The View from Mudsock Heights: The Haitian Earthquake Brings Thoughts of Midwestern History

By Dennis E. Powell | Jan 21, 2010 at 17:13:48

The sheer vastness of the devastation in Haiti, a nation that was not a garden spot to begin with, is such that it is almost impossible to grasp. It appears that at least as many people as populate all of my county — every man, woman, child, and out-of-town college student — were killed. The mind lacks perspective for such things, even as a phrase like “a trillion dollars” is so big as to be meaningless.

Stalin understood this when he famously said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.”

But I have begun by digressing. Something we can grasp about the earthquake in Haiti is that we didn’t expect it. Earthquakes in California, or Alaska, or Japan are, while terrible, not very surprising. But Haiti?

The thing is, there can be earthquakes pretty much anywhere. I remember early one Sunday morning in New York in the mid-1980s. Because my work duties usually ran from 2 a.m. to 9 a.m., I was awake — washing dishes, in fact — at 5 a.m., the window over the sink open a little though the morning was chilly. Suddenly there was a rumble and a slight shaking that lasted a few seconds. I wondered briefly if the apartment building boiler five floors below had exploded or something.

But then I heard it, the wave of cacophonous sound as every car alarm for miles suddenly went off. It had been an earthquake. In New York, of all places.

There was a small quake in Kentucky a few years ago, and one in Illinois last year.

Those of us who grew up in the midwest, especially in states along the Mississippi River, have faintly expected the biggest earthquake ever will not plunge California into the sea but will instead strike the country’s midsection.

It has happened before.

In December 1811 and January 1812, the 50,000 square miles surrounding New Madrid, Missouri, were shaken by a series of earthquakes, at least three of which are thought to have exceeded 8.0 on the Richter scale. The channel of the Mississippi was altered in some places; that mighty river even experienced rapids and waterfalls. The river equivalent of a tsunami roared upstream, creating Reelfoot Lake, which still exists.

Contemporary accounts tell of “sand fountains,” openings in the ground whence sand spewed skyward, that erupted from time to time for weeks. Strange lightning-like discharges were reported.

Wrote George Heinrich Crist, living near what today is Louisville, of the December quake: “When you could hear, all you cold hear was screams from people and animals… . None of us was killed - we was all banged up and some of us knocked out for awile and blood was every where… . We still had our home it was some damage. Some people that the home was not built to strong did not.” Then came the January temblors: “The earth quake or what ever it is come again today. It was as bad or worse than the one in December. We lost our Amandy Jane in this one - a log fell on her. We will bury her upon the hill under a clump of trees where Besys Ma and Pa is buried. A lot of people thinks that the devil has come here.” And this was more than 100 miles from the epicenter.

Destruction was limited only by the fact that the area was not heavily populated at the time.

The New Madrid Seismic Zone, as it is called, is considered active. Seismologists estimate — it is, as it must be, a guess — that there is as much as a 10 percent chance of a similarly strong earthquake there in the next 50 years. This is something every Missouri kid knew when I went to school; maybe it is still taught.

I don’t know if there is science to back it up, but it has always seemed to me that the likelihood of earthquakes is greatest when there is a full Moon or new Moon. My reasoning is that the same gravitational forces which make the tides higher at those times slightly change the shape of the liquid-filled Earth. The crust on which we live is like the shell of an egg that has been multifariously cracked. The cracks, seems to me, are more likely to rub together when the shape is changed a little.

The earthquake in Haiti came two days before the new Moon.

This isn’t meant to alarm, it’s just noting a very interesting historical event and the fact that some disasters can strike pretty much anywhere.

To return to George Heinrich Crist, January 23, 1812: “What are we gonna do? You cannot fight it cause you do not know how. It is not something that you can see. In a storm you can see the sky and it shows dark clouds and you know that you might get strong winds but this you can not see anything but a house that just lays in a pile on the ground.”

The same thing could be written, accurately, today.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.