The New York Times‘ Katharine Seelye begins her report (8/24/11) on yesterday’s Virginia-centered earthquake with a dangerous inaccuracy:
Of all the things there are to worry about, earthquakes are fairly low on the list for those on the East Coast.
Actually, people on the East Coast should probably worry about earthquakes a lot more than they do. A study done of potential quake hazards faced by various cities placed Boston at slightly more risk than San Francisco (Wired Science, 8/23/11)–because the latter city, while more seismically active, is also better prepared.
In New York City, where Seelye’s main audience resides, “a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area substantially greater than formerly believed,” as Columbia University’s Earth Institute (8/21/08) summarized a paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.A magnitude 6 quake, just slightly bigger than the one that hit Virginia, occurring near New York City is projected to kill more than a thousand people and do $40 billion in damage.
Seelye, assigned to cover the quake for New York City’s most powerful news outlet, could have used the opportunity to point out how the city could be better prepared for seismic disaster. Instead, she chose to write a jokey piece that gave no indication that earthquakes could pose a real threat to her readers.
Naw, they shouldn’t worry. The world will be a better place with fewer self-entitled yuppies around.
BREAKING NEWS: President Obama has just announced that the Secret Service and Maxine Waters will continue an investigation of the quake’s suspicious ties to the Tea Party. The United States Geographic Survey however has proven that it was caused by the Founding Fathers rolling over in their graves.
A 6.0 is not ‘slightly’ more than a 5.8. A 5.9 is exactly twice as strong as a 5.8, and and 6.0 is twice as big as a 5.9. Therefore, a 6.0 occurring in the North-east could do substantial damage and take lives.
The ground shakes or the wind blows, unreinforced masonry is one of the first to go.
Actually the first thing to go was everybody’s cell phones.Made me feel all warm and cuddly inside to see how hardened our modern communication infrastructure was.Word to the wise….Keep a land line.
Maggi May’s remark is not quite accurate, although she (I guess ‘she’) is right that 6.0 on the Richter scale is more than slightly stronger than 5.8.
The Richter scale is based on a base-10 logarithmic scale, meaning that a 5.0 magnitude is 10 times greater than a 4.0 magnitude quake. (10 times greater in ‘shaking amplitude’.) Each increment of .1 on the scale corresponds to a factor of 10^(.1), which a little less than 1.26 (not 2, as she has it). An increment of .2 represents an increase in shaking amplitude by a factor of about 1.58 (not 4, as she would have it).