WHEC-TVA significant earthquake was felt throughout the northeast around 1:40 p.m.
Director of the Weston Observatory at Boston College Dr. John Ebel says the preliminary magnitude is 5.5. The center of the earthquake is about 30 miles north of Cumberland, Ontario.
the quake was felt throughout the northeast including Boston, Maine, New York, Canada, Buffalo, Rochester, Quebec, Ottowa, Toronto.
Wow. It's all falling apart. (the world, that is) We live on a fault line and every time there's a quake my wife freaks out. "We need to secure our hot water heater and take all those lanterns off the ledge," she say's. "It is secure," I say, and... "The lanterns are empty." If we ever have an earthquake we won't have any lights.
The bed rock is a significant factor on the range, and effect of a large quake. The eastern U.S. architecture is not well prepared for the next large quake. It was early morning when the ground started shaking in Cincinnati. Some slept through the tremors, while others were roused from their beds. A young physician felt it at his home and wrote that, “It was so violent as to agitate the loose furniture of our rooms; open partition doors that were fastened with falling latches; and throw off the tops of a few chimnies in the vicinity of the town.” The date was December 16, 1811—back when there were only a few “chimnies” in Cincinnati—and the physician was Daniel Drake, who would go on to help found the Medical College of Ohio.
Drake took great interest in the events he witnessed, logging detailed accounts of three more earthquakes in the Ohio River valley in the following weeks. In 1815, he published his observations in a book, Natural and Statistical View, or a Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country. Drake’s writing is considered by many to be the foundation of modern seismic study.
All four of the quakes he described originated in what would come to be known as the New Madrid Seismic Zone, an area that extends from northeast Arkansas through southern Illinois. There, the temblors that rattled Cincinnati were so powerful that they altered the course of the Mississippi River and leveled the pioneer town of New Madrid, Missouri, at the epicenter of the fourth and most powerful quake. Eyewitness accounts tell of fissures opening in the ground, forests sinking into the earth, and swamps rising. It’s believed that Tennessee’s 18,000-acre Reelfoot Lake was either formed or enlarged by the quakes.
If the technology had been available back then, it’s estimated the New Madrid quakes would have registered 7.8 to 8.1 on the Richter scale. That’s the same range as the earthquakes that wreaked havoc in central China last spring, toppling buildings, triggering landslides, and killing nearly 70,000 people. But the real power and scope of those early 19th century quakes is hard to gauge, since they occurred on the sparsely populated American frontier.
In 2006, FEMA officials told a congressional hearing that preparing for a major New Madrid quake was one of the agency’s top priorities, predicting that a strong quake could bring down 60 percent of the buildings in the cities of St. Louis and Memphis, as well as burst underground pipelines and compromise highways, bridges, and river traffic. But would that kind of destruction reach us? One concern Kilinc does have is our notoriously unstable hillsides. “In my opinion, the secondary effects of an earthquake are much more important, and one of the secondary effects of an earthquake is landslides,” he says. Cincinnati, he points out, “is a very landslide-prone area.”
Updated at: 06/23/2010 2:09 PM
ReplyDeleteWHEC-TVA significant earthquake was felt throughout the northeast around 1:40 p.m.
Director of the Weston Observatory at Boston College Dr. John Ebel says the preliminary magnitude is 5.5. The center of the earthquake is about 30 miles north of Cumberland, Ontario.
the quake was felt throughout the northeast including Boston, Maine, New York, Canada, Buffalo, Rochester, Quebec, Ottowa, Toronto.
/lmao...
ReplyDeleteOkay, I know this *shouldn't* be funny, but on one of our news sites someone posted:
"Good thing they don't happen around here often or Albany would make us pay an earthquake tax."
Wow. It's all falling apart. (the world, that is)
ReplyDeleteWe live on a fault line and every time there's a quake my wife freaks out. "We need to secure our hot water heater and take all those lanterns off the ledge," she say's.
"It is secure," I say, and... "The lanterns are empty."
If we ever have an earthquake we won't have any lights.
The bed rock is a significant factor on the range, and effect of a large quake. The eastern U.S. architecture is not well prepared for the next large quake.
ReplyDeleteIt was early morning when the ground started shaking in Cincinnati. Some slept through the tremors, while others were roused from their beds. A young physician felt it at his home and wrote that, “It was so violent as to agitate the loose furniture of our rooms; open partition doors that were fastened with falling latches; and throw off the tops of a few chimnies in the vicinity of the town.” The date was December 16, 1811—back when there were only a few “chimnies” in Cincinnati—and the physician was Daniel Drake, who would go on to help found the Medical College of Ohio.
Drake took great interest in the events he witnessed, logging detailed accounts of three more earthquakes in the Ohio River valley in the following weeks. In 1815, he published his observations in a book, Natural and Statistical View, or a Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country. Drake’s writing is considered by many to be the foundation of modern seismic study.
All four of the quakes he described originated in what would come to be known as the New Madrid Seismic Zone, an area that extends from northeast Arkansas through southern Illinois. There, the temblors that rattled Cincinnati were so powerful that they altered the course of the Mississippi River and leveled the pioneer town of New Madrid, Missouri, at the epicenter of the fourth and most powerful quake. Eyewitness accounts tell of fissures opening in the ground, forests sinking into the earth, and swamps rising. It’s believed that Tennessee’s 18,000-acre Reelfoot Lake was either formed or enlarged by the quakes.
If the technology had been available back then, it’s estimated the New Madrid quakes would have registered 7.8 to 8.1 on the Richter scale. That’s the same range as the earthquakes that wreaked havoc in central China last spring, toppling buildings, triggering landslides, and killing nearly 70,000 people. But the real power and scope of those early 19th century quakes is hard to gauge, since they occurred on the sparsely populated American frontier.
In 2006, FEMA officials told a congressional hearing that preparing for a major New Madrid quake was one of the agency’s top priorities, predicting that a strong quake could bring down 60 percent of the buildings in the cities of St. Louis and Memphis, as well as burst underground pipelines and compromise highways, bridges, and river traffic. But would that kind of destruction reach us?
One concern Kilinc does have is our notoriously unstable hillsides. “In my opinion, the secondary effects of an earthquake are much more important, and one of the secondary effects of an earthquake is landslides,” he says. Cincinnati, he points out, “is a very landslide-prone area.”