WTOC, Savannah, Georgia, news, weather and sports | Earthquakes, more likely or just more noticeable?
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Chuck WatsonSAVANNAH, GA (WTOC) – It seems impossible to explain such devastation so simply.
"It's just location and random chance,'' Chuck Watson, of Kinetic Analysis Corp., says of a recent rash of powerful earthquakes worldwide.
Watson, whose company studies earthquakes for the United Nations and several individual governments, says the only connection between the four major quakes in different parts of the world within the last 55 days is unfortunate geography.
"They're on fault zones,'' he says of Haiti, Chile, Taiwan and Turkey, all of which suffered strong quakes since January 12. "They're on what we call plate boundaries. Well we get earthquakes all the time. The thing is are they underneath something we're interested in.''
The frequency with which they have struck lately has raised public interest.
But Watson has measured even more and larger quakes in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during the same time period. And his studies even indicate where the next major earthquake could occur.
"You look at the earth, you look at where the plate boundaries are,'' he says. "Italy was hit by a big earthquake last year. You look at the Caribbean a little closer to home, Jamaica is an area we're very worried about. Kingston is almost identical to Port Au Prince. There's Mexico City. And, of course, we've got our problems here in the U.S. Los Angeles, San Francisco, they are extremely vulnerable areas.''
And anyone familiar with the history of the Coastal Empire, which sustained significant damage from the Charleston Earthquake of 1886, would wonder just how vulnerable the Savannah area is.
"We think maybe a one-in-500-year event,'' says Watson. "We're in the middle of a plate, so we're not on any seismic boundaries where stuff happens all of the time. But that's sort of a cautionary tale that we can get earthquakes.
"And every once in a while, we'll get a little bit of a rumble," Watson explained. "Most folks think it's just artillery from Fort Stewart or something like that, but it's a small earthquake. Again, it's very rare, not something to keep yourself up at night. If you're going to worry about disasters, worry about hurricanes.''
The U.S. Geological Survey has a history of earthquakes in Georgia and South Carolina online:
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