What are we supposed to think when rather large earthquakes start happening in places that aren’t supposed to have large earthquakes?
2019 has been quite a year for seismic activity already, and I understand that we should expect to see earthquakes in diverse places, but if someone told me that the U.S. was just hit by a significant quake one of the last places that I would check would be Kansas. The state of Kansas is certainly known for a lot of things, but earthquakes are not one of them, and that is why what we just witnessed is so startling.
According to the Kansas City Star, one county in central Kansas alone has been hit by 11 quakes within the past five days…
A county in central Kansas experienced a pretty shocking uptick in seismic activity last week — 11 earthquakes in five days.It started with a magnitude-2.4 earthquake Wednesday morning just 2 1/2 miles southwest of Hutchinson, Kansas, in Reno County, according to the United States Geological Survey.There would be 10 more before the week was out.
The biggest one of the group hit on Friday morning. It was originally reported to be a magnitude 4.2 quake, but it was later downgraded to magnitude 4.1.
Due to the geology of the region, earthquakes in the middle of the country are often felt more acutely, and this particular earthquake was powerful enough to shake things off the shelves of people’s homes…
Tim Black, who lives in Hutchinson, told the TV station his house shook and things fell off the walls. And Hutchinson resident Alice Hinnen said things fell off shelves in her home. She said she has felt earthquakes before, but this is the strongest one yet.KWCH said people across Kansas felt this earthquake. “We’ve heard reports from people as far away as Topeka, Hays, Arkansas City, and into northern Oklahoma,” the station said on its website.
Further south, Oklahoma has experienced even more earthquakes than Kansas has over the past seven days. Overall, there has been a total of 65 earthquakesbetween the two states over the past week.
That definitely isn’t normal, and we should keep a close eye on this.
Meanwhile, we are also seeing more unusual seismic activity out on the west coast. In fact, a magnitude 5.4 earthquake just hit the Cascadia Subduction Zone just off the coast of Oregon…
The magnitude 5.4 temblor struck at 8:23 a.m. more than 200 miles west of Coos Bay, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The quake hit at a depth of roughly 7 miles.
Earthquakes are not uncommon in the area, which sees frequent seismic activity as tectonic plates meet and shift and crumble under one another. The Cascadia Subduction Zone, a series of faults that runs parallel to the coast from Northern California to British Columbia, is expected to produce a massive quake that could devastate the region.
It is always alarming whenever a quake rattles the Cascadia Subduction Zone, because scientists tell us that someday a monster event will produce a giant tsunami that will wipe out coastal areas up and down the west coast. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “You Have Been Warned: Experts Tell Us That A Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake And Tsunami Will Destroy Everything West Of Interstate 5”.
But more than anywhere else, I am deeply concerned about the California coastline right now.
According to Earthquake Track, there have been 2,801 earthquakes of at least magnitude 1.5 in the state of California within the past 30 days.
If the earthquakes remain small, that won’t be too much of a problem.
But one day the “Big One” is going to hit, and all of our lives will instantly change.
Of course many Californians like to mock the idea that the “Big One” is coming, but physicist Michio Kaku recently told CBS News that it is actually “way overdue”…
“We’re playing Russian roulette with Mother Nature,” said physicist Michio Kaku, CBS News reported.
“You realize the last big earthquake to hit the L.A. segment of the San Andreas fault was 1680,” Kaku said, according to the network. “That’s over 300 years ago. But the cycle time for breaks and earthquakes on the San Andreas fault is 130 years, so we are way overdue.”
I have been thinking about the coming California earthquake a lot today. The people living there have been warned over and over again, and they know the risks.
And only 13 percent of all California homeowners actually have earthquake insurance.
So when they lose their homes, they are really going to lose their homes.
Our planet is rocking and rolling, and the warning signs are very clear. Let us hope for the best, but the truth is that Californians are already living on borrowed time, and eventually there will be no more grace period.
2 comments:
I understand choosing to not purchase earthquake ins. Back in NY we had it because it wasn't expensive and the deductible was small. Here in the Charleston area, the deductible is huge and we have chosen not to pay the extra amount for that insurance though it is a concern here.
I can't even imagine how much that insurance would cost - it must be astronomical
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