Life on the Faultline

History, Iconic Communities, On the Road, Traditions
on December 31, 2000

It’s a winter morning in New Madrid, Mo., and several courthouse workers hurry across Main Street for coffee at Tom’s Grill. Ben Ashley strolls in for breakfast as he has for nearly 25 yearsas long as he’s been county recorder. He’ll be back for lunch, maybe to order a “Quake Burger” from the menu. Bobby Hedgepath leaves the restaurant, waving to several women who work at his funeral home, and down the street, Virginia Carpenter reels off ribbon in The Corsage Shop.

Another quiet day in store for New Madrid (pronounced MA-drid).

Dot Halstead looks across the Mississippi River into Kentucky before entering the New Madrid Historical Museum, where she’s executive director. Halstead has lived in New Madrid ever since her late husband’s company, Noranda Aluminum Inc., built a plant here in 1968.

That means she is one of the 3,000 townspeople living on the fault line.

This junction in the earth’s surface, known as the New Madrid Fault, in the winter of 1811-1812 was the epicenter of a series of the strongest earthquakes in the history of the contiguous United States. A major quake measuring 7.5 or more on the Richter scale occurs on the New Madrid Fault about every 200 years, geological research suggests, so another may not be far away.

“If you thought about it a bunch,” says Halstead, “you wouldn’t live here.”

But she doesn’t dwell on it, even though every day at the museum, she checks the earthquake exhibit, which includes a working seismograph and letters that people wrote describing that awful winter nearly two centuries ago.

The New Madrid Fault is quite active. Every year, scientists record dozens of tremors that range from 2.5 to 3.0 on the Richter scale, and every 18 months the fault tremors measure 4.0 or more. “You can feel them, yes,” Halstead says. “Every once in a while, they give you a pretty good jolt.”

Damaging tremors occur here less frequently than along California’s San Andreas Fault, but they spread across 20 times as much land. The New Madrid Fault system crosses five state lines, the Mississippi in three places, and the Ohio River in two. Unlike California’s faults, the New Madrid Fault cannot be seen because it lies 10 to 12 miles below the earth’s surface.

The earthquake of Dec. 16, 1811, was so powerful it made the Mississippi run upstream. Waves of earth rose several feet; their swells tossing great volumes of water, sand, and charcoal. Small shocks continued until January 1812 when another major quake hit that would have registered a magnitude of 8 if there had been a Richter scale then.

The New Madrid region was visited by the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto about 1541, followed by Canadian trappers. Col. George Morgan, a Revolutionary War veteran, established the town in 1783. Because it lay in Spanish territory, he named it for Spain’s capital.

In 1990, a prognosticator named Iben Browning predicted the big quake was coming Dec. 3. It didn’t come. What came instead were 27 media and satellite trucks, which turned the river end of Main Street into a parking lot for days. Some townspeople left, some just packed the china. Most residents took the hoopla with humor, including Halstead, who sold more than 10,000 T-shirts imprinted with “It’s Our Fault.”

David Stewart, a seismologist who lives in nearby Marble Hill, Mo., says Browning’s false warning left a “positive legacy” in that many townspeople braced their hot water heaters and chimneys to reduce property damage, the greatest loss from an earthquake. Stewart says emergency groups, such as fire and police departments and hospitals, “really talked to each other to prepare for disaster.”

“Earthquakes need to be respected but not greatly feared,” he explains.

Halstead, for her part, doesn’t hear her neighbors fretting about the big quake anymore.

“Life goes on,” she says.