Earthquake Forecast Sends Shivers Through Heartland : Science: An eccentric scientist’s projection has many in the Midwest and South preparing for their Big One.

There’s no one alive who remembers the last big earthquake here, it happened so long ago.

For that very reason, residents don’t get shaken up by talk of tremors, even though scientists have been warning for years that the heartland is due for a doozy.

This monster quake, seismologists say, could be the worst natural disaster in American history. The losses could be staggering. Still, folks sitting right on top of the potentially deadly New Madrid Fault only yawned.

“The way I see it, if you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die,” convenience store clerk Laura Holmes said the other day, echoing the sentiments of other stoic Missourians who have refused to let fear dominate their lives.

Folks hereabouts still say such things--they are, after all, Missourians--but show-me-state residents tend to say them while buying earthquake insurance, storing up supplies and holding disaster drills.

Throughout a huge portion of the Midwest and South, people who formerly shrugged off talk of earthquakes now are frantically making preparations for the Big One--all because an eccentric scientist from New Mexico predicted a 50-50 chance of a quake of magni tude of 7.0 or greater occurring here between Dec. 1 and Dec. 5.

“To me it’s a lot like dying,” said New Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid) Mayor Dick Phillips, trying to explain the sudden, uncharacteristic wave of anxiety in a large part of the central United States. “If you know when you’re going to die, the closer you get to that date you’ll make preparations.”

Although a few seismologists who have studied Iben Browning’s forecasting techniques take him seriously, most dismiss his projections out of hand. But that hasn’t stopped school districts in a number of communities near here from announcing that their doors will be closed Dec. 3.

Small towns throughout the Mississippi Valley have been holding meetings to prepare their residents. And town officials in nearby Malden, Mo., plan to shut down the 51-year-old city hall for an eight-day “earthquake drill.” All municipal operations will be moved into a sturdier fire station for the duration.

“I consider it a deathtrap,” Malden Mayor W. M. (Bill) Johnson said of the city hall. As for the fire station, he said: “I hate like the dickens to be in there, but it’s better than nothing. I don’t want to be here.”

People are reacting to Browning’s forecast as far north as Chicago, 450 miles away from the New Madrid Fault, where even a major quake is not expected to have much effect.

“I’ve never had earthquake insurance on my house,” said Roger Spencer, a vice president at PaineWebber Inc. in Chicago, “but I’ve put it on now. And I don’t plan on being in the tall (PaineWebber headquarters) building on Dec. 3.”

Spencer’s office is on the 38th floor of the downtown skyscraper.

“I don’t care what anybody else does,” he said with a chuckle, “but I ain’t going to be there. The worst that can happen to me is that everybody will call me a chicken. If that’s the worst that happens, I can live with that.”

Browning, a 72-year-old scientist and business consultant who lives in Sandia Park, N.M., started the commotion with his 5-year-old forecast. It was released to the media by a business client last year.

Actually what Browning forecast was that there is a good chance of a cataclysmic occurrence somewhere in the world between the 60 degrees north and 30 degrees north latitudes within 48 hours either way of Dec. 3. It could be the New Madrid Fault. It could be the San Andreas Fault. It could be a devastating quake in Tokyo. Or it might not be an earthquake at all; it might be a volcanic eruption at any of four locations in the United States and Europe.

“He doesn’t project things categorically,” said Spencer, the PaineWebber vice president, who has known Browning for years and whose firm had hired him as a consultant until recently, when Browning’s health began to fail. “He just says that if something’s ready to go off, if there’s a bullet in the chamber, the tidal forces on that date might be the trigger that will ignite it.”

Browning, through a spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed for this article, but seismologists who have studied his methods say his projections--he eschews the word “prediction”--have been uncannily accurate in the past.

Using a highly sophisticated computer analysis of tidal forces, he accurately forecast last October’s San Francisco earthquake, the Mexico City quake of 1986, the Mt. St. Helens volcanic eruption in 1980 and the San Fernando quake in 1971, said Michael D. Coe, co-director of the Center for Earthquake Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.

Browning publicly mentioned the time and location of the Bay Area earthquake at an industrial equipment industry convention in San Francisco a week before it happened, according to people who attended the conference.

In an interview with The Times after the Oct. 17 earthquake, Browning said he told the group of his projection to “lend a certain amount of credibility” to his work. But he said he hesitated to go public because “if you go about saying this on street corners it could cause a riot and panic.”

Even though he forecast the quake, he said he was shaken when it occurred. “I wept,” he said. “There is no scientific attitude toward disaster.”

Browning’s forecasts aren’t limited to geological occurrences.

He was hired to share his views on a myriad of subjects with PaineWebber’s clients, Spencer said. “He was talking about the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc many years ago,” he said.

A panel of scientists who studied Browning’s forecast for the U.S. Geological Survey dismissed the earthquake prediction as having no scientific basis.

Brian J. Mitchell, a seismologist from St. Louis University, added that “studies of the correlation between earthquake and tides have been done a number of times in the past and the results have always been mixed.”

He acknowledged that on or about Dec. 3 the Northern Hemisphere will experience a peak in tidal forces--one of the strongest in years. “There’ll be a lineup of the sun and the moon on that day,” Mitchell said. “They’ll both be pulling together.” But he said that neither of the last two New Madrid earthquakes that were magnitude 6.0 or higher occurred at a tidal peak. And he said that while the largest earthquake in the nation’s history--a devastating New Madrid quake in 1811--did occur during a tidal peak, it was not an unusually large peak.

But Coe, whose Cape Girardeau, Mo., offices are perched on the northern edge of the fault, said he has faith in Browning’s forecasts. His co-director, David Stewart, has spent time with Browning in New Mexico and studied his forecast methods, which Coe said are different from most past examinations of tidal forces in that they also factor in vector forces.

He explained vector forces: “If you had a rope tied to a cart and you pulled it to the north and someone else was pulling to the east, the cart would tend to go to the northeast. What speed it had and whether it went more easterly or more to the north would depend on your force in relation to the other person’s force.”

Most earthquake studies in the past have not looked at vector forces, he said. Browning claims to have advanced degrees in biology, genetics and bacteriology as well as physics from the University of Texas.

He makes his living as a lecturer and consultant to businesses on climatology. He took up the study of earthquakes, at first as a hobby, in 1957.

Coe said he thinks Browning lacks the respect of the scientific community because he doesn’t publish his findings in scientific journals and because he tends to work directly for business clients rather than in government- or university-owned laboratories. As a result, he said, most scientists hear of his forecasts after the events he predicted have already happened.

“I would be hopeful that there might be something to it,” he said of this most recent forecast. “Not hopeful that we’re going to have an earthquake, but hopeful that the science of earthquake prediction can be advanced.

“My feeling is that if in fact on Dec. 2nd or 3rd there is an earthquake or volcano anyplace in the world between the 30 and 60 latitudes . . . I would think it would indicate that essentially he has accomplished something that other people have not done.”

Expert opinions on the likelihood of a large New Madrid quake vary widely, but it is generally agreed that a catastrophic earthquake sometime in the next 50 years is a real threat. One recent study estimates the probability of a 7.6 quake before the year 2035 to be between 20% and 30%. The same study says there is a 2.7% to 4% chance of an 8.3 earthquake occurring during the same time period.

Because of soil conditions, the possibility of earthquake-caused flooding and the lack of seismic-designed buildings in the Mississippi Valley region, even a moderate quake here is expected to cause much more extensive and widespread damage than a similar-sized earthquake in California, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency study released in June.

“Thousands of people will be homeless,” the study said. “Property damage is expected to total billions of dollars. Flooding and other secondary effects would seriously compound these problems.” A federal study on the effects of a major New Madrid earthquake on tall buildings in Chicago, Kansas City, Atlanta and Dallas found that, generally speaking, well-built buildings in those cities could resist the quake with only light structural damage. St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn., and countless small towns in between, could suffer greatly, however.

Now, thanks to Browning, the people who would be most affected by such an earthquake are finally starting to take the possibility seriously. A Missouri law passed in May requires jurisdictions in the eastern third of the state for the first time to have seismic codes, Coe said. Companies in downtown St. Louis have started having earthquake drills for their employees. And spokesmen for earthquake preparedness agencies say they have been flooded with requests for information.

“I think that it’s nothing but positive,” Ray Briggler of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services said of Browning’s earthquake forecast. “It’s produced great awareness in the area.”

He acknowledges some overreactions. “I have a friend in the airline industry, and he tells me that flights out of Memphis are booked up for Dec. 2.”

But noting that one study projects a 50% to 60% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 to 7.0 occurring in the next decade, he said: “The reality is that (the New Madrid area) is a very active seismic area. The probability of a quake in that area is very good on any given day.”

His fear is that Dec. 3 will come and go without an earthquake and people will revert to their former nonchalance.

Staff writer Dan Weintraub in Sacramento contributed to this story.