The rather absurd myth that earthquakes only kill people in Third World hellholes without building codes seems to have gotten stronger after the Haiti quake. Entirely wishful thinking.
People seem to forget the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan killed over 5,000 people.
In America, though, I think tornadoes are the deadlier force. Tornadoes rarely kill hundreds but they kill small pockets in a cluster of storms year after year on a rather steady basis. While man has built structures that limit earthquake damage, nobody has yet designed a building to limit tornado damage.
The U.S. will have an earthquake that kills several thousand people, probably within the next 2-3 decades. It's just a matter of time. When that happens quakes will easily pull ahead of tornadoes as a cause of death in the U.S.
And even now earthquakes are a far greater cause of dollar damage in the U.S. averaged out over time; the Oklahoma City tornado did about $1 billion dollars of damage; the Northridge earthquake did about $20 billion dollars of damage.
Even California has tens of thouands of older structures that are not remotely capable of surviving a large earthquake; when you start talking about places like the Pacific Northwest, Utah, and even the East Coast (where a M 7 quake has hit Charleston SC and large quakes have struck near Boston centuries ago) it's much worse; there's even a not-inconsiderable threat to New York City.
Is a quake ever going to kill 100,000 people in the US? No. But we don't have any sort of magical technological immunity against mass deaths in earthquakes.
I believe you will be alive when 10’s of millions are killed by quakes in the USA within a relatively short period of time.
We shall see.
I have no doubt where you’ll file this . . . yet you will remember it at the time.
An series of seismic events could easily kill or cause the deaths of millions in the US. They could easily cause volcanic activity, tsunamis, disruption of logistical lines of communication, and destruction of water resources for population centers.
We only survive and prosper by the grace of God.
If the New Madrid quakes occurred in 2011 and 2012 instead of 1811 and 1812, I'd think it might come close. Lots of people live in that area now, and they are not used to earthquakes. Plus if it took out lots of bridges, it might be very hard to get aid to the area, which has lots of rivers and smaller, but still substantial, waterways.