
CHAPTER 2
The Earthquake
2.1 General
Mid-continent events, far from plate boundaries such as the so called
Ring of Fire along which California trembles, are poorly understood,
but can be just as destructive (Maynard 2012). For example, the 1556
disaster in Shaanxi, China, had the highest death toll in history, an
estimated 830,000. Earthquakes happen along meandering faults
and are unpredictable. And they can be widely separated in time.
The August 2011 magnitude 5.8 earthquake at Mineral, Virginia,
which damaged the Washington Monument and other buildings in
Washington, D.C., was the biggest in that seismic zone since 1875.
The U.S. Geological ...