Why America Should Be On High Alert For A Major Earthquake Along The New Madrid Fault
By Michael Snyder
EndOfTheAmericanDream.com
August 31st, 2015
Did you know that a magnitude 3.5 earthquake hit the New Madrid fault about a week ago? According to Fox News, the New Madrid fault line is approximately twenty times larger than the San Andreas fault in California, and it is starting to wake up. Most people don’t realize this, but this fault zone has produced some of the largest earthquakes in U.S. history. In 1811 and 1812, immensely powerful earthquakes along the New Madrid fault rang church bells in Boston and permanently changed the course of the Mississippi River. If we had similar earthquakes today, the devastation would be unimaginable. Unfortunately for us, earthquake activity in the middle part of the country is becoming much more common. The USGS says that the number of significant earthquakes in the middle part of the country has more than quintupled in recent years, and the USGS has publicly admitted that the New Madrid fault zone has the “potential for larger and more powerful quakes than previously thought“. Very few Americans are talking about this right now, but as you will see below, the threat is very, very real.
According to international insurance giant Swiss Re, if the 1811 and 1812 New Madrid earthquakes were to repeat today, the losses would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars…
A series of big shakes — of the sort last seen in 1811 and 1812 — would cause about $300 billion in damage, Swiss Re says. The cost would be double the damage from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.
Houses — especially brick ones — would collapse. Buildings would sink sideways into liquefying earth. Bridges might tumble into the rivers. The route of the Mississippi River could change — as it did in the last big quake.
People would die, perhaps by the thousands. Being mainly a property reinsurer, Swiss Re didn’t estimate the human toll.
Could you imagine what that would do to our nation?
The Rest…HERE
