[mountainlion]

Good idea. Blow up all the buildings along the fault line and you can reduce earthquake damage to nothing.

[BwanaNdege]

In case you're worried about earthquakes in Jacksonville (Fla or NC?)

HAYWARD, Calif. — Every time the ground trembles in the San Francisco Bay Area, people ask themselves: Could this be the big one?

[MHGinTN]

Hmmm, and yet over a million tonnes of 110 story buildings supposedly slammed down on bedrock on Manhattan Island and the seismic imprint barely registered?

[TEXOKIE]

I found this article a number of months ago and was fascinated by the information of there being a tectonic plate in the Gulf Coast which is causative of the fault zones running not only through the Missouri New Madrid complex, but is also the explanation for the fault system running across Florida to South Carolina.

http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2002/11nov/rift_zone.cfm

[Darren McCarty]

Plate tectonics is really a new science that has been around 100 years, starting with the SF quake which was the first major case study. Related Volcanism had its major push with Mt St Helens that rewrote the books on so called extinct volcanoes.

While most of the plates and many of the faults have been mapped, quakes in the central/eastern US aren't yet explained. This is as good of a theory as any other I've read.

I wouldn't want to be near New Madrid and Pacific NW for their next big ones.