![]() ![]() And depending who you ask, another major earthquake here represents either a towering threat for which the Central U.S. The shocks occurred on what today is the least understood seismic zone in the United States. An alarmed President James Madison even wrote Thomas Jefferson from DC about the tremors. Because the deep rock in the middle of the continent is older and colder than out west, strong shaking was felt over an area 10 times that of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The quakes woke New Yorkers, rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina, buzzed bemused Torontonians a country away, and brought down chimneys from St. Boatmen caught in the maelstrom said the Mississippi appeared to run backwards. Meanwhile, existing lakes were turned inside out, as cracks in the ground spewed volcanoes of sand and water into the air. It created temporary waterfalls and lasting lakes. The earth had slipped somewhere deep under the frontier settlement of New Madrid, Missouri, and the resulting earthquakes opened up chasms, diverted the Mississippi, threw trees to the ground and landslides into the river. In the winter of 18, three earthquakes of magnitude 7, and possibly as high as 7.7, and countless punishing aftershocks thereafter, rocked the sparsely inhabited frontier of the American Midwest. The source of all this anxiety is the fabled New Madrid Seismic Zone. In 1999, FEMA identified four hazards in the United States that, were they consummated in all their destructive wonder, would be worthy of the title “catastrophic.” They were: a major earthquake hitting Los Angeles, a major hurricane hitting Miami, a major hurricane hitting New Orleans (check), and a giant earthquake hitting the Central US. But in the center of the country there’s also a bewildering, giant fuchsia bullseye-smack in the middle of what should be the stable interior of North America. The familiar culprits are there: the entire West Coast predictably lights up as a long, narrow hazard zone-from the cascades to southern California. Indeed, the USGS earthquake hazard map of the United States, might also come as something of a shock. To those reared on the coasts, with a traditional understanding of earthquakes as arising from titanic disagreements at the edges of tectonic plates, this all sounds quite strange. Louis, 600 million years ago, the continent tried to rip in half. ![]() Further downtown, AutoZone’s corporate headquarters also stands ready for a tectonic throttling, propped up as it is on top of giant shock absorbers, while, the nearby Memphis VA is similarly inured to temblors after the city spent $64 million dollars removing nine floors of the hospital to reduce the risk of collapse in a catastrophic earthquake. The city recently spent $25 million to prevent the pyramid from being swallowed, perhaps by Geb, the ancient Egyptian god of earthquakes. Originally built as a nod to the city’s Old Kingdom namesake, the pyramid now enshrines a Bass Pro Shops megastore. The bridge passes a glass colossus, the Memphis Pyramid. It’s also decked out with strong-motion accelerometers and bookended by borehole seismometers to record convulsions in the earth. Thanks to a recently completed $260 million seismic retrofit, the bridge-a chokepoint for traffic in the central U.S.-is now fortified. Park officials said there was no reason to believe the ride malfunctioned, but that they are working closely with local and state authorities.As I drove across the I-40 bridge into Memphis, I was reassured: chances were slim that a massive earthquake would wrest the road from its supports, and plunge me more than a hundred feet into the murky Mississippi. The roller coaster will remain closed until the investigation is complete. Further details about the accident and the injuries were not immediately available. Witnesses say the park employee stepped into the path of the roller coaster while trying to retrieve a rider's cellphone.Ī guest riding the roller coaster at the time reported a hand injury and was taken to a hospital for evaluation. ![]() (KGO) - Two people were injured, one seriously, in a roller-coaster accident at California's Great America amusement park in Santa Clara on Friday night.Ī park employee was hospitalized for traumatic injuries after being struck by a train returning to the station of the Flight Deck coaster, park officials said in a statement. Officials are investigating after two people were injured, one seriously, in a roller-coaster accident at California's Great America amusement park in Santa Clara on Friday night. ![]()
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