The sand blows were left by geysers when debris surged up through narrow dikes and landed in wide mounds. Then, two decades ago, paleoseismology expert Martitia Tuttle and her colleagues began dissecting “sand blows” in the five states surrounding New Madrid. Geologists once assumed that the 1811-12 disaster was a one-time event and little cause for concern for the people who now live near the epicenter. Thousands of fissures ripped open fields, and geysers burst from the earth, spewing sand, water, mud and coal high into the air.
But 8-year-old Godfrey Lesieur saw the ground “rolling in waves.” Michael Braunm observed the river suddenly rise up “like a great loaf of bread to the height of many feet.” Sections of riverbed below the Mississippi rose so high that part of the river ran backward. The Midwest was sparsely populated, and deaths were few. Each New Madrid earthquake had a magnitude of 7.5 or greater, making them three of the most powerful in the continental United States and shaking an area ten times larger than that affected by the magnitude 7.8 San Francisco earthquake of 1906. “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.formed a scene truly horrible,” wrote one resident.Īs people were starting to rebuild that winter, two more major quakes struck, on January 23 and February 7. The shaking rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina, and toppled chimneys as far as Cincinnati, Ohio. The ground heaved and pitched, hurling furniture, snapping trees and destroying barns and homesteads. on December 16, 1811, residents of the frontier town of New Madrid, in what is now Missouri, were jolted from their beds by a violent earthquake.
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