Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Getting prepared for our Big One
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The Greater Evansville Area is vulnerable to the threat of an earthquake because of its proximity to the New Madrid and Wabash Valley Seismic Zones. What do we need to do to reduce that threat? The Tri-state Earthquake Hazards Geological Mapping Advisory Committee, made up of geological experts, city officials, and safety and infrastructure personnel, was organized to answer that question and serve the objectives of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). The NEHRP began a five-year plan to assess earthquake hazards in the Evansville area in 2003. The advisory committee will have its quarterly meeting on Thursday, November 3, in New Harmony, Indiana, followed by a dedication ceremony for a new strong motion sensor at the Granary. The instrument was installed two months ago, and will be dedicated between 11:45 a.m. and noon. It joins a network of seismological instruments in and around Evansville. “You need a network,” said Paul Doss, chair of the Geology and Physics Department and a member of the advisory committee. “You can not have a single instrument to precisely locate and characterize earthquake activity. Different instruments are capable of giving different information.” The new sensor records seismic activity of different magnitudes and frequencies than the seismometer located at USI. It was funded in part by the Blaffer Foundation. The NEHRP funds research, but does not provide all the dollars to develop an instrumentation network. “Society is at risk from natural hazards, but is often ignorant of those hazards, and yet there is a lot of effort to try and understand the risk, and prepare the community for it,” Doss said. He said there is a “significant probability” - 30 to 40 percent - of a large earthquake hitting the New Madrid Seismic Zone within the next few decades. An earthquake occurred in the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone, an extension of the New Madrid system, in June 2002. “There was a fair amount of damage to hundreds of chimneys and some plate glass windows from that earthquake, and that was a little earthquake,” he said. |
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