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It’s Party Time for Those Unshaken by Quake Alert

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Pssst. Heard the latest disaster prediction?

The word is the Mississippi River is going to overflow. That should happen say about Wednesday when all the folks along the river who’ve been stockpiling water for the Big Earthquake finally pour it down the drain.

For months a major portion of the Midwest and South, from about Memphis, Tenn., to St. Louis and beyond, braced for the Big One. Schools in parts of four states declared holidays. Earthquake insurance sellers reaped a fortune. An untold number of people packed their valuables and lit out for safer territory.

All because Iben Browning, an eccentric 72-year-old scientist from New Mexico, predicted a 50-50 chance that a temblor with a magnitude of 7.0 or higher would occur within 48 hours of Dec. 3.

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So far, it hasn’t happened.

So you’d think maybe a lot of folks with relieved or sheepish expressions on their faces would be crawling out of their basements about now, right?

Maybe. But you’d have to wade through the revelers to find them.

The only reeling and rocking anyone in these parts saw was at the earthquake parties thrown throughout the region by the skeptics who stayed behind.

“We’re trying to have a good time with it,” said Jack Hailey, a big, bearded man in an omnipresent Stetson who threw an all-day party Monday at his tavern here in New Madrid, the southeastern Missouri town for which the fault is named. “This is the most attention this little town ever had, and probably on Wednesday nobody will know where it is.”

Saturday was, according to Browning’s prediction, the first day of high-earthquake probability. At the Faultline, a nightclub in Memphis that has a crack painted on its dance floor and another crack that runs the length of a wall with fake body parts sticking out, dancers Saturday night enjoyed “the last shake before the quake.”

Revelers downed Earthquake Shooters--”guaranteed to shake you up,” claimed the management. The place was packed.

Even tiny New Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid) took on a carnival atmosphere. Ordinarily the town is so dead that children skateboard down the middle of Main Street at rush hour without encountering cars. But this weekend policemen were out directing traffic as a country and western band played tunes atop the levee, and vendors sold T-shirts and barbecue downtown.

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Not that there aren’t a lot of nervous people still around.

Anita Wolford is one of many who maintains that only God can predict an earthquake. But she admits she got scared a few days ago when her cat--animals are supposed to have an inside track on these things--started acting funny.

“She just ran her head into the wall by the hutch,” Wolford said. “It was just a-running and a-scooting. Then it started jumping up like you see those acrobats do, its hair standing up on its back.”

The New Madrid Fault, which runs from Marked Tree, Ark., to Cairo, Ill., spawned the most powerful series of earthquakes in the nation’s history in 1811 and 1812. Scientists say the strongest of the quakes would’ve measured over 8 on the Richter scale if the scale had been invented then. Its effects were felt as far north as Canada. Water flowing in the Mississippi River temporarily reversed directions.

Although the scientific community was almost unanimous in its repudiation of Browning’s prediction, geologists and emergency planning officials have taken advantage of it to impress upon the public that, whether or not it occurred on Dec. 3, the fault is overdue for another big rumble. People who never took the warnings seriously before are taking them seriously now.

“Back in September, people were in here just hysterical,” said Virginia Carlson, director of the New Madrid Historical Museum, which has reading material and an exhibit on earthquakes. After officials began holding seminars on earthquake preparedness, however, people calmed down and started making rational preparations, she said.

Elderly people and children seem to be the ones most shaken by the prediction. Many of those who left, a number of residents said, were elderly.

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“A few old people left,” admitted Hailey, trying to play down the concern that has clearly dominated the region for months. “Some guys sent their wives and children away and they stayed. They said it was for their (family’s) safety, but I think they wanted to be here to party by themselves.”

Robert R. Butterworth, a psychologist from Los Angeles, spent three days in town trying to gauge the psychological effects of the earthquake prediction.

“It’s rare that you get a situation where people are dealing with trauma before it happens,” he said.

Many of the people he talked to denied that they were concerned about the quake prediction and some joked about it, he said. “But when you talk to the kids it ceases being funny, because a lot of them are worried . . . . One child said she was going to sleep under her bed or under a table. A lot of people are sleeping with their clothes on.”

Butterworth was critical of Browning for making the prediction, which he called “frivolous.”

“If I yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater and a stampede results, injuring people, I can be prosecuted if there wasn’t a fire. Why should someone be able to yell ‘earthquake’ in a crowded region and be immune to the disruption and anxiety that result?”

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Butterworth wasn’t the only person upset by the commotion.

Christina Smith, like everyone else in the town of 3,200, knows people who have left town for the week because of the prediction. “This Mr. Browning, he’s got people terrified,” she said. “That upsets me.”

At the winter meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, academic and government seismologists, also showed some concern Monday, saying they had become weary of trying to debunk the prediction, and adding that if--by a freak of nature--some quake did occur, the debate would be prolonged.

“I just pray there’s no earthquake, because if there is I’ll never get anything done for months,” said Thomas Heaton, seismologist in charge of the U.S. Geological Survey office in Pasadena.

Adding to the concern in New Madrid, was the large number of reporters that have overwhelmed the town. By one account, more than 100 television trucks were in the area, and, as 10-year-old Jonathan Hunter said: “If they (the reporters) didn’t know something, they wouldn’t be here.”

But for everyone frightened by the cameras, there seemed to be someone else drawn to them. Many people took to the streets with video camcorders so they could shoot back at the professionals.

Browning himself has remained mostly silent. “He has not been talking to the press for five or six weeks,” his wife told a reporter who called his home. She said he wasn’t interested in responding to criticism. “It wouldn’t do a bit of good,” she said.

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Staff writer Linda Monroe in San Francisco contributed to this story.

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