The 1812 earthquake in Tennessee - 14 July 1989

To get away from the drenching heat of the north-eastern United States – or for that matter of about nine-tenths of the whole country at this time of the year – I took off a few days ago for "The City That Waits for Death", the rather shivery title of a BBC television documentary some 15 years ago, I think, about San Francisco.

It was, as some of you may remember, a very spooky piece of work, an epic of doom and gloom based on the most pessimistic prediction of the seismologists, the earthquake men, that very soon now in five,10, 20 years, perhaps tomorrow, either northern California or southern California would suffer what they cheerfully call here The Big One – an earthquake at least as disastrous as the 1906 monster whose subsequent fires destroyed about a half of the city of San Francisco.

It seems – in fact it is so – that the rhythm of these fractures in the faults on which San Francisco and its peninsula rest, as also most of coastal Los Angeles county, 400 miles to the south, the sequence of the quakes in this century has been charted and computed and the finding is that The Big One is already overdue.

At least 10 years ago, California's state legislature passed a law requiring all new buildings of any sort to be made earthquake proof as surely as modern technology can guarantee. As you would expect, the Californians, the architects working in tandem with the seisomologists, are very good at this – the surviving city fathers of the appalling earthquake in Armenia last year were quick to consult the Californians.

Apart from these structural precautions, the schools of California are required to give their children a regular earthquake drill, which has to do with knowing where to retreat to and where not, how to have on hand at all times food and water, battery-powered flashlights and so on. This is now routine. Apart from that, they trust in the lord and go about their business.

But now comes an interesting item about a man who owns a Victorian house and recently tried to talk its fellow owners into taking out earthquake insurance. His neighbours scoffed, which they would not have done had they been Californians, but this man was a Bostonian – he is 3,000 miles away from the city that waits for death. He lives in the capital city of the great state of Massachusetts, the pioneer of the American revolution.

I don't think he would have made the news at all – except the "Here's some kind of an hysteric" – if he were not also the head of a city department in Boston known as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has to look out for disasters, accidental and natural.

Mr Edwin Thomas is the name of this fretful Bostonian. He had taken note of a recent meeting in Hawaii where they have volcanoes, otherwise no sinister significance in that – Hawaii is beautiful in an exotic way and is a favourite place for annual conventions and the like.

This conference was one of the national council for earthquake engineering research – or, rather, it was a conference of insurance people being addressed by the earthquake engineers. And what they heard was the latest word on the timing of the next Big One – to the surprise, I'm sure of the audience – for insurers, the expert guests of the earthquake engineers, was that in the next 10 years the chances of a big (we now say major) earthquake were between 75 and 90%. But where is it going to happen? Somewhere east,over the Rockies, most probably somewhere along the north-eastern seaboard. "Help," cried Mr Edwin Thomas.

On the other hand, the experts said "the chances of the big one coming to California, especially along the infamous San Andreas Fault, are only 50% in the next 30 years". So, if you're a Californian a 50% chance in the next 30 years, if you live in Massachusetts or New York or anywhere down south, 75 to 90% in the next 10 years.

I think if you were to ask 100 Americans which was the worst earthquake in American history, I'm sure that 90 of them would say San Francisco in 1906. They would be way off. The truth has never passed over into the history books, certainly not into the schoolbooks. The answer is New Madrid, Tennessee, the date 1812.

Of course, Mr Richter, the man who invented the measuring scale was unborn and so we don't have a precise scientific measurement of the intensity of that quake. What we do know and what, at the time, every American who could read must have shuddered to learn, was that while the town of New Madrid and all its inhabitants vanished from the earth – from the top soil anyway – this earthquake had such an immense destructive range that it rattled windows 400 miles to the south in New Orleans, changed once for all the direction of the Mississippi River along 800 miles of its bed and set church bells ringing 1,000 miles to the north in Boston.

It's impossible today to imagine the effect of this shock on millions of Americans along the eastern seaboard and even in the telling I think impossible for us to credit the mighty scope of its effects. To me the still-incredible detail is the sudden peeling of church bells in Boston because of an upheaval in the earth 1,000 miles to the south.

I don't know if the wicked earthquake engineers in Hawaii mentioned the scary precedent of New Madrid, but they did bring up the unfamiliar bit of knowledge that although the last big earthquake in the east was in 1895, in the north-east last year there were over 250 measurable earthquakes, most of them of course no more recognisable than the noise of a passing train.

There was a small whopper – if that's possible – in Quebec City in Canada, which registered 6 on the Richter scale, an alarming experience for the residents. Quite a bit of damage, but not, I believe, reported by the Yankee giant to the south, which is not surprising – Canadian news very rarely crosses the border apart from periodic stories about acid rain or unfair trade practices.

I doubt that one American in 10, 20, 100 could call off the names of the Canadian pProvinces, but the Quebec story and the hundreds of tiny tremors throughout the north-east are not alone the reason why the experts are expecting an early and big earthquake in the east.

They have observed a steady movement of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean towards the eastern coast and a northern movement of the deep faults that lie under the state of Texas. This all sounds so cosmic and unreal has to be almost comic to us.

Yet it's very real and ominous to the scientists who have set up an observatory in a farmhouse in a small town in Connecticut, so small as to be, I guess, unheard of by weekend yuppies who live in expensive colonial houses not too far away.

It's a town named Moodus, which is an Indian word meaning "little noises", which suggests that for three centuries at least Moodus has been very familiar with rumbles and cracking sounds and shuddering houses.

The earth shaking there is so frequently experienced today that the scientists suspect it could be the trigger point for a massive quake and against that now-strong possibility, Columbia University scientists are drawing up for the first time a safety building code for New York City. The most recent word from them is that if The Big One hit New York City, Manhattan would be – the word is – "devastated".

Luckily, New Yorkers, New Englanders, I should guess the vast majority of the inhabitants of the eastern states from Maine down to Louisiana have never heard of these dire omens and wouldn't believe them if they had.

I don't know if this fascinating story out of Hawaii appeared in any eastern paper. It was reported in the western edition of the Wall Street Journal and, no doubt, will bring much comfort and relief to Californians, especially to recent residents who have not lived with the earthquake fear long enough to forget it. Anyway, for the moment that is the good news from or for the west.

I've recently had an experience which, if I were a mystical type would, I think, make me go running off to join the society for psychical research, which was very big in the 1930s – I assume it still exists. About two months ago, I had a letter from an English headmaster.

He was interested in American folklore from as far back as the colonial days and he asked me if I could tell him the origin of the phrase, a song perhaps, "The world turned upside down". The phrase immediately struck a chord with me, but I couldn't say which part of the piano, so to speak, it was struck on. I confessed my bafflement, irritated by the echo of something I couldn't place in context or in time. I apologised and forgot it.

Well, the other night I woke up, as I tend to, very early in the morning before dawn and reach down for my book, which had fallen on the floor. My reach was clumsy and I almost landed on my head upside down. At that moment, it struck me "The world turned upside down" was the tune played by the military band of General Cornwallis's army as he surrendered at York Town to the victorious Yankees 1781.

So there. If you can make something of this and tie it in with the omens and alarms about the coming big earthquake, you too are ready for the society for psychical research.

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