Lots of places in the world have simple rock and mortar homes. If we’re talking about the areas of Turkey, Pakistan and perhaps China, the buildings simply aren’t up to the codes ours are.
Even a 6.5 earthquake in St. Louis compared to one that might hit Los Angeles, would cause far more damage. LA builds to different codes based on it’s frequent quakes.
The New Madrid fault near the bootheel of Missouri and the upper north east section of Arkansas is over due for a large shake. If it were to go a lot of the Mississippi area of that region would be severely damaged. That quake could possibly cause damage up and down the eastern seaboard as well.
When this fault line broke in the early 1800s (I believe), it actually made church bells ring in Boston.
We texans have ... different disasters, so we can’t comment on EQs, but I’ve heard it’s better to have small quakes over time to relieve friction rather than no small quakes, just big ones?
Re the New Madrid EQ zone. The New Madrid EQs of 1811 and 1812 constituted 3 extremely severe quakes felt on the east coast and as far as Canada, as well as a number of other quakes of considerable size. In early 1812 there was also EQ activity in Venezuela that killed around 20,000. There was also a major eruption at St. Vincent in the Caribbean in 1812.
I have been studying this period for several years and just finished reading “The Big One: The Earthquake that Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science” by Jake Page & Charles Officer, 2004. In other volcano and EQ studies I have noticed a 90 to 100 year pattern and a 180 to 200 year more severe pattern. By this observation it would seem that New Madrid might be ripe. However, in reading this book I found the following:
“In the 1990’s several workers from the Center for Earthquake Res. and Info. at the Univ. of Memphis...from 40 or so sites they determined that there had indeed been previous quakes of comparable size to the quakes of 1811-12. They were dated to about AD 500, AD 900, and AD 1450....The average interval, then, is some 430 years....Specifically, what we want to know is the probability of a monster quake [there] between now and the year, say, 2100. The answer is 20%.
Regarding previous EQ experience I was in a 7.5 in Mexico City in 1957 (the biggest since 45 years earlier). I was coming home from a party at 1:30 am. I started staggering and said to my date “I didn’t think that 2 drinks would affect me like this.” Being from California, he said, “It’s an earthquake”, grabbed my hand and we ran out into the middle of the street to get away from the 3 story houses, and the electric lines that were swaying the crackling together. We held onto each other to keep from falling down; it swayed around like a fast moving subway train. When I got home all the 3 foot tall flower pots in the apartment had fallen over, the guys upstairs had been thrown out of bed, one of the girls in our apartment said the chandelier (sp?) had been swaying so hard that it was hitting one side of the ceiling and then the other. A friend said that downtown the “little Empire State building (over 30 stories) was swaying back and forth, and all the prostitutes ran out into the street and were screaming and praying hysterically. Almost 200 people altogether were killed. Mostly in an apartment building that crumbled. Graft in inspections was charged.
I am interested in the problam of low cost earthquake resistant structures. I thank that strawbale structures might be particularly good. I look for one in hurricane country last year on a business trip. Found one outside Pensacola, Florida. It had suffered no damage in Hurricane Hugo, whereas neighboring buildings had considerable damage, and one foot diameter trees had fallen 200 feet away.