth's crust where adjacent blocks of stone formations have shifted relative to one another.

Faults can extend for hundreds of miles. Perhaps the most famous is the "San Andreas Fault", which is 600 miles long, from the Mohave Desert to the Pacific Coast, north of San Francisco. It was the sudden shift of this fault that caused the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.