Government Warns of “Catastrophic” US Quake

A new study has found that people living in the New Madrid Seismic Zone of the southern and Midwestern US could face catastrophic damage if a major earthquake were to strike.

Reuters’ Carey Gillam says the report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency found that if earthquakes strike in the New Madrid fault, they would cause “the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States.”

According to Gillam, FEMA predicted a large earthquake would cause “widespread and catastrophic physical damage” across Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee. Approximately 44 million people live in the area.

The hardest hit is likely to be Tennessee. The study tried to gauge the impact of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in order to guide the government's response, and found that “in Tennessee alone, it forecast hundreds of collapsed bridges, tens of thousands of severely damaged buildings and a half a million households without water,” Gillam says.

“People who live in these areas and the people who build in these areas certainly need to take into better account that at some time there is ... expected to be a catastrophic earthquake in that area, and they'd better be prepared for it,” FEMA spokesperson Mary Margaret Walker told Gillam.

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