Today's Springfield News-Leader asks whether Missouri will be ready when "the New Madrid earthquake fault in southeast Missouri suddenly rips itself apart." Had the reporter checked with UMR's David Rogers, he would have explained that New Madrid Seismic Zone quakes pack quite a whallop.
Rogers suggests officials focus on preparing for a magnitude 6.6 to 6.8 quake -- not the 8.0 "big one" series of temblors in 1811-1812 that shook the Midwest and rang church bells in Boston. A 6.6- to 6.8-magnitude quake, similar to what took place in 1895 (illustrated at right and compared to the 6.7 earthquake in L.A. a decade ago), is more likely and could do significant damage, Rogers says.
"It's in our face here and now, not 200 or 300 years from now. This one could happen tomorrow." Rogers and several graduate students have been modeling fictional seismic events of approximately the size of an1895 quake that registered 6.6 on the Richter Scale. As part of their research, they have tried to estimate the impact such a quake would have on long-span bridges across the Missouri River. The preliminary results are sobering, Rogers says. Data indicates ground shaking would be magnified about 600 percent within the flood plain of the Missouri River, a development that would predict soil liquefaction and cause most of Missouri's existing long-span bridges to collapse. "You don't need a big earthquake to do significant damage in Missouri," Rogers says.
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