I was driving down Interstate 55 on my way south between St. Louis & Memphis. On a whim, I took the Highway 62 exit west towards Lilbourn. I drove about half a mile down 62, slowing down when I passed the local school complex. I turned north, drove past the schools, and crossed the railroad tracks next to the first gravel road intersection. I drove down that road a couple of hundred yards and I parked.
It was winter in Missouri, and as the dust from the gravel road was slowly carried away by the chilly wind, I got out of my car and looked around. Railroad tracks to the south of me, empty farm fields all around. I could still see the school complex that I had passed, and I could faintly hear the swishy hum of the traffic on I-55 about a quarter of a mile away from me, but downwind.
The Heart of the Beast, November, 2017
“Wow, this is it. I’m here,” I thought to myself. Then I remembered the writings of Robert J. Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, quoting an ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Although the “destroyer of worlds” in my presence on that lonely, dusty cold Missouri morning wasn’t Oppenheimer’s unleashed nuclear demon, I could somehow feel that the force of which he spoke was coiled nearby to strike.
I walked north into the uneven ground of the farm field, about 150 feet from me and looked down. Nothing but unexceptional southern Missouri dirt and debris from a long-harvested crop. There was absolutely nothing to indicate I was standing on the exact heart of the New Madrid seismic zone, an earthquake fault so massive that may destroy the heart of the Midwest.
Think I’m being over dramatic? I’m not.
If we were to simply get a repeat of the earthquakes that happened here in the zone in 1811-1812 (albeit they were spread out, I was simply standing at the center of the zone), it would flatten St. Louis, Memphis, and pretty much every town up and down the Mississippi River, in Illinois & Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee.
Tens of millions of Americans would be affected, potentially hundreds of millions. Chances are good a lot of you reading this would be.
Rather than re-write it all, I’m going to borrow the basics from Wikipedia, you can read the whole article by clicking here if you like, but here’s what happened:
“The 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes were an intense intraplate earthquake series beginning with an initial earthquake of moment magnitude 7.5–7.9 on December 16, 1811, followed by a moment magnitude 7.4 aftershock on the same day. They remain the most powerful earthquakes to hit the contiguous United States east of the Rocky Mountains in recorded history.[1][2][3] They, as well as the seismic zone of their occurrence, were named for the Mississippi River town of New Madrid, then part of the Louisiana Territory, now within the US state of Missouri.
There are estimates that these stable continental region earthquakes were felt strongly over roughly 130,000 square kilometers (50,000 sq mi), and moderately across nearly 3 million square kilometers (1 million square miles). The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, by comparison, was felt moderately over roughly 16,000 km2 (6,200 sq mi).”
Damage-range comparison between a moderate New Madrid zone earthquake (1895, magnitude 6.8), and a similar Los Angeles event (1994, magnitude 6.7). This quake was many orders of magnitude lower than the 1811-12 quakes
At the time, there was actually very little there to damage, but that’s not the case now. Many, MANY cities and towns are in the path of the next monster earthquake.
This is not an earthquake preparedness post, we will be doing some of those in the future… the takeaway I want you to get from this post is this. As a prepper, you have probably heard of the New Madrid fault, and are probably aware of the implications as they affect you. Millions of people who live in the zone of destruction when the next monster hits, however, have no idea they are living in a disaster area waiting to happen.
I remember looking around at the placid scene around me on that could day in the country, and thinking about the slumbering monster. “My God,” I thought, “my God… it’s going to kill them and they don’t even know it’s sleeping below them right here…”
The moral of my story is: Know your sleeping monsters, and be as ready as you can to fight them when they appear.
PRO TIP: If you live anywhere near a yellow area on the above map, make sure you have an earthquake rider on your homeowners insurance. Standard homeowners policies exempt earthquake damage entirely, so you NEED to have a rider on yours. Good new is, unless you are in California it’s cheap.
http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/89/894a74a919475c04428cac77496ca2508d5ca6064c730a485c2ae2dbe987705f.jpg
We will rebuild! I just thought it was funny.
a major earthquake in that area – especially during the frigid mid-wintertime – could be one of the most devastating natural disaster in US history … the natural gas pipelines to the major North Midwest cities and spider webbed everywhere would be disrupted and destroyed …
millions upon millions would be without heat instantly – with no eazy recourse or quik recovery …..
There are two fiction books (series) by Sam Penny that cover this scenario completely. “Memphis 7.9” & “Broken River”.
Good to know, haven’t read them, will definitely add them to my list! I appreciate the info, I’m in fact about ready to need a new book, I the one I am reading now is just about finished (it’s a history book).
From what I’ve seen a lot of the older buildings in the affected towns and cities are barely standing now. None of them appear to have any chance of surviving an earthquake without completely collapsing. Another thing, there are over 21 million miles of gas lines in this country, that’s counting all the small ones, and that would be a disaster compounded many times if they start exploding. thanks
Also, there are more than 10,000 bridges in Missouri. There’s a reason our bug-out backup plan is bicycles. They won’t cross big rivers, but they’ll cross bridges a car can’t, and you can portage them through creeks.