Are you ready for the next big event? Experts meeting in St. Louis for New Madrid earthquake planning | local work

St. Lewis – Hundreds gathered here Thursday to focus on an unknown scenario: How would Missouri perform in the event of a catastrophic earthquake? Can the region prepare now for such a disaster?

For the first time in its four-year history, the Missouri seismic summit has deviated from the southeastern Missouri Butyl region – home to the New Madrid fault system that, 200 years ago, produced three of the largest earthquakes recorded on the continent.

“It’s not just California’s problem,” said Thomas Pratt, the USGS program coordinator for seismic hazards in the central and eastern parts of the country.

Pratt said the earthquake zone in New Madrid produces a steady cross-section of smaller earthquakes, but it can also generate massive earthquakes every 300 to 600 years. One struck around 900 and the other around 1500. Then, more recently, a wave of them struck in 1811 and 1812. This famous eruption caused part of the Mississippi River to flow backward, forming Reelfoot Lake—the largest lake in Tennessee—and woke up President James Madison in Washington DC

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More than two centuries later, it has not been clear to modern scholars when the next could happen. Pratt compared it to predicting when a baseball star would hit a home run. It is impossible to know the moment – but one can know the probability. And scientists do: They say there’s a 7% to 10% chance of another major earthquake in New Madrid – a magnitude 7.5 on the Richter scale – in the next 50 years, and a 40% chance of it happening with a magnitude 6. a USGS map of the hazards shows ‘Bull’s-eye’ seismicity over New Madrid, where it faces as high a risk as anywhere else in the US

The increased possibility of another major event leaves people at every level of government making contingency plans and assessing how to prepare. Thursday’s attendees included engineers, responders, road managers, insurance experts, seismologists and government officials.

The scale of the challenges is overwhelming and colossal.

Buildings, roads, water and sewage systems are all under threat. A joint report from Missouri and the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates that more than 840,000 people may be displaced by the New Madrid earthquake. St. Louis, more than 100 miles from the fault system, remains vulnerable because earthquakes in the eastern United States travel greater distances than their western counterparts, thanks to the rock types prevalent in each region.

However, the effects of a brutal earthquake from New Madrid will not be felt uniformly in Missouri.

Bootheel and some adjacent areas along the Mississippi River are particularly vulnerable. Not only are they akin to a fault system, they sit in a highly hazardous area known as the Mississippi Empyment—essentially a tongue of softer sediment almost surrounded by stronger bedrock.

This makes the area vibrate like a “bowl of Jell-O” during earthquakes, Pratt said. (Christchurch, New Zealand, is in a similar place and had to rebuild thousands of downtown buildings after a strong earthquake in 2011.)

Meanwhile, earthquake insurance faces what experts and academics call a “vicious problem” — with relatively few policyholders, and often expensive rates. Missouri has the third largest earthquake insurance market in the United States, after only California and Washington. But far fewer are covered now than in 2000 in the New Madrid area, while costs are up 760%.

“Earthquake insurance is a challenge because so few people have it,” said Lisa Grouchong, of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. “Obviously, costs are a big part of this problem.”

According to survey results discussed Thursday, not many people in the area even know about earthquake insurance.

Whether it’s insurance or a building retrofit, issues of earthquake preparedness and risk mitigation usually come down to an overarching question of how much society is willing to put up with — and how much is willing to pay for it.

“The last 2% of security costs a lot of money,” Pratt said.

But several speakers at Thursday’s event made it clear that safety can’t be bought alone. Ultimately, they said, much of the region’s resilience will depend on teamwork and coordination. This requires communications and planning now, said Martin Reuter, director of the Salvation Army’s Division of Emergency Disaster Services.

“The worst time to exchange business cards is during a disaster,” he said.

It’s a good exercise in contingency planning, no matter what happens, said Andrea Spilars, FEMA’s regional official.

“If you’re ready for the New Madrid earthquake,” she said, “you’ll probably be prepared for just about anything.”

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