Historic Earthquakes Accounts Guide Modern First Responders Shaken, Rattled and Rolled...

On December 16, 1811, a U.S. Army officer stationed in the soon-to-be-established Missouri Territory woke just after 2 a.m. reacting to what he described as a “great agitation”, an earthquake.

Several of the officer’s guards, he soon wrote to a friend, “could scarcely keep their feet” during the shaking, which he said lasted about eight minutes.

Several soldiers reported the violent trembling had been accompanied by “a noise something like that of distant thunder” and those on duty outside reported trees shedding all of their dead branches during the shuddering.

Subsequent inspections revealed damaged chimneys and loose plaster in several surrounding buildings.

“From the best observation we could make,” the officer wrote, the “different shocks came from the south, and I can account for the dreadful phenomenon no other way than premising an eruption of the earth to have taken place somewhere on the southern continent of America.”

Close – But Not Quite

An even more dreadful phenomenon had occurred in the southeast corner of what, 10 years later, would be declared the new state of Missouri.

There the trees had not merely shed branches but had tilted completely over while great fissures opened in the earth. Noxious clouds erupted from the ground while banks along the Mississippi River collapsed into the water, itself turbulent and angry, rocking flatboats and other vessels back and forth.

All of it was accompanied by the screams of residents and wildlife. Even the current of the Mississippi, according to one New Madrid eyewitness, “was retrograde (sic) for a few minutes” or, in more familiar language, ran backward.

Also destroyed: much of the 1,000-member community of New Madrid, today located in what scientists today call the New Madrid Seismic Zone, a district that includes portions of Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois.

Today, scientists consider it the most seismic area in the United States, east of the Rocky Mountains.

The December earthquake was the first of three such events – the others occurring the following January and February – all later assigned a magnitude not previously not experienced in America since the first year of the French and Indian War.

The rattled Army officer who described the shaking in December had not, however, been on duty in New Madrid.

He had been stationed some 320 miles to the northwest at Fort Osage, the military garrison built three years before about 30 miles downriver from the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers.

That was where fur trappers and others then were building the frontier outpost that would, in 1850, be incorporated as Kansas City.

Dropping, Covering, Holding On

Today the letter written by the rattled Fort Osage officer represents the western-most eyewitness account maintained in the New Madrid Compendium an online archive of more than 600 written references to the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 maintained by the University of Memphis.

The letter itself can be accessed in the compendium’s Far-Field Reports Database, which has collected published New Madrid earthquake accounts from more than 100 newspapers across the country, covering December 1811 through December of the following year.

The Fort Osage letter, apparently sent by the officer to a friend back east, appeared in the December 31, 1811 edition of the Philadelphia Aurora and General Advertiser.

Its editors must have found it newsworthy.

“The earthquakes were just so unprecedented,” said Kent Moran, a research associate with the university’s Center for Earthquake Research and Information.

“We did not have any such seismic events of this scale since 1755 in New England. So people felt compelled to write down their experiences.”

Today these accounts, although more than 200 years old, still inform the contemporary scientists who monitor and study earthquakes and the danger they represent, as well as emergency management officials trained to respond to them. The 19th century testimonies detail just what happened where, and when, and just how bad it was, Moran said.

This October 17, Missouri and Kansas will be among 11 states participating in the Great Central U.S. ShakeOut, a coordinated earthquake exercise.

Among the Kansas City area entities already registered to participate are the University of Kansas Medical Center and the Fort Osage School District, whose boundaries include the small Missouri River community of Sibley, home of the replica Fort Osage, today a National Historic Landmark maintained by the Jackson County Parks and Recreation.

The Missouri ShakeOut schedule is the largest earthquake awareness event coordinated by the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency. Every year for perhaps the last 10 years, an average of half a million residents have signed on, said Jeff Briggs, SEMA earthquake program manager.

This year, at 10:17 a.m. on October 17, participants will engage in a one-minute “Drop, Cover and Hold On” drill.

“Its a one-minute exercise that everyone can do at the same time,” Briggs said.

But that’s in October.

In July a 500-member task force, coordinated by the City of St. Louis and the Missouri National Guard, organized a three-day exercise to drill first responders during an imagined earthquake emergency.

Authorities closed downtown streets near and around Busch Stadium.

“The disaster they envisioned was kind of spectacular,” said Briggs.

Planners, he said, imagined “a big earthquake, followed by a chemical spill, during a Cardinals game, where all these people were trapped in a stadium contaminated by chemicals. They had to figure out a way to extract them and decontaminate them.

“it was a very challenging scenario to pull off.”

The role played by SEMA included some of the approximately 1,000 trained volunteer architects, engineers and building inspectors who are part of the Missouri Structural Assessment and Visual Evaluation (SAVE) Coalition.

“These are people with structural expertise trained to look at buildings to see if they are safe to use or need to be evacuated,” Briggs said.

Briggs added the elaborate drill had not been prompted by any recent events known only to extremely plugged-in Missouri emergency planners.

“You can’t predict earthquakes, so it’s not like they are expecting one to happen soon,” Briggs said.

“But because of our proximity to the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the experts say that we have had a history of big earthquakes and that another big earthquake should be expected at some point, and when it happens it’s going to be the worst natural disaster this state has ever experienced.

“So that is why it is particularly important to practice for this sort of thing.”

Briggs added that no similar exercises of such scale have occurred in the Kansas City area.

“But the western part of the state is an important partner for us because of the resources they can provide to the more impacted areas.”

Kansas City area emergency agencies, while perhaps not participating in the recent St. Louis drill, have conducted their own earthquake exercises in the past.

In 2016 many local first responders participated in a “mass care” event – anticipating a specific cataclysmic earthquake – which included establishing respite or resource centers across western Missouri for those driven from the site of the disaster.

Emergency officials in Jackson County reported to Cable Dahmer Arena on Interstate 70 in Independence as well as several churches, said Janelle Scofield, assistant emergency manager for the city of Independence.

“We looked at how we could track evacuees, including minors, as well as children with their parents or people with pets,” Scofield said.

“We tested the limits of how many people we could intake at one time.”
Such rehearsals then allow agencies like the Mid-America Regional Council to better organize the sheltering of evacuees, as well as the distribution of food and medicine, Scofield added.

The 2016 exercise also allowed volunteer members of area Community Area Response Teams, as well as members of the Medical Reserve Corps of Greater Kansas City, a local network of medical and public health volunteers based in Independence, to coordinate their own responses.

Western Missouri and eastern Kansas are well away from the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which includes the New Madrid area itself, where three major earthquakes occurred in 1811 and 1812.

The first earthquake occurred on December 16, 1811, at 2:15 a.m., the second on January 23, 1812, at 9 a.m., and the third on February 7, 1812, at 3:45 a.m.

Each had a magnitude (M) of 7.0 or greater.

The three events were felt throughout the entire eastern part of the country and are among the largest earthquakes to strike the continental United States.

The 1811-1812 New Madrid Earthquakes were preceded by at least two other similar sequences in about the years A.D. 1,500 and about the year A.D. 900, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“It’s not like clockwork, but it appears the large earthquakes have occurred in the New Madrid Seismic Zone about every 500 years, and it has been about 200 years since the last ones,” said Thomas Pratt, a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist based in Reston, Va.

“So, there is a chance there could be a fairly large earthquake in the NMSZ, and we give it about a 7 to 10 percent chance that there could be an earthquake of that size in around the next 50 years.”
An earthquake of the same magnitude in southeast Missouri likely would not cause extreme damage in the Kansas City area, Pratt said.

“In Kansas City, if you are in a tall building, you probably would feel the building swaying quite noticeably. You might hear something that sounds like a sonic boom. If you are in a house you might see tables shaking, or books falling off shelves.”

More Honorable Than Not

The organized emergency earthquake preparedness of today is part of the New Madrid earthquakes’ legacy.

The first instance of federal emergency disaster assistance was in response to those events.

So was the first instance of federal disaster relief corruption.

William Clark, who with Meriwether Lewis had embarked on the Mississippi River as they had left St. Louis on their 1804 expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase, helped persuade the Missouri territorial assembly in 1814 to petition Washington for disaster relief following the New Madrid quakes.

The subsequent New Madrid Relief Act was the first federal response of its kind.

It allowed landowners whose parcels had been damaged to receive a certificate that could be exchanged for between 160 and 640 similar acres in public domain real estate.

The difference between the bargain price the ruined land might be sold for and the price that the newly-received undamaged land might later attract could perhaps be pocketed by anyone less than scrupulous.

The relief act, once approved, prompted speculators to rush to the New Madrid area to persuade landowners holding titles to damaged parcels – and who had not gotten the disaster relief memo from Washington – to sell their properties at everything-must-go prices.

Among these speculators would be Clark himself, who dispatched two agents to purchase some of that ruined land.

All this didn’t happen immediately.

There was the small matter of defeating the British in the War of 1812, which began about four months after the last of the New Madrid earthquakes on February 7.

President James Madison felt that one.

On the same day, writing to former president Thomas Jefferson from what often was called the President’s House in Washington, Madison wrote “…the re-iteration of earthquakes continues…There was one here this morning at 5 or 6 minutes after 4 o ‘C.”

In August 1814, British troops burned the President’s House; neither James nor Dolley Madison were home at the time.

The war ended the following February 17, when both England and the United States ratified a peace treaty.

On the same day, Congress approved the disaster relief.

Clark’s subsequent behavior became a political vulnerability in the territory’s factional politics.

“I don’t know the full details of Clark’s actions, but his aim was to make a profit,” said William E. Foley, retired history professor emeritus at the University of Central Missouri and the author of “Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark,” published in 2004.

“Land speculation was commonplace, and he was joining the fray.”

When Clark died in 1838, he held considerable land holdings but not just his New Madrid real estate speculation, Foley added.

Any such acreage would have represented a small percentage of his real estate holdings. Other parcels had been inherited, awarded by the government for his service on the expedition to the Pacific, or purchased during his lengthy post-expedition career as a Missouri public servant, which included serving as Missouri territorial governor from 1813 through 1820.

“As governor his intent in lobbying for federal relief for his constituents was honorable,” Foley said.

“New Madrid had been devastated; the area was pretty much in ruins. And remember, seeking government disaster relief was not a routine thing at the time. But with his connections he made it happen.

“He was simply doing his duty.”

But Clark, at the same time, Foley said, chose not to pass up a personal business opportunity.

“As this story was unfolding, he was looking after a large family, and it occurred to him that he could buy up some of these land titles for exchange,” he said. “He was out to make a buck, clearly. From his vantage point, he was simply doing business.

“I don’t think he viewed his New Madrid land dealings as taking undue advantage of people, although in reality that may have been what happened.”

In Memory of Eliza Bryan

Among those conversant with eyewitness earthquake accounts from 1811 and 1812, many admire the descriptions of Eliza Bryan, a 31-year-old New Madrid resident whose account of all three earthquakes – which she described as “the late awful visitation of Providence” – captured the disaster in its full-on end times terror.

“On the 16th of December, 1811, about two o’clock, A.M., we were visited by a violent shock of an earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise resembling loud but distant thunder, but more hoarse and vibrating, which was followed by a few minutes by the complete saturation of the atmosphere, with sulfurous vapor, causing total darkness. The screams of the affrighted inhabitants running to and fro, not knowing where to go or what to do – the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species – the cracking of trees falling, and the roar of the Mississippi – the current of which was retrogade for a few minutes, owing as is supposed to an irruption in its bed – formed a scene truly horrible.”

Bryan submitted her account to Lorenzo Dow, an itinerant preacher and author who included it in his book, “History of a Cosmopolite,” published in 1814.

Her description is valuable in several ways, said Kent Moran of the University of Memphis.

“She’s the only female voice that we have,” he said.
“But she is also so articulate and does a wonderful job of describing what happened. She wrote it in 1814 but it has such a level of precision that I believe she had drawn it from a parent document, a diary that she had been keeping.”

Moran also has found descriptions submitted by a Cherokee witness, a member of a group that had migrated to what later became Arkansas Territory well before the forced removal of many thousands of Native Americans from the southeast United States prompted by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

”He wrote to the Indian agent saying, roughly, that the ground ‘became wet,’ “ Moran said.

The correspondent, Moran said, was trying to describe liquefaction, which occurs when loosely packed, water-logged sediments near the ground’s surface lose their strength in response to strong ground shaking.

“He is using English as a second language trying to describe a geological phenomenon to someone who is not a geologist,” Moran said.

But the Cherokee eyewitness, nevertheless, was just as determined as Eliza Bryan to document what he had witnessed.

Bryan, by the way, never left New Madrid, where she was buried following her 1866 death. Her gravesite sometimes is visited by the same dedicated earthquake tourists who also report to the New Madrid Historical Center.

There, a recorded version of Bryan’s descriptions of the geological apocalypse can be heard. They are part of the center’s upgraded earthquakes exhibit, installed in anticipation of the events’ bicentennial in 2011.

“Few people just stumble on us; they are kind of looking for us,” said Jeff Grunwald, historical center administrator.

“People are fascinated by natural disasters, so we are on a surprising number of bucket lists.”

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