Super Quake Is Sneaking Up on U.S. : East, Midwest Are Vulnerable to Armenia-Type Devastation

Already the process of recrimination has begun in Soviet Armenia: How could tens of thousands of citizens be killed by a relatively small 6.9-magnitude earthquake? How could entire communities be leveled? Why did modern buildings collapse? Why, in an area of known seismic danger, did the government allow high-rise apartment blocks to be built of brittle masonry--and to contain schools filled with the youth of a nation, thousands of them in harm’s way on the lower floors? Why, in other words, were the people of Armenia not prepared and protected by their leaders from a well-understood natural hazard?

The shrill edge of such internal criticisms will be muted from our vantage point a world away, but as the rescue efforts become moot and the cleanup efforts begin in earnest, even through the somewhat-transparent veil of glasnost the process of finger-pointing should be clearly visible.

And that process is one with which we Americans had better become familiar, because we, too, will be playing the same tragic and angry refrain, perhaps before the end of this century.

As you watch the pictures flow in on television and in print this week--terrible, gut-wrenching scenes of rubble and destruction entombing tens of thousands of fellow human beings--try to grasp the fact that such pictures could just as easily be coming from an American city, and not necessarily Los Angeles.

Certainly San Francisco is also a likely candidate for such destruction, as is Salt Lake City, and now even the cities of the Pacific Northwest. The Seattle/Tacoma and Portland areas are, we have just discovered, subject to 9.2 subduction-zone earthquakes equal in magnitude to the monster that mauled Alaska in 1964.

Yet the most physically vulnerable American communities of all lie to the east of the Rocky Mountains. Boston, New York, Charleston, Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago and many other metropolitan hubs sit naked and exposed before the certainty that major earthquakes will soon shake the eastern half of the United States.

Indeed, Dr. Robert Ketter, director of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research in Buffalo, N.Y., made that point a few weeks ago, warning that we will almost certainly have a large Eastern quake before the year 2008--a quake targeted on cities filled with people and political leaders who refuse to believe the existence of the problem.

Of all those communities, only Boston has provisions in its building codes to require some physical resistance to quakes (and those are inadequate). Through the rest of the Midwestern and Eastern United States runs an unbroken horror story: hundreds of thousands of unreinforced-masonry buildings of cinder block and brick, used for homes, offices and high-rise apartments. And laced throughout the region are undependable dams, aging bridges barely attached at each end, questionably sited nuclear-power plants, vulnerable gas, electric, water and sewer lifelines and hazardous chemical-storage facilities sitting tenuously on potentially shaky ground. Stephen King could hardly set up a more terrifying scenario.

Los Angeles can expect to be mightily damaged by movement on the San Andreas Fault, or the Newport-Inglewood or other neighboring faults, most probably within the next 25 years. But the Eastern and Midwestern states also face ground-shaking of colossal proportions, repetitions of such known upheavals as the 1886 Charleston, S.C., quake, the 1755 Boston quake, the Jamaica Bay quake hundreds of years ago on New York’s Long Island. The granddaddy of them all was the1811-12 series of three great quakes on the New Madrid Fault (halfway between St. Louis and Memphis beneath the Mississippi), which shook the entire United States. The next time the New Madrid Fault produces such a quake, it is estimated that 60% of Memphis will be devastated, leaving $50 billion in damage and thousands of dead in its wake. Memphis, you see--like Armenia--has looked down the barrel of a cocked and loaded seismic gun for decades, but has done virtually nothing to move out of the crosshairs.

There is no doubt that great quakes roiled the American wilderness before recorded history. Today that wilderness is home to hundreds of thousands of occupied buildings held together only by the grace of undisturbed gravity, brittle constructions based on 100 years of erroneous assumptions that America’s heartland cannot shake, rattle or roll.

Throughout the East and Midwest there are cracks in the bedrock that we can’t see, under strains that we can’t calculate. Exactly when they will produce cataclysmic earth-shaking cannot yet be predicted. But because it could happen as soon as next year or next decade, we should at least alter the standards by which we construct new buildings. (A process of applying well-understood engineering techniques would add, on the average, less than 10% to building costs.) If we live and work in properly designed buildings, our ability to withstand large quakes and emerge with our businesses, our economy, our families and ourselves intact can be boosted from the dubious to the realm of near-certainty.

We know that Americans take a back seat to no one when it comes to finger-pointing after a disaster. We know exactly what the national outcry will be if one of our communities suffers a seismic catastrophe next week or next year, especially on the East Coast: Why were building codes inadequate? Why did the dams, the bridges, the apartments collapse? Why were so many killed and maimed? Why didn’t Washington protect us when the resulting national financial catastrophe was so predictable? Why weren’t we prepared? Doesn’t it make more sense to ask those questions--and find the answers--now?