Everyone in the Midwest Okay? Earthquake this AM

susiestar

Roll With It
We were literally shaken awake this morning at 7 am. The earthquake registered 5.6 and is the worst I have ever experienced personally. It seemed like it just kept going. We went outside because we are on the bottom floor of an apartment building. Nothing broke though a flour container fell and dumped. If it hadn't gotten into the cat's food, it would not have been a big deal.

Captain sure thought it was a major deal. He has been bent out of shape all day over it, lol! Of course being scared of earthquakes, storms and fireworks had him upset already. Today is the first football game of the season and Captain HATES that. Hubby works at the games and is gone 14-18 hrs per game which Captain finds personally offensive. Then last night they had a big pep rally nearby and set off fireworks for a solid half hour. Adding an earthquake wake-up call on top of that and husband leaving at 5 am?? Yikes! I have one super cranky siamese on my hands. He is even now yelling at my neighbors for who knows what.

Are all of you fine? Apparently this quake was felt from Nebraska to Arizona and in many other areas. So far I don't know of damage in my town. I hope that no one else was put through this today!
 

Tanya M

Living with an attitude of gratitude
Staff member
Wow, did not know this happened. I'm in N. IL but did not feel anything. 5.6 is a pretty good quake. I was in Calif. one year at my grandmothers and felt a 6.5 it's very un-nerving to feel that.
Glad you are ok. Hope Captain is doing better, perhaps a little catnip :tongue:
 

ksm

Well-Known Member
We feel it here in KS. This is only the second one that i felt in the state. It did go on and on... At first I felt someone bumped my recliner...then I realized what it was. One of my cars was scared, he gave me a strange look, then started running around the house. The other didn't move from his recliner!

No damage that I am aware of. Difficult Child said it's even worse when you are upstairs...

KSM
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
They are still looking into the incredibly heavy amount of fracking and wastewater injection going on in OK as a cause of this latest quake as well as the numerous smaller quakes that are occurring with increasing frequency in OK.
 

Nomad

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Does anyone know which state felt it the hardest? Was it OK? Not a ton of information right now. I found out about it on FB!
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
From what I've read, the epicenter was in OK, they felt it the hardest, and it was felt so widely because it was a VERY shallow quake: only about 4 mi. down.
 

susiestar

Roll With It
It was centered in Oklahoma. The town of Pawnee asked for people to avoid their downtown due to damage and the reservation for the Pawnee Tribe had quite a number of damaged buildings, some were so bad as to be uninhabitable.

My husband was at the university setting up for the opening football game of the season. He works at all the sporting events and is usually there very early. He thought someone was running with an industrial size trash container until he glanced up. The entire stadium shook and waved back and forth. The nearby basketball stadium had broken windows.

I was actually rather shaken up by it. It seemed much stronger and longer lasting than any we have had in the past. Reports say that they closed a number of fracking wells within hours of the earthquake.

The statistics now say that Oklahoma has the same risk of earthquakes that California has always had. This is a HUGE change and NOT for the best!! We already have tornados, what next? Tsunamis coming out of the lakes?

I am a bit afraid for our dams though. They are not designed to tolerate earthquakes because we didn't have earthquakes until recently. I don't know if our old dams can handle the stress or if they will burst and flood large areas. It will be a terrifying disaster if that happens.
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
Susie, I was looking at some satellite images of OK and noticed the dams as well. Many are very old. Earthquakes have not been an issue in OK before fracking. OK sits squat in the middle of a fairly seismically "sleepy" area with-no real fault lines to speak of.

The designers of those dams would not have even considered earthquakes.

I hope the dams hold, but I have my doubts. And even fracking were to stop immediately, the quakes are likely to go on for at least a while as things find their new level.
 

susiestar

Roll With It
That is exactly what has a lot of people here very, very worried. Some years ago we looked at moving to a couple of houses along a lake near Tulsa. We are now VERY glad we did not because the dam there is very old and is likely to be one of the earlier ones to fail if any do fail. Houses in that area are losing value because no one wants to move there with the earthquake threat to the dam. It is pretty scary because the entire town would likely be wiped out. The flood plain is actually the reason I decided not to move to that town as it is an area that has real flood and flash flood problems every year as it is.
 

Lil

Well-Known Member
You know it's funny...I found out about this on Facebook! Some friends here in my town felt it, but I didn't...slept right through it. Jabber was up and he didn't notice it either. I guess we're on a firm foundation.

I understand the quake was centered in Oklahoma. Here in Missouri we have the New Madrid fault. It was once the source of a quake so bad it changed the course of the Mississippi river. I've read that it's not a question of IF we'll have a major quake in Missouri, but WHEN...yet no one really thinks about it.
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
Yes, Lil. That quake created Reelfoot Lake, and the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers swapped beds.

The New Madrid is so scary because of much of it along it's (long) length is locked, and it is heavily built up along there. There are even a couple of nuclear power plants along it IIRC
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
Being locked along most of its length makes the New Madrid fault so scary because it can't slip a little here and there to release pressure. When it goes, it's going to be explosive. Seismologists and geologists say that the New Madrid is capable of producing a quake in the high 8s or even 9 when it goes. Unlike the last quake, when the area wasn't really settled, most of that area is heavily settled. Tens of thousands would be killed. Millions displaced. Extreme property damage would be the rule of the day, plus horrific infrastructure damage.

Buildiings and infrastructure there are not built to resist quakes, and you can't reallly build to resist a quake of the magnitude NM could produce.
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
Oh. Just as an update that won't make any of us feel any better. There are currently 15 nuclear reactors along the NM fault, nearly all of them very old.

If NM lets go and those reactors are destroyed/damaged, it will make Fukushiima look like somebody flicked their Bic.
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
So far no signs of active magma plumes or magma movement under OK or MO. We can depend on their being massive fires along the NM "footprint" when that fault lets go, though.

We'll feel it to a greater or lesser degree here in Milwaukee as well. The parts of the New Madrid fault that aren't locked shift constantly, causing small quakes that seismological equipment in Milwaukee and Chicago pick up.

I don't doubt that we'll be very well aware, and possibly take some damage as well, though nothing like those living along the fault line.
 

susiestar

Roll With It
To me this seems to be another Katrina in the making. I can't help wonder why no one seems to be paying any attention to this. Billions of dollars in damage but it wouldn't cost billions ahead of time to upgrade things the way it will after the fact. It just seems so irresponsible. But that is the government I guess. They are more worried about election garbage and other idiocy.
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
Chicago's gonna be in a world of hurt as well. It has been determined that if the upper end of NM lets go, Chicago will get a pretty high magnitude shaking. Now much of Chicago is build on reclaimed swampland and artificial coastline created by dredging and dumping vast amounts of sand. Buildings were built on steel beams sunk into that sand.

If Chicago gets hit by a good sized quake, that sand is basically gonna act like a liquid, causing much of the Loop, Streeterville, and the Gold Coast, not to mention parts further inland, to simply sink into what is now quicksand.
 

Lil

Well-Known Member
The last New Madrid quake was 200 years ago. My guess as to why no one takes action is because the fault may shift next week or not for the next 500 years. There is no way to know...any more than if the super volcano under Yellowstone is going to blow...and it could. That would be much worse than an earthquake caused by the NM fault. The North West is a powder keg. Who ever thought Mt. St. Helens would erupt in 1980? I understand that Mt. Lassen erupted last in 1915 and is still active. Mt. Hood, Mt. Shasta, Mt. Rainier - all those mountains are volcanos and they aren't dead.

Is it risky to put nuclear plants near a fault? Sure. It was risky to build one in Japan - a country known to be unstable and subject to severe storms and tsunamis. I'm sure a cost/benefit analysis was done at the time and the risk was deemed acceptable. Was it? Probably not. New Orleans is sinking under water - as is Venice, Italy. Look how big the population is in Southern California - where quakes aren't even unusual. We humans don't always put things in the most logical places.

The way I see it, you can worry about stuff that may never happen, or you can live your life and not make yourself a wreck over something you can't prevent.
 

Jabberwockey

Well-Known Member
Eh, the asteroid that NASA is trying to study will probably kill us first. LOL!

You never know when something completely out of your realm of knowledge, much less control, might come along and bite you. Within reason, there's no point in worrying about things that you cant control or predict. Live on the east or gulf coast you deal with hurricanes. Live on the west coast you get earthquakes, live in the northwest you have volcano's, southwest insane heat, Midwest tornado's. You get the picture. Whether its disease or disaster, Mother Nature is always trying to kill us so quit worrying about it, but not to the point of being stupid!, and enjoy your life while you can.
 
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