The New Madrid Fault: a St. Louis Katrina?

It seems that public consciousness of the New Madrid Fault has been pretty low since Iben Browning's famed failed prediction of a quake way back in 1990. But though there has been considerable scientific speculation about the potency of the fault, there has been no definitive finding that the fault is inactive. On the contrary, the USGS still rates the chances of a catastrophic quake in the next fifty years as one in ten.

Back in the 1811-12 quakes, St. Louis was still lightly populated and Memphis did not even exist. An 8.0 earthquake such as occurred then, which was allegedly strong enough to ring church bells in Boston, would cause damage many orders of magnitude greater today, especially given Missouri's geologic susceptibility to liquefaction. The 1964 Good Friday Quake, which occurred in Alaska, caused $311M in damage, largely in Anchorage due to buildings not designed to withstand quakes. (The quake measured 9.0 on the Richter scale, which is ten times greater than an 8.0.) The 1994 Northridge Quake in LA, which was only a 6.7, caused twenty billion dollars in damage.

If we should learn any lesson from Katrina, it is that complacency can become a very expensive proposition. If the USGS is right, we have a lot riding on a one in ten shot, and yet who considers whether where he is living would be a good or bad area in the event of a quake, or whether his house would be likely to withstand an 8.0 on the Richter scale, or whether his neighborhood would be secure against looters? After the fact is too late to realize the imperative of survival.