Born in the time of the dinosaurs, the New Madrid fault has rested in the middle of North America for millions of years. It began as a tear in the crust while the titanic forces that build mountains and form vast oceans fought to rip the continent in half.
A long-buried avenue for the mile-wide Mississippi River covered by eons of mud and rock, New Madrid remains active, most recently and devastatingly awakening in the early 1800s in a series of three magnitude 8 earthquakes that reportedly turned the Mississippi River’s flow backwards.
Now, almost 200 years later, the chance of another New Madrid earthquake remains a threat to much of the South, where even at Mississippi State University in Starkville, the devastating effects of such an event could be felt.
For Darrel Schmitz, geosciences department head at MSU, the possibility of another New Madrid earthquake is not a matter of if, but when. He said many experts believe the fault system is past due for a strong quake.
“It’s very hard to predict exactly when. Will there be one someday? Unquestionably, there will be,” Schmitz said.
Scientists once predicted a major earthquake would strike the fault every 200 years, but more recent studies place that estimate closer to 600 years, Schmitz said. Whether at this very moment or in 1,000 years, an earthquake could happen any time, he said. When the next large earthquake does occur, it will probably happen without any advance warning.
“Usually when there’s a major one, usually that’s the first [one], just like what happened in Haiti,” he said. “You often get some big aftershocks . but it’s that first ‘snap’ that’s the big one.”
A graduate student under Schmitz, David Snodgrass studied the possible impact of an earthquake on MSU if a magnitude 8 quake hit eastern Arkansas. His research indicated such an event might leave 10 percent of the campus damaged.
“When you value the buildings on this campus at hundreds-of-millions of dollars … it’s a notable amount of damage,” Schmitz said.
The impact on campus would also depend on the construction of MSU buildings: older brick and stone structures like the smokestack near the steam plant would likely crash to the ground.
“Steel flexes a little bit, wood flexes a little bit, [but] Masonry, concrete block and brick doesn’t flex, so it crumbles, which is one reason why some places, particularly less fortunate civilizations in areas of earthquakes, [. have] a lot more deaths and a lot more damage,” he said.
More likely is the possibility of a New Madrid earthquake striking Memphis, Tenn., two and a half hours northwest of Starkville. Schmitz said while Memphis has instituted building codes to make the city less susceptible to seismic activity, the city would not stand a chance if a magnitude 8 earthquake took place nearby.
“If the eight happens, around Memphis, it’ll probably be pretty close to that – almost total destruction,” he said. “We won’t be as bad off here from an 8 in that area, but probably we would definitely have power outages and people would be confused.”
A disaster of that magnitude happening to Memphis, Schmitz said, would be similar in proximity and size to the effects of Hurricane Katrina in terms of scope and impact on the region.
“Not the same destruction, but it would be that bad and we’d be close enough by to feel some effects and close enough hopefully to get people help, because they’re going to need it,” he said.
Although an earthquake in Starkville may not be likely, the university has a plan in place in case such an emergency should arise. Vice President for Student Affairs Bill Kibler heads the Crisis Action Team, or CAT. A group of officials from across campus, the CAT team is on the forefront of crisis management and response for the university and must prepare for possible emergency events ranging from severe weather to hostage situations and even earthquakes.
The core of the CAT team can be assembled within a few minutes; and regularly conducts drills in preparation for possible future emergencies. Universities like MSU regularly conduct “disaster audits” to determine the possibility of various disasters at the school. Because earthquakes are less frequent than other disasters, the group has never practiced a response to an earthquake, but Kibler says many of the response systems for other incidents would be used if an earthquake did occur.
“It’s not that [an earthquake drill would] be a waste of our time but we have so many other things, clearly based on our experience here – winds, tornadoes, ice storms – that are far more likely to strike us,” he said. “We need to know that we’re prepared, but we have elements that are common to all of those, like our communication system and our ability to assemble our team and respond quickly.”
Advance warning before an earthquake disaster plays a key role in the school’s response to the event.
“The obvious question would be: ‘How much warning would we get? Would we get any?'” Kibler said.
But sometimes there is no warning. Kibler said if that is the case, the CAT team will turn its focus to coordinating emergency response and maintaining communication across campus to begin accounting for people at the university.
He said the recent earthquake in Haiti was tragic, and he hoped that if a similar earthquake were to happen near Mississippi State, emergency personnel would have time to warn the surrounding community.
“We have lots of sophisticated ability to do those things here in this country, but that doesn’t mean that it will always work,” Kibler said. “We would hope that if something like that would be coming, we would at least get enough advance time to push some emergency messages out to our community pretty quickly because that’s the ultimate goal of all this, keep the people on the campus safe. Buildings can be rebuilt, but if you lose some people, that’s it.”
Aimee Cole, a junior geoscience major concentrating in operational meteorology, said in several of her geology classes the professors have mentioned the New Madrid fault, and while the possibility of an earthquake affecting Starkville is possible, the risk is relatively low. She said that recent natural disasters like the Indonesian tsunami from 2006 and January’s earthquake in Haiti have raised awareness surrounding them.
“There’s probably been an increased interest or awareness, there’s usually that after something like that, after the big tsunami after the big one a few years ago, it’s normal for a big incident,” Cole said.
She said although she knows what to do in the event of an earthquake, she was not sure students who haven’t seen disaster movies or taken geology classes would know what was happening.
“It would probably freak me out because the likelihood that we have an earthquake is so out there, not because we don’t have that many earthquakes, but there aren’t many earthquake building codes around here,” Cole said.