This map shows earthquakes in the New Madrid and Wabash Valley seismic zones as circles. Red circles indicate earthquakes that occurred from 1974 to 2002, with magnitudes larger than 2.5. Green circles show earthquakes that occurred prior to 1974. Larger circles represent larger earthquakes.
It's a bleak scenario. A massive earthquake along the New Madrid fault kills or injures 60,000 people in Tennessee. A quarter of a million people are homeless. The Memphis airport - the country's biggest air terminal for packages - goes off-line. Major oil and gas pipelines across Tennessee rupture, causing shortages in the Northeast. In Missouri, another 15,000 people are hurt or dead. Cities and towns throughout the central U.S. lose power and water for months. Losses stack up to hundreds of billions of dollars.
Fortunately, this magnitude 7.7 temblor is not real but rather a scenario imagined by the Mid-America Earthquake Center and the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University. The goal of their 2008 analysis was to plan for a modern recurrence of quakes that happened along the New Madrid fault more than 200 years ago, in 1811 and 1812.
No one alive has experienced a major earthquake in the Midwest, yet geologists say it's only a matter of time. That puts a lot of uncertainty on disaster officials. Their earthquake precautions - quake-resistant building codes, for example - have never been reality tested. Some question if enough has been done to strengthen existing buildings, schools and other infrastructure. It is difficult to prepare for a geological catastrophe the public cannot see and has never experienced.
"We mostly react to disasters, and it's been extremely rare that we get ahead of things," said Claire Rubin, a disaster response specialist in Arlington, Va. "A lot of hard problems don't get solved. They get moved around and passed along."
Comment: This 'quake' was reported by the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre to have been magnitude 4.3.
The following eyewitness report has some interesting additional information: And here: Loud bangs followed by rumbling suggests that it might have been another overhead cometary explosion. In addition, the sound can often seem very close because of the electrophonic nature of meteors. Objects that are close by will transduce the meteor shockwave into an audible sound.
There was another fireball significant event over the UK and Ireland just five days previously, and it does appear to be raining fireballs the world over...