Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for April 18, 2008 4:37 A.M.

Mm, mm, oh, oh, yeah, yeah,
I'm all shook up!

Floods, EARTHQUAKE...what's next???

Earthquake causes buzz, little else in Southeast Missouri

By Bob Miller and Matt Sanders
Southeast Missourian

Southeast Missouri was abuzz with conversation Friday as vibrations from a magnitude-5.2 earthquake in southeast Illinois woke up and startled residents all across the region.

From libraries to schools to laundries, people were talking about the earthquake that occurred at 4:37 a.m. seven miles from a tiny town called West Salem in Edwards County near the Indiana border.

"I was sleeping pretty good," said Cape Girardeau resident Rene Phillips. "And my dresser started shaking."

Sharde Anderson, a Southeast Missouri State University student, said she was sleeping when she awoke with her leg shaking.

"I didn't find out till this morning that it was an earthquake. I thought it was a weird dream."

Jean Martin, who works at the public library, said several library patrons were talking about the quake, including one man who noted Southeast Missouri has seen ice storms, floods and now an earthquake.

"He said if he starts seeing locusts, he's heading for the hills," she said.

Some in Southeast Missouri weren't awakened by the shaking. Gary Patterson, manager of the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis, said some structures far removed from an epicenter will be more likely to shake because of the properties of seismic waves in relation to a building's structure. Some buildings will act like a tuning fork, he said, and taller buildings are more likely to resonate with earthquake waves, as are structures on soft sediment.

It wasn't just members of the public talking about the subterranean hiccup. State, city and emergency preparedness officials were all addressing it, assessing possible damage and encouraging people to use the incident as a wake-up call.

Crews with the Cape Girardeau Fire Department and the city government's inspection and engineering wings did a survey of the city but found no significant damage on their cursory review, said fire chief Rick Ennis. Public works checked infrastructure, such as water lines and treatment plants, and found no damage, Ennis said.

"It was really a good exercise for us," Ennis said. "We really didn't expect to find any damage."

The Associated Press reported that Missouri Department of Transportation said it had found no problems after inspecting 2,500 bridges.

Locally the transportation agency had crews inspecting for damage in Southeast Missouri. By late afternoon, with almost all inspections complete, the transportation agency's Southeast district, based in Sikeston, said no damage had been found. Josh Wessel, a maintenance supervisor with MoDOT's Jackson office, said crews out of Jackson inspected 28 bridges in Cape Girardeau County and found no damage.

Inspectors were searching for cracks or buckling in the bridge deck, loose pavement, bent beams or girders, missing bolts or misaligned curbs or rails.

There have been no reports of injuries or serious damage in Missouri. But one bridge that may have been damaged by the earthquake was an overpass on South Kingshighway Boulevard in St. Louis. Debris fell from the overpass around the time the earthquake happened.

No injuries were reported in Missouri, and only minor property damage, according to a news release from Gov. Matt Blunt's office. Little damage was reported near the epicenter.

'It sounded terrible'

West Salem police chief Harvey Fenton said the damage was limited to a few small cracks in walls.

"It sounded terrible for a while," he said. "We're extremely lucky."

A photographer in Mount Carmel, Ill., captured an image of a porch awning that snapped away from the house during the quake.

Despite the lack of widespread damage, the quake was fairly powerful. It was felt as far away as Chicago and Nebraska.

Another quake, with a magnitude of 4.6, reverberated through the river region later Friday morning. It was the largest of several aftershocks. People shouldn't assume, however, that the pre-dawn tremble, which occurred in the Wabash Valley seismic zone, will spawn larger quakes along the New Madrid fault in Southeast Missouri, which scientists for years have predicted will unleash a monster rumble.

"My first reaction would be no," said Dr. Nicholas Tibbs, professor emeritus of geosciences at Southeast Missouri State University. He added, however, that earthquakes on rare occasions have been known to trigger earthquakes in other faults.

The Center for Earthquake Research and Information was sending a team to the epicenter of the quake to begin monitoring seismic activity there. That team will be joined by others from universities and public agencies around the region, Patterson said.

5.2-Magnitude Quake Jolts Midwest, Shaking Buildings but Injuring Few

By SUSAN SAULNY and CATRIN EINHORN

CHICAGO — The aftershocks that rippled around this city and other parts of the Midwest on Friday were not only seismic but stupefying: That shaking and swaying in the predawn hours Friday morning, Chicagoans asked one another, was that really an earthquake? Here of all places?

It was. An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.2 hit Southern Illinois at 4:36 a.m., said Gary Patterson, a geologist at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis.

The quake shook an area of about 120,000 square miles from northern Michigan south to Memphis, and from Kansas City, Mo., east to Nashville. At the epicenter, near the town of West Salem, Ill., just west of the Indiana border, buildings suffered minor structural damage.

No one was killed, and only minor injuries were reported. Farther out, skyscrapers wiggled, at least one chimney collapsed, and nerves were rattled for many people who awoke in a sleepy fog, not sure why their headboards were clanking against the wall.

In Chicago, where the wind blows and the snow falls but the ground rarely shakes, the earthquake was the talk of the town, although many who felt it were slow to recognize it.

“It was so unexpected, so weird, so random,” said Kate Peters, a communications consultant who lives on the eighth floor of a high-rise condominium building on Chicago’s Gold Coast. “It actually woke me up. And I thought, my bed is shaking! What’s going on? I was glad when I heard on the radio that it was actually an earthquake. Glad I’m not crazy. My building was creaking, and I could feel the floor move.”

Across Chicago, hundreds of callers flooded emergency and nonemergency telephone lines. Some reported shaking furniture, officials said, while others, bewildered, simply asked what was going on. Inspectors were dispatched to ensure the integrity of structures like bridges, viaducts and cranes, and officials asked contractors to examine their construction sites. Air-traffic control towers at the airports here and in Indianapolis swayed and rattled, but operations were not disrupted, officials said.

The earthquake originated in what geologists call the Ozark Dome region, which covers about five Southern and Midwestern states and includes several active fault lines. It was unclear Friday, several experts said, which fault had triggered the tremor. Unlike the seismic zones of the Western states, the Midwest is largely uncharted territory.

“Things are well known on the West Coast because they’ve been studying this for a hundred years with a lot of resources,” said Mr. Patterson, the geologist from Memphis. “In the central United States, there’s much more to be learned about how the faults interact and how they’re shaped. We don’t know how big this fault is that ruptured today. We’re surrounding the epicenter with instruments as fast as we can to capture some data.”

Scientists do know that because of the flat, dense terrain, tremors travel more quickly and over more territory in the central states than, say, on the West Coast, making smaller seismic events more widespread and possibly more dangerous. And because earthquakes happen less frequently in the country’s midsection, people are less aware of the risk.

“Today’s earthquake serves as a reminder that they can happen anywhere,” Mr. Patterson said.

A similar earthquake hit around the same area in 2002. A slightly stronger one hit Southern Illinois in 1968. But the most devastating on record happened in the early 1800s along the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which stretches from Southern Illinois roughly to Memphis.

“People have been saying ever since then that we’re overdue for a big one, but who can say?” said Waverly Person, a geophysicist and former head of the National Earthquake Center. “All we know is that there is a possibility.”