It’s curious to consider why some quakes are virtually silent, yet other of similar magnitude are very loud. One account of one of the New Madrid shocks indicates “The roar I thught would leave us deaf if we lived.”
The local geology of course makes big quakes in the US mid-south VERY bad. The entire account from above is here:
http://hsv.com/genlintr/newmadrd/accnt3.htm
Note the location: Louisville, about 200 miles away from the epicenter(s).
Thank you for this excellent link. I know I will study it in detail. Actually while 3 of the quakes were extremely strong, there were dozens of others during about a 6 month period that would have been noteworthy in most other cases. There was also a major quake in Venezuela in the spring of 2012 that killed perhaps 20,000 people. St. Vincent in the Caribbean also had a major volcanic eruption in 2012. Obviously the whole Caribbean Plate was influencing neighboring areas.