Oct 25, 1989

By Andrew Cassel , Inquirer Staff Writer

NEW MADRID, Mo. – Joe Lankheit didn’t use to worry about the Big One.

But since he got back from the sales meeting in San Francisco last weekend, he looks at the bridges, highways and buildings of his southeastern Missouri home town with new alarm.

“If there’s a 7.0 around here, I think it’ll be so devastating that people cannot even imagine,” said Lankheit, an auto dealer here. “I do not think my house would stand it. “

Lankheit, who rode out the 7.1 California quake in a Hyatt Hotel outside Monterey, may have had his consciousness raised more than most, but he is far from alone. In the last eight days, earthquakes have become Topic A in this region.

The reason: Southeastern Missouri is at the center of the New Madrid fault zone, the most earthquake-prone area east of the Rocky Mountains and the likely center of what some scientists predict will be a far more deadly quake than the one that rocked the San Francisco Bay Area Oct. 17.

“It’s just a matter of when,” said David Stewart, director of a new earthquake study center at Southeastern Missouri University, who is trying to persuade citizens and their elected officials here to prepare for a major earthquake.

The region stands a 33 percent chance of seeing a quake the size of San Francisco’s by the end of the century, Stewart said, and a 67 percent chance by the year 2024. But a quake of that size would be a much bigger event here than in California.

There would probably be not only severe damage in cities such as Memphis and St. Louis, which have done little to prepare for quakes, but also tremors as far away as Chicago and the East Coast.

The geology of the eastern North American continent is the reason, according to Stewart. “The rock out West is hot and young,” he said. “It doesn’t transmit seismic waves so well. The rock here is cold and old; it would be just like ringing a bell. “

The last big series of quakes on the New Madrid fault did in fact ring bells – in Boston. That was between December 1811 and February 1812, when five tremors now estimated at more than 8.0 on the Richter scale upended fields, sank towns and briefly made part of the Mississippi River run upstream.

Emanating from a rift in the bedrock 7,000 feet below the Mississippi Valley, the quakes made sidewalks buckle in Washington, D.C. The scaffolding set up to build the dome of the U.S. Capitol fell down. The town of New Madrid, Mo., then the largest settlement between St. Louis and New Orleans, disappeared into the rerouted river.

“New Madrid could have been a metropolis of a couple hundred thousand people by now” if not for the quakes, Stewart said.

Today there is hardly a trace of the catastrophe, only some bare spots amid the cotton and soybean fields where the Earth threw up round spouts of pure sand.

Moreover, there is no living local memory of a deadly tremor – a fact that has made it hard, up to now, to impress people of the need for preparedness.

“There’s no one around who knows or remembers or even remembers hearing talk of anyone who’s ever been harmed by one,” said Don Lloyd, New Madrid town manager. “It’s just low down on the list of priorities. “

With fewer than than 3,500 people, New Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid) doesn’t even have building inspectors. Flooding is a far greater concern, along with the fate of the town’s municipal electric system.

Bigger communities nearby are equally unprepared. Two weeks ago, the City Council in Jonesboro, Ark., population 41,000, voted to rescind an earthquake- related code for new buildings after managers of a company the town has been trying to lure complained it would increase construction costs.

Only one of the seven states near the New Madrid fault zone – Kentucky – has any sort of statewide seismic building standards, Stewart said. The cities of Memphis and St. Louis are particularly vulnerable, with hundreds of thousands of people living among older brick and masonry structures that could fall.

A 1985 study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency projected deaths in the thousands in six cities if a major quake hit the region.

But only in the last week has interest here focused on the likelihood of a serious quake occurring in the foreseeable future.

“I’ve been here 11 years, and I’ve never seen anything like the response to this earthquake. We’re just swamped,” said Arch Johnston, director of the Tennessee Earthquake Information Center at Memphis State University.

Memphis’ mayor led a delegation of local officials and builders to San Francisco to observe the damage there. U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth (R., Mo.) has called in Stewart and others for meetings. U.S. Rep. John Tanner (D., Tenn.) has slated hearings on earthquake preparedness for Memphis next month.

“We’ve had a building code languishing (in Memphis’ City Council) for a year and half,” Johnston said. “I think they’ll move it to the front burner now. “

Stewart said almost nothing in the region is built to resist earthquakes. “We have to start with the basics,” he said. “Most of the engineers and architects don’t even know how to build a seismic building in the Midwest. “

And most citizens in this predominantly rural region have little understanding of what’s involved. “When one comes,” said Harvey West, a retired auto worker fishing for catfish in the Mississippi at New Madrid on Monday evening, “I’ll probably be standing here with a reel in my hand and just slide in.”

But Stewart is optimistic he can capitalize on the California disaster. “My purpose here is to prepare Missouri for the earthquake we feel is coming,” he said. “Sociologists tell us that if you’re going to do something like this, you have six months from an earthquake before interest dies out… Now’s our opportunity.”