Whoa! That's what I call a big volcano.
Posted on 02/25/2006 9:38:10 AM PST by Strategerist
ST. LOUIS - Preparing for a catastrophic earthquake along the New Madrid fault is a priority, a FEMA official said Friday before a congressional field hearing on government readiness to handle natural disasters.
"New Madrid is at the top of the list," Michel Pawlowski, section chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said. "It's our primary objective."
Pawlowski told a congressional committee that FEMA has "significant concerns" for the potential of a catastrophic earthquake equal in magnitude to those that struck parts of the Mississippi River Valley in 1811-1812, and again in 1895. The estimated magnitude of those earthquakes is 7.5 or 8. The probability of a magnitude 6 or larger earthquake is 25 percent to 50 percent over the next 50 years.
Even a magnitude 7 earthquake would destroy more than 60 percent of buildings in St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn., because most buildings predate building requirements aimed at resisting the shock, officials estimate.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Whoa! That's what I call a big volcano.
It is a "Whopper" for sure.
Of course here in CenTex we worry more about drought, wildfires and tornadoes.
Newspaper reports ofthetime say thay the Mississippi reversed course..flowed backwards upstream for some time..
I suggest a major think tank top secret Manhattan like government funded project to develop a "MAGIC WAND".
If successfully developed, whenever there is a catastrophic event either man-made or natural, all we have to do is WAVE IT and everything will be fixed.....no infrastructure damage, no physical suffering no mental anguish, no alternative healing, JUST WAVE it, and with a bit if incantation and all will be well!!!
< /sarcasm >
Strictly an estimate based on anecdotal and physical evidence.
Bush Fails To Prevent East Coast Blizzard
Minorities Hit Hardest
by Brian Williams
NBC 02/12/06
As President Bush and his staff cowered in the White House, the snow continued to pile up on the many poor and African American victims who could not afford to get out of town or to safety in Florida.
Crucial supplies of blankets, hot cocoa, popcorn and dark rum, so essential to surviving the stress of any major snowstorm, lay in stores undelivered.
"Where is the government? I need my sidewalk shoveled so I can get out to buy my danged lottery tickets!" said one D.C. resident from his living room.
"Why are we wasting money in Iraq when we could be spending it here on me?"
Progressive blogs blasted the President for his inaction. "We find the timing terribly suspicious, just as the Domestic Spying hearings kick into high gear, what happens? A major northeast Blizzard. Why now?" wrote one blogger.
Hearings into the Blizzards' effect on hearings are almost a certainty.
Howard Dean has suggested he will call for an investigation once his new medications kick in and John Kerry took a break from the sporting activities of the glamorous super-rich in some exotic locale (random choice: Ice Sailing in Finland) to call for new legislation outlawing snowstorms.
"The Republican Congress has dropped the ball once again. I have always been a staunch supporter of anti-snow legislation, except for certain locations where I ski. Snow has no business on our roads and the President and Congress knows that."
Calls for impeachment over "SnowGate" as some are calling it already are mounting as deeply as the snow itself, and what will be discovered underneath will prove to have a truly chilling effect on the Republicans, as the inevitable thaw proceeds. Or something like that.
More breaking news......
Al Sharpton wants an investigation as to why snow is ALWAYS white.
Cheney has stock in Tru-Value Hardware. Do you have any idea how many SNOW SHOVELS they sold today to the unsuspecting consumer?
I demand to know why FEMA has been so late in reacting to this storm. THEY KNEW IT WAS COMING! And yet they failed to have crews in place to fix the electricity as soon as it went off. It just shows that Bush and the Republicans just don't care about the people in the N.E. The Senate needs to investigate this with administration people under oath.
I'll bet that the great junior senator from N.Y. has opened the doors of her home to all of the heatless poor of her neighborhood and is busy baking cookies for them while her husband applies body heat to the nearly frozen teen-aged girls.
"What does FEMA think they can do?"
Whatever it takes for them and their sponsers to maintain power.Thats really all its about.
Grandstanding and reaching for great gobs of money.
Other problem is that in an earthquake on the SLC segment of the Wasatch Fault is that SLC is going to drop in elevation; meaning the lake is going pour into the city (Not some grand tsunami but you're going to have places that were once dry land under several feet of water.)
Yeah, a big problem is that most of the larger cities in Utah are built mostly on old lakebed. Not very stable.
There was another thread where I mentioned this and there were a couple of people from SLC (moved there recently, I think) who were doing the "What, EARTHQUAKES? Here?" routine.
Richter Scale came about in the 1920s..before that there was instrumentation (there are extant seismograph traces of the 1906 SF earthquake)....so for 1895 I believe there are actual records.
For quakes even older than that, like the 1811-1812 earthquakes, magnitudes have to be guestimated from a combo of maps showing the range of human "felt" reports and damage to structures (the Mercalli scale, in roman numerals) and physical evidence (how far a fault moved, how far away from the quake you have things like sand blows - where the shaking causes waterlogged sand to spill out on the ground from below, etc.)
These estimates are difficult and uncertain and you can get a lot of argument.
Interestingly most recently a lot of authors have reduced the magnitudes of the 1811-1812 New Madrid quakes from a lot of the really high estimates earlier; some have none of them being bigger than Magnitude 7.5.
My mega-disaster of choice is the onset of a renewed Ice Age.
All it would take is one lingering winter with heavy snow in Canada's north, in particular, northern Quebec.
Or so I am given to believe by climatologists.
It was interesting, to say the least.
I live in Southern California and I believe that we are more prepared for an earthquake than any place on Earth. We have proof -- the Northridge quake. 57 deaths is an amazingly low number for an earthquake of that size. I am 3 miles from the epicenter and had power and gas back within 1 day!
And then after that we continue to refine the rules and procedures. THey run earthquake drills here at least twice a year and sometimes more frequently.
We in California may screw a lot of things up, but when it comes to Earthquake Preparedness we are the leader in the world.
Oh, and everyone I know has water and food for at least a week. And flashlights in every room (except for the newbies).
You are probably correct. The area is not attuned to earthquake resistant design as is California. The damage assessment will be pretty easy.....condemn condemn condemn.
There is also an assumption that help can actually get there. That is a big assumption if transportation is disrupted.
Everything I have read says that when that happens - that is it for the Human Race.
Or did I misunderstand?
Now compare that map to a county result map for either the 2000 or 2004 presidential election. Note the overlap between the damage profile and the counties that voted democrat along the Mississippi, particularly if you extend the damage area a little further up and down the river.
Looking at the two maps, can you deny Karl Rove's earthquake machine is behind the proposed earthquake? ]
Link to a link only county election map:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm
Well, you have to keep some things in mind:
1) It wasn't THAT big of an earthquake; energy release, and general destructive power, goes up 32 times for each whole number of magnitude (it's simple ground motion that goes up 10 times), so a magnitude 7-7.2 earthquake in the LA Basin, which is quite possible, is a whole new ballgame compared to a M 6.7 earthquake.
2) In both the Northridge and the San Fernando earthquake of 1971 a great deal of the energy of the quake was directed into largely unpopulated areas of the hills.
3) Northridge occured at the perfect time of day to minimize deaths.
Right after Northridge a lot of Japanese were shaking their heads at those stupid unprepared Americans and how much destruction they suffered and acting smugly confident and proud about their own readiness.
Of course, precisely one year later they had 6,000 people killed in Kobe.
I saw a lot of fairly uninformed similar smugness over the Bam Iran and San Simeon earthquakes, which were of similar magnitude and fairly close to each other timewise, but of course had vastly different levels of destruction and death tolls; however one was DIRECTLY under a fairly good-sized city, and the other was basically in the middle of nowhere.
We're going to have an earthquake that kills thousands in this country, and likely within the next 20 years.
And a magnitude 235 quake would level the entire earth. Sheesh.
60 percent of buildings in St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn...
it's a start.
Don't get me wrong -- no one can stop the devestation that will happen. It is just we are more prepared than anyone else.
In building design, there are 2 ways to deal with earthquakes: flex or overbuild. The California approach of flex seems to be superior (witness Kobe).
But I am not smug, and thank God, neither are the people in charge of California earthquake preparedness. It still amazes me that every single overpass in California has been strengthened (I saw one in progress -- it is rhebar strung in a spring configuration and then concrete).
If we are smug, it is because we keep working at it -- it is our LACK of smugness that is what makes us prepared. An 8.0 at 2:30 pm in SoCal will kill thousands. An 8.0 in New York, Chicago, Memphis, Pittsburgh, etc. will kill millions.
And what about the week(s) after? How many people in Memphis have an earthquake kit with water, food, radio, etc?
I spend a lot of time on the road and I look at new brick buildings (for example) and say to myself, "won't last 10 seconds in a 5.0."
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