Quakeland: On the Road to America's Next Devastating Earthquake

"Quakeland: On the Road to America's Next Devastating Earthquake"

Author Kathryn Miles was on Stephen Colbert early last week talking about her newest book--which is pretty darn scary. There's really nowhere in the US that's not on shaky ground, and when she starts listing all our out-dated and crumbling infrastructure, "collapse" takes on a whole new dimension. Salt Lake City? Oy vey! There are about 88,000 aging dams and 100,000 miles of geriatric levees and way too many crucial bridges that could bring this country to its knees.

Turns out she has family here in Central Illinois, and I am hoping she will be coming here to speak in the near future.

David Trammel's picture

This is a good reminder that we should be preparing for more than just Collapse. It won't just be the long slow descent of economics and resource depletion that takes decades but it could be a sudden disaster like an earthquake or hurricane that will push some of us into poverty and little letter c, collapse.

Highly recommended! Must-read for Green Wizards. Not only does it discuss historical earthquakes, current knowledge on earthquake detection, and likely sites for "the Big Ones," but it talks about all the different types of earthquakes we are likely to experience: breaks in known faults, breaks in unknown faults, seismic activity from fracking, waste water injection sites, carbon sequestration sites, mining, construction of huge high-rise buildings and subways, extreme water pressure from gargantuan hydro-electrical dams.It covers tsunamis and where you are likely to get swept away. It talks about quake-resistant and tsunami-resistant infrastructure, and the fragility of our current hodge-podge of bridges, highways, public buildings, and utilities. It talks about preparing for disasters.

And there is a very interesting early warning network being built around smartphones:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114851-seismic-sensing-app-detects...