It’s funny … somehow, I knew New Orleans was a lake waiting to happen, but Bush seems to feel nobody could have predicted it. I was also completely unconvinced that there were WMD in Iraq, but there was no way anybody could have predicted that there wasn’t. Maybe we’re being lied to, I guess, but I prefer to think that I’m just incredibly brilliant and far-sighted. Yeah, I like that. I’ll stick with that hypothesis …
I have another prediction. Very bad things will continue to happen now and then — things that only Government can do much about. And those things can’t be prevented, no matter how much Government is hated by … the, uh … current … Government.
I don’t intend to be alarmist, of course. This is only an example. But when was the last time anyone got warned about the great New Madrid earthquakes in Missouri and Arkansas? There were four quakes above magnitude 7.0 within the span of a few months, and some were powerful enough to break windows all the way over in the White House in Washington, D.C. (so maybe it got their attention). The quakes changed the course of the Mississippi River, which flowed backward for three days.
The point is that, you know, this is not a political game. Government really does have to take itself seriously, and tax people for whatever that seriousness costs. Here are a few other big earthquakes to think about:
Idaho
1983 Oct 28, Magnitude 7.0, Borah Peak
Montana
1959 Aug 18, Magnitude 7.3, Hebgen Lake
Nevada
1915 Oct 03, Magnitude 7.1, Pleasant Valley
1932 Dec 21, Magnitude 7.2, Cedar Mountain
1954 Dec 16, Magnitude 7.1, Fairview Peak
S. Carolina
1886 Sep 01, Magnitude 7.3, Charleston
And then there was the enormous 9.0 subduction zone quake along the Pacific Northwest coast the night of January 28, 1700, that was only the latest in these kinds of quakes that core samples tell us happen every 300 to 500 years. How do we know the quake happened? Apart for oral stories among native people and old estuary marshes buried under ocean sand sediment for miles inland in all estuaries in WA, OR and northern CA, the Japanese (who kept very good written records of “the big waves” called tsuamis) record an enormous series of waves striking from the east on a particular late January morning. Calculating wave travel time, researchers have corroborated native people stories of the huge wave in the middle of the night in winter of what we call 1700. The prospect of a 9.0 quake, which would bring down buildings from Vancouver BC to San Francisco, coupled with about a 15 minute warning period prior to a tsunami, has local officials on the PNW coast in a panic (especially after a nearly identical quake in Indonesia last winter). We live on a very active little planet that basically doesn’t care if we are here or not.