I’m a worry wart, and I won’t apologize for it. It’s not my fault, I was born that way. It’s the San Andreas Fault. With an adult child living in San Francisco, I can find plenty to worry me. The City is a marvelous place, but any city has a dark side, too. I worry about him being accosted by some stranger. I obsess about the cost of living there. I fret about him having to take public transportation or walk everywhere (I’m a Texan– therefore think it is unnatural not to have a car). But mostly I get all shook up over earthquakes.
Before our last visit, I bought a book in Wal-Mart Bookstore (I only rarely shop there) called A Day That Changed America—EARTHQUAKE!, by Shelley Tanaka. It’s a children’s book written about Wednesday, April 18, 1906. That’s when one of the most famous natural disasters rocked the western coast. The story is told through the eyes of four of the young survivors from San Francisco. It’s fascinating and horrifying. Just what I needed to make me totally paranoid.
My baby is sitting on top of the San Andreas Fault. He has only told me about experiencing one tremor. I’m sure there have been more, but it might have disturbed him to hear my voice go up two octaves when I tried to talk about it with him. He doesn’t want to burden me. I keep hoping he will decide to move to someplace safe. Someplace where there won’t be any dangers like earthquakes. Maybe someplace like—Missouri.
Wrong, again, Shelly.
THE largest recorded earthquake in United States history occurred near New Madrid, Missouri. In fact, there were a series of quakes that took place from December 1911-February 1912. There were three earthquakes of greater than 8.0 in magnitude. “Aftershocks included two more events around magnitude 8.0, five more at magnitude 7.7, ten more at magnitude 5.3, and eighty-nine at an estimated magnitude of 4.3. This seismic release was the largest ever recorded in the continental United States.”
Teachers didn’t enlighten me about that in school. I accidentally found it thumbing through a book on earthquakes (to satisfy my morbid curiosity), then looked it up on-line. Because that part of the country was sparsely settled during the time period, there wasn’t enormous loss of life or major damage to cities. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t get the attention that the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 gets in the curriculum.
However, the devastation was great after the New Madrid quakes. The first of the three main quakes was so powerful that it rang church bells in Boston (1,000 miles away), knocked over chimneys in Maine and made the Mississippi River run backwards at one point. More than 150,000 acres of forest were destroyed, the Mississippi River changed course, whole areas of land were swallowed up and new lakes were formed. For the people who lived there, it must have been terrifying.
The Virtual Times has several accounts from survivors of the quake. Excerpts from letters written by George Heinrich Crist, who lived in central Kentucky at the time, are especially vivid.
Interestingly, ten years before the earthquake, a man predicted that “In the midst of the night the earth will begin to tremble, giant trees will fall, rivers will run backward, new lakes will be formed, and old ones will disappear.” It happened on the exact day that Tecumseh, a Shawnee warrior and chief predicted. He took that as a sign that all the tribes should unite against the whites to take back their land. Unfortunately, that didn’t go so well. His brother led the tribes to defeat at the battle of Tippecanoe. Tecumseh didn’t see that one coming.
You can go to this site and read the predictions of damage to the area if another major quake were to hit. Or, you can just take my word for it. It wouldn’t be pretty. Modern day predictors of catastrophe say that there will be another earthquake as great as the New Madrid earthquakes, and they say it can happen any time.
My son can relax now. I have another focus for my worry.
