ST. LOUIS, Mo. – It is a matter of when and not if there will be a major earthquake in the New Madrid seismic zone centered about 160 miles south of St. Louis. Its last major quake came in 1895. Now there’s a new effort to do something. One big concern most of us may overlook, how best to get people out of the area after a catastrophic quake.
“There ain’t no way no one’s going to get out of here,” said New Madrid resident, Richard Buckthorpe. “I’d try to drive out but I don’t think I’d make it.”
Buckthorpe actually moved out of town amid the hype of the massive earthquake predicted by Iben Browning, forecast to hit in 1990. He has since moved back and lives just blocks from the New Madrid fault line marker near the Mississippi Riverbank.
“It’s our fault,” he said laughing, quoting the town’s slogan.
Residents seem to have accepted what a large earthquake could mean.
Researchers are working to change that view for eight Missouri counties (Cape Girardeau, Scott, Butler, Stoddard, New Madrid, Mississippi, Dunklin, and Pemiscot) that surround the fault, which hugs the Mississippi River from southern Missouri and Illinois, stretching about 120 south into Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
“The road network is pretty sparse there, especially outbound,” said University of Missouri Civil Engineering Professor, Praveen Edara.
He and a team of researchers from the University of Missouri S&T along with MODOT are part of a $300,000 study on how best to evacuate the region’s close to 300,000 residents in the event of a catastrophic quake.
Nearly all of those residents have rumblings through years.
“(I) thought a truck had hit the side of the house,” said Robbie Meyers, director of the Butler County Emergency Management Agency.
He was describing the small, 4.0 quake, that hit Poplar Bluff in November.
Strong quakes in similarly active seismic zones across the globe have shown that getting people away from the destruction and aftershocks to shelter and medical services will save lives.
Unfortunately, for the eight counties, west may be the only direction to go.
“All of our evacuations are to the west,” Meyers said. “The assumption is possibly we might not be able to cross the Mississippi River because some of the bridges might have been damaged. Evacuations for some people won’t be able to happen immediately because roads or bridges headed out of their community aren’t fixed yet.”
He urged residents to keep a two weeks supply of food, water, and medications
“This research is going to tell us here are the roadways that are going to be in the best shape, that are going to be the best routes for us to take the public out and another part is we also have to get emergency response in,” said MODOT Research Director, Jen Harper.
“If a large-scale earthquake were to happen in New Madrid, liquefaction along the Mississippi River banks is a very high possibility,” Edara said.
“Liquefaction” happens when water saturates sediment loosened by seismic waves. Roads and buildings essentially float, slide, sink, and break apart.
So, Interstate 55, the best north-south escape route in the New Madrid zone, along with bridges to the east, in Cape Girardeau, MO, and Cairo, IL, may be “off-limits”.
The research team is running computer models, focusing on roads leading west, “plugging in” various quake magnitudes and epicenters.
“(We’ll) run the models again to see if you don’t have 3 of the main bridges, how much additional delay will that cause. Where would the bottlenecks have shifted?” Edara said. “We’ll do that ‘what-if’ analysis.”
Surveys are also going out to residents to see how they plan to respond: will they try to stay put or get out.
Ultimately, map “apps” on cell phone could be updated to point people to the safest way out in the wake of a quake.
“The endgame is that eventually we would get this type of thing to be able to interact with tools that people have in their hands (i.e. phones) and would tell them, ‘hey, this is where you want to go,’” Harper said.
Another study will follow for metro St. Louis after the this one is completed in July.
