Our house started shaking this morning as I was getting ready for work. It lasted, maybe, 15–20 seconds. The newspapers say it was only a 5.7 magnitude earthquake, but still big enough to get one’s attention. I haven’t heard of anyone being hurt, but some of the buildings downtown were damaged, the power’s out in some parts of the valley and the airport’s been closed.
We get an earthquake of this size about every ten years, which is better than the “big one” geologists say will happen here sooner or later.
How strange … we had one last week as well. Not as big. It was a 3.5 (I think) It was loud and very rock and roll according to all reports. Ours tend to come with a huge boom. We also get them about every 10 to 15 years. Maybe the Earth is getting ready to give up
Coincidentally, I wrote a paper on that in a university disaster management class a long time ago. If I remember right, it’s called the New Madrid Fault (or something to that effect) and is down toward the bootheel part of the state. There was a series of huge earthquakes there a couple of hundred years ago when very few people were around. Today, those same earthquakes would be catastrophic — probably extreme damage all the way from St. Louis down to Memphis.
The earthquake in Salt Lake today was along one of the side faults on the west side of the valley. The big fault — the Wasatch Fault — runs along the east side of the valley parallel with the Wasatch Mountain range and directly through the most heavily populated urban parts of state.
It’s pretty obvious where it is in places due to the sudden couple of hundred feet difference in elevation from one side to the other. When that fault lets loose, the geologists say it will result in upwards of a 7.5 magnitude quake.
The Wasatch Mountains that rise up from the valley by several thousand feet are supposedly the long-term consequences of this fault that lets loose every three hundred years or so. The geologists say it’s probably overdue.
