Fear Finally Feasts on Oklahoma

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I finally have an Okie who reads my stuff.  I can't feel so detached and call them dumb as dirt.  They are living, breathing dumb people.  :)  So far all the big 6-ish earthquakes have had their barrels pointed away from the people, but that won't last.

I think the media will now go 'the other way', casting horrible irrational fear for big bucks.  Poor Okies, they threw away science education, and now they are being hit with science.  I have no doubt that we'll get a full New Madrid-type sequence within a year.  This will flatten all buildings on soil and destroy the Cushing oil tanks.

But cheer up, not everybody will die!  The New Madrid studies showed that anybody on firm soil or rock never felt a thing.  Seriously, the uncertainties are huge, the directivity is a factor of 10 in PGV, and soil is a factor of 10 or 100.  PGV goes up a factor of 2 for every intensity unit.  A well-built frame won't have structural damage until the PGV gets over 50 cm/s.

I wish for Christmas that they will now install strong motion instruments, now that the fear thing is fully exposed.  Perhaps they didn't want to alarm people before.  If the area becomes fully instrumented we'll save countless lives elsewhere by showing how wrong engineers are right now.  It will finally show that PGV rules over PGA, and kill off those soft-story condos.  But I don't expect much.  :)

Lest anybody think I am callous and cruel, I give this PC statement:  Sorry.

For those thinking of building a new house soon, you don't have to move to California to reduce your risk.  Stay out of the valleys, and pick firm soil.  Put in a dang-tootin basement!  Pour your foundations on beams connected by screw piles that have gone down to refusal.  Fill around the basement with structural foam popcorn.  Pour the walls with those integrated forms, and use a steel roof system.  Better yet, put in a concrete dome house, but that's hard to furnish.

PS, Dear Okies, this is the final screamy, shoot-the-messenger stage where all rational people abandon you, lest they fall into the Italian Trap.  Note the complete absence of the busgus, this doesn't do their fund-raising any good.  I should shut down soon, as well.

PS2:  Whew, seems to have stopped.  I can go back to my holiday.

PS3:  Tuesday, M4, deep, probably strike-slip, right on the shear line.  I was hoping to go to bed without a major earthquake on that line for 24 hours.