As China copes with the consequences of a massive earthquake, is the U.S. ready for the next Big One?

On April 18, the residents of Southern Illinois were jolted out of bed by something most probably had no idea could happen there: a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. The temblor not only rattled St. Louis, but was felt as far away as West Virginia.
Reno, Nev. was recently rattled by a series of small quakes, the largest a magnitude 4.7. And in early April, a swarm of earthquakes began under the ocean floor off the Oregon coast.
The question is not if there’s going to be a large quake in the U.S., only when, and where. While the massive destruction of the Sichuan quake—56,000 dead, 5 million homes destroyed—is unlikely to be repeated here, the economic impact will be felt throughout America long after the rumbling stops.
Huge quakes have regularly shaken the California and caused horrifying destruction. The 1989 San Francisco quake, a magnitude 6.9, killed 63 people and caused $10–15 billion in damage (in 2007 dollars); the 1994 Northridge quake, a 6.7, cost us $20–40 billion. And another big California quake is, in the long-term sense, a sure thing.
In Northern California, “there’s a 63 percent change of a magnitude 6.7 or greater in the next 30 years,” said Tom Brocher, the U.S. Geological Survey’s coordinator for earthquake hazards investigations in Northern California. Southern California has a 67 percent chance.
It’s not just California facing high odds. A major earthquake in the middle or east of the country might sound like something out of Hollywood, but the area where Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Illinois come together is capable of tremors roughly as large at the 1906 San Francisco quake.
In 1811 and 1812, a series of large earthquakes changed the course of the Mississippi River in the area. Recent studies put the chance of a magnitude 6.0 or larger quake at between 25 and 40 percent over the next 50 years. Seattle is also at risk; there are several major faults in the area, including one very close to the city capable of a magnitude 7 quake. And Charleston, S.C. was devastated by a quake in 1886 that caused about $6 billion in damage in today’s dollars.
What this means is that though we may not know exactly when it will happen, a big earthquake will hit somewhere.
The challenge is preparing ourselves. And much of that preparedness depends on choices made by governments across the country.

How well are we prepared?
The first concern in an earthquake is whether buildings collapse. In the recent Chinese quake, buildings, bridges and other structures fell because they weren’t built to withstand such intense shaking. Their collapse trapped thousands under the rubble.
Most of the deaths from the 1989 California earthquake occurred when a freeway overpass in Oakland collapsed, and the 5,000 deaths in the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan were mostly caused when older buildings fell.
Building codes serve as the first line of defense against earthquakes, but standards vary widely. Areas with a long history of earthquakes tend to have codes in place so that newer buildings are unlikely to collapse.
Shelby County, Tenn.—home to Memphis—has had such codes in place since 1990, though Gary Patterson, a geologist with the University of Memphis’s Center for Earthquake Research and Information, noted that most buildings regionally were not built to any kind of code. And while buildings that meet those standards might let you walk out after a quake, many of them would not be usable afterwards, leading to large-scale economic losses.
Infrastructure is the next concern. Scott Miles, a professor of environmental policy and planning at Western Washington University, noted that water networks are particularly fragile. Broken sewer systems can lead to outbreaks of disease, while disruptions to water delivery systems (many cities rely on cast-iron pipes that can break during a quake) can have impacts beyond the obvious.
In the 1906 San Francisco quake, as much as 90 percent of the damage came not from the shaking, but from fires that couldn’t be doused because of broken water mains. Today, the city maintains a special water supply for just such an emergency, including 175 small reservoirs beneath street intersections.
The energy grid is also an issue. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric is undertaking a project to replace metal pipes used to distribute natural gas with more flexible plastic tubing less likely to be damaged during the shaking. Damage to transit systems could impair everything from rescue efforts to food security, as grocery stores generally don’t maintain much inventory beyond what’s on their shelves.
But a major earthquake wouldn’t just be the problem of the area that was hit. As Hurricane Katrina made clear, any disaster causes secondary impacts that ripple through economic systems. The real question, noted Patterson, is “How do all these things interact?” For example, a significant percentage of the natural gas that New England replies upon runs through areas that could be impacted by a major quake in the Midwest; if it happened during the winter, many New Englanders could end up without heat.
With these sorts of nightmare scenarios as outside possibilities, how might the U.S. go about recovering from a major quake, wherever it happened?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is supposed to take the lead in coordinating recovery efforts. Although the agency has plans in place to respond to a major quake, the agency’s performance after Hurricane Katrina raises obvious questions about its capabilities. As Kathleen Tierney, director of the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center and a prominent FEMA critic, told Congress last year, “it may take years to see positive outcomes from post-Katrina reforms—years that will unfortunately be marked by more and perhaps even more severe disasters.”
Meanwhile, the Red Cross has been working to apply the lessons learned from Katrina to develop detailed plans for a major quake. For example, the organization now maintains a warehouse in Reno that it would use to get supplies to Northern or Southern California in the event of a big quake, according to Laura Howe, a spokesman for the organization.
The U.S. is clearly far better prepared than China for a major earthquake. Still, the economic losses could be staggering. A study released earlier this year suggested that a major earthquake in the eastern part of the Bay Area could cause upwards of $165 billion in economic damage. Worse yet, the study estimated that just 5 percent of residential losses and 15 percent of commercial losses would be insured. That would be an economic disaster that could exceed Hurricane Katrina, which produced $100 billion in uninsured losses.

Known Unknowns
Of course, we can only prepare for what we know about, and geologists have plenty to do. For example, while the fault that likely produced the recent quake in China was mapped years ago, only very recently did geologists do the fieldwork necessary to document how active it might be or how large a quake it could produce.
Similarly, geologists are still investigating some aspects of this country’s geology. The Wabash Valley fault zone, which produced the earthquake in Illinois in August, is still under study. It was just two decades ago that the Meers fault near Oklahoma City was determined to be active. And the Seattle fault which, like the faults in Northern California, runs directly under a metropolitan area, was discovered only in the 1980s.
So how worried should we be?
“If you’re unlucky, it happens to you once in your lifetime,” said the USGS’s Brocher. “If you’re really unlucky, it happens twice.”
Still, anyone living in a fault zone needs to be cognizant of the risks—especially when it comes to developing our cities and building infrastructure.
“For me,” concluded Miles, “disasters are just manifestations of development failures.