It’s just a matter of time, geologists say, before an earthquake the size of the one that struck Turkey will strike an American city, too. Whether it inflicts the same devastating toll, though, will depend on how well those cities prepare.

ACCORDING TO EXPERTS in the U.S. Geological Survey, the threat of severe damage in an earthquake is quite high for a number of major U.S. urban centers. Some, like San Francisco and Los Angeles, have been identified as high-risk areas for some time and have infrastructures better suited for dealing with the disasters. Others, like Seattle, have only recently seen their risk assessments climb, and are now scrambling to catch up.
 
Geologists say they can’t accurately predict when and where quakes will strike next. But, says USGS geophysicist Art Frankel, “we can look at all quake locations and say which zones are most likely to get hit, and then engineers and others can use them for preparing so that it doesn’t matter.”
 
Frankel, who is project chief for the USGS’s National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project in Golden, Colo., says five chief areas have been identified in the U.S. as being highly vulnerable to quakes: the Aleutian Island area of Alaska; the San Andreas fault running north to south in California; the Cascadia subduction zone, running north-south in the coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean from northern California to Washington state; the New Madrid fault zone in the central U.S., including portions of Missouri; and the Intermountain seismic belt, centered on Yellowstone National Park and extending to Salt Lake City and most of the Rocky Mountains in Montana.

Mitch Battros
Producer - Earth Changes TV
http://www.earthchangesTV.com