* * * * *
                                        
                                Tick tick tick …
                                        
> Connoisseurs of disaster know that the official map of seismic hazards in
> the United States paints a fat red bull's-eye in the middle of the country,
> right where Missouri dovetails into Arkansas:
> 
> FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) expects a major earthquake in
> the central United States to be the costliest natural disaster in American
> history [1], which as a California tech worker wounds my professional
> pride. We've spent decades building America's most valuable industry on top
> of a seismic powder keg, only to find ourselves outdone by a bunch of
> Midwestern cotton farmers. How could they erect a more precarious house of
> cards than Silicon Valley?
> 
> To find out, last spring I joined a group of Midwestern geologists and
> fellow-travelers on a sort-of-annual  field trip to the New Madrid Seismic
> Zone [2]. The goal of these trips, organized by Phyllis Steckel of
> Earthquake Insights, is to develop an eye for the kinds of structures and
> landscapes at greatest risk in a central US earthquake, to soak up the
> seismic ambiance of the place, to take killer ?before? pictures for when
> the Big One comes, and above all to put the fear of God into actuaries and
> insurance assessors, the only people who have enough economic leverage to
> make painful and expensive seismic retrofitting happen in the central
> United States.
> 

Via Hacker News [3], “Confrontin g New Madrid (Idle Words) [4]”

Just when you thought it was safe in the middle of the country, **NOPE!**
There's a big old bulls eye [5] right where Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois,
Tennessee and Kentucky all meet, just waiting for the Big One [6] to strike
(probably just after the Cascadia subduction zone goes [7] do doubt).

[1] http://geog.ucsb.edu/mobile/events/department-news/995/light-damage-
[2] http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/external/reports/05HQGR0014.pdf
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9904824
[4] http://www.idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm
[5] http://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/products/conterminous/2014/HazardMap
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stdi-1tIUhM&t=24s
[7] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2015/07/13.1

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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