CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. — Earthquake experts provided the first public look Tuesday at a new tool that projects and illustrates what would happen if the New Madrid Seismic Zone were to unleash another major quake, like it did two centuries ago — and will eventually do again.
“It’s only a matter of time before we have more big ones,†said Jeff Briggs, the earthquake program manager for the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency, or SEMA. “So we need to be ready.â€
One of the “worst-case scenarios†with an epicenter in southeast Missouri, near Sikeston, would be the least disastrous of the three possibilities described by the model, with 533 deaths, more than 20,800 displaced households and $75.8 billion in damages.
None of those fatalities would happen in the St. Louis area, although the city and its widespread brick buildings would still experience shaking and potential damage, said Brian Blake, the executive director of CUSEC, a nonprofit that aims to reduce deaths and other negative impacts from regional earthquakes.
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The by the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium, or CUSEC, was unveiled and discussed Tuesday before hundreds of officials, emergency personnel and other attendees at SEMA’s seventh annual Earthquake Summit, held this year in Cape Girardeau.
The data, , show potential impacts mapped out down to the county level, currently detailing three scenarios if a Magnitude-7.5 or Magnitude-7.7 earthquake were to occur.
That’s roughly on par with the series of three massive earthquakes that the New Madrid fault system produced over a period of weeks in 1811 and 1812, when Missouri’s Bootheel region was at the epicenter of some of the most powerful quakes the U.S. has ever experienced. That historic burst of seismic activity cracked sidewalks in Cleveland, rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina, and was felt by President James Madison in Washington, D.C.
It’s unlikely that local quakes of that caliber will reoccur anytime soon, experts say. But it’s possible — with a 7% to 10% chance of an earthquake that registers a Magnitude-7 or higher striking within the next 50 years, experts said.
In modern times, the new data indicate that such an event would be catastrophic, resulting in hundreds to thousands of fatalities, depending on where the quake’s epicenter occurs. The model projects what would happen from a single major earthquake, rather than a series of them.
The deadliest and most destructive of the model’s three current scenarios would have an epicenter in northwest Tennessee. That case would leave 2,719 dead, more than 92,000 households displaced and incur $145.8 billion in damages, with severe impacts reaching into the Memphis area.
The overviews of different scenarios provide breakdowns of impacts at the state and even county levels, including information such as projected hospitalizations, and how many thousands of buildings could require inspections after a major quake.
That creates all kinds of possible applications for the data, Blake says, such as estimating how many engineers or architects could be needed for building inspections in the disaster’s aftermath — even if real-world impacts differ, based on features of the earthquake or other variables in play.
“The tool is for planning purposes,†said Blake. “This gives us something to plan to.â€
Now that they “have the recipe,†the model’s developers aim to expand it to include more scenarios — building it into a “choose-your-own-adventure planning tool,†Blake said.
But beyond the sheer numbers that the model projects, the impacts from another “whopper†of a New Madrid quake would be sprawling, as speakers described Tuesday.
Risks would be far-reaching, aided by geological features of the region. For example, river soils easily transmit energy from an earthquake, posing a threat to many communities up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. And areas in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, for instance, are also susceptible to threats from “liquefaction,†when earthquakes turn underlying soil into quicksand-like “soup†that can struggle or fail to support buildings and other things on top of it.
The new data and many of the event’s speakers helped make the stakes of the next big quake abundantly clear.
“It’s going to be a challenge unlike anything we’ve ever seen ... which is why it’s so important to talk about it,†said Briggs, the earthquake program manager.
Nicklaus: If the big one hits, many St. Louisans will be uninsuredPost-Dispatch photographers capture hundreds of images each week; here's a glimpse at the week of March 9, 2025. Video edited by Jenna Jones.
