Earthquake Story Shakes it Up in Buffalo SPREE Magazine

COOL STUFF
Tracking ‘the big ones’
By Paul Chimera

Photos courtesy of Dr. Robert Jacobi,
University at Buffalo.
Buffalo native Cheryl Freed, who’s been living in Los Angeles for twenty-seven years, remembers it all too well.

“The Northridge quake of 1994 felt like it was never going to stop. It was scary as hell. I was under my dining room table for what felt like an eternity, but lasted only about a half-minute or so,” she recalls. “A lot of my friends had significant damage. I was lucky: one glass slid off the counter into the sink, and my hot water heater started leaking.

“That was early on a Monday morning,” adds Freed, a speech/language pathologist with family in the Town of Tonawanda. “The following Saturday afternoon, as I was in a movie theater, we had a sizable aftershock. It rattled everyone’s nerves and heightened everyone’s awareness as to where emergency exits are in all public places.”

During the notorious 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Police Sgt. Jesse Brown Cook observed the chaos downtown: “All about us, houses were tumbling, and falling walls and chimneys and cornices were crushing men and horses in the street. The district at that hour was crowded with produce wagons, and through the uproar of the earthquake, you could hear the cries of people and the whinnying of horses that were hurt or killed.”

Meanwhile, back in Buffalo, we check weather reports for impending snowstorms. We’re mindful of the occasional flash flood alert. We watch out for that rare funnel cloud over land or water. But thank god we don’t have to concern ourselves with something as unexpected and unforgiving as an earthquake. Right?

Not so fast.

There’s something you should know: the Buffalo region is situated on a significant fault line, known as the Clarendon-Linden Fault System. This seismic zone runs from Lake Ontario southward to Rushford Lake in Allegany County, cutting west of Rochester and through such Genesee and Wyoming County towns as Batavia, Linden, Attica, Dale, and Pike.

Exactly what is an earthquake? And could we find ourselves in the same boat our city did on September 4, 1945, when, according to a news report at the time, “Startled Buffalonians, when they felt their beds shaking and saw pictures dancing on their walls … wondered if the city was being rocket-bombed”? That earthquake was centered midway between Massena, New York, and Cornwall, Ontario, causing an estimated $2 million damage.

An earthquake is the shaking of the ground, caused by an abrupt shift of rock along a fracture in the Earth. It’s called a fault, and within seconds a quake releases stress that has slowly accumulated within the rock, sometimes over hundreds of years. Dr. Robert Jacobi, a geology professor at the University at Buffalo, acknowledges that “nobody’s sure why the Earth has such stress, but it does.” What he does know is there are hundreds of statewide faults, “maybe thousands of them. No one would believe us, if we didn’t have all these faults. Swarms of them.” Clarendon-Linden, he points out, is clearly the more active one.

Just how seriously seismic is Western New York? What has history taught us? Should we be worried, or merely curious? Answers vary, depending on whom you consult. Mark Castner runs the Braun Seismograph Station at Canisius College. “We do have and feel earthquakes in Western New York. Is there a major fault in Western New York? No,” Castner says.

Jacobi views things differently. He cites a 1997 Southern Ontario report by the Atomic Energy Control Board of Canada (whose board he served on). Probability studies were conducted of what magnitude earthquake might occur in different regions. Regarding the Clarendon-Linden Fault System—whose epicenter you drive over when you travel east on the thruway, just past Genesee Community College in Batavia—the Ontario study predicted a forty percent probability there will be a 6.5 magnitude earthquake here … sometime.

The “if” is somewhat predictable; it’s the “when” that everyone wishes scientists could answer. “We think we know where the faults are,” Jacobi states. “The question is, how many are seismically active, and to what extent?” Some answers came with a shake and a shutter on August 12, 1929, in nearby Attica, when 250 chimneys were toppled after strong shock waves. According to the World Data Center for Seismology in Denver, Colorado, “There was some damage at Batavia and other points at similar distances. A wall was cracked at Sayre, Pennsylvania. The earthquake was felt throughout most of New York and the New England states, northeastern Ohio, northern Pennsylvania, and southern Ontario.”

Jacobi notes that, if that forty percent Canadian-based prediction of a quake along the Clarendon-Linden fault system were to occur, data suggest it would likely be a 6.5 magnitude. By comparison, a 6.5 magnitude quake struck Sylmar, California, in 1971, causing a hospital wing to collapse. A 6.7 “event” collapsed an overpass in Kobe, Japan, in 1995, and a 7.1 earthquake in 1989 brought down the I-880 bridge in Oakland, California, killing forty-one motorists.

It’s important to understand, Canisius’s Castner explains, that there are three magnitude scales, consistent with the original Richter Scale. Going from a 5.0 to a 6.0 magnitude means thirty times more energy at the 6.0 level. “It was a 7.0 quake in California during the 1989 World Series. If there were a 5.0 magnitude quake in Youngstown, Ohio, that would be 1/900th the amount of energy of the California quake,” Castner notes.

Inevitably, there are political tremors shrouding earthquake talk here. The Allegany County Board of Legislators got involved when the nexus of nuclear waste and seismology made headlines. A front-page story in the Buffalo News, Nov. 13, 1989, reported that “a major fault system cuts through Allegany County, where three sites are being considered for storing low-level nuclear waste, so more study is needed before a decision is made on a storage site, two University at Buffalo geologists say.

“‘The evidence there is a major fault system raises the potential for problems of seismic activity,’ says [Dr. John] Fountain … ‘The active seismic potential must be determined prior to any further action on that site.’ According to the report, the fault is actually ‘two major fault systems,’ known as the Clarendon-Linden Fault System.”

Scientists seem to agree that the recurrence rate—the interval between earthquakes—is so low (often hundreds of years) that earthquake prediction is virtually impossible. “You can predict that you’ll have a 7.0 magnitude quake—every 800 years,” says Jacobi. Files from the Peoples History Union list significant earthquakes in our region’s history, including one on September 20, 1946, registered in Niagara Falls, which geologists later fingered as weakening a fault behind the Schoellkopf Power Station in the Niagara Gorge, promoting its collapse ten years later.

A more recent event occurred May 25, 1996, estimated at 3.0 magnitude and felt mainly in North Buffalo and Tonawanda. If the vantage point of so much of this is hindsight, it may be due to the dearth of seismographs here. Besides the one at Canisius College, there’s one at Mount Morris Dam in the Genesee River gorge, and another at SUNY-Geneseo. “The decisions made are political in nature and not based on science,” laments professor Jacobi. “It’s based on how much money society thinks it can spend on this problem.”

Since significant local earthquake activity is infrequent, it’s not surprising government support isn’t robust. Still, grant money helped establish MCEER (formerly the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research) at UB, which seeks ways to build structures better able to withstand ground motions. Donald J. Goralski, senior program officer, Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, affiliated with MCEER, says of earthquakes: “It doesn’t have to happen here to create problems here.” The center uses three shake tables to measure the effects of earthquakes on structures and nonstructural components—sprinkler systems, for example—and seeks “usable solutions,” says Goralski. “We’re not successful unless we can enact change out there.”

Change in our region’s ability to better anticipate seismic activity hinges on whether financial priorities will shift. Says Jacobi: “There’s the potential here for small-magnitude events. We can safely say that, because they’ve already occurred here. The question is, where will the large-magnitude event occur? We don’t have enough seismographs. If we did, we’d be able to better predict when, if, and how bad.”

Mark Castner at Canisius College—whose seismograph is sensitive enough to detect quake activity in Australia—makes a case for why earthquake prediction is dodgy. “The San Andreas fault in California has moved 100 miles over millions of years. For something that’s moving that long and that slowly, how can you say it will happen next week?”

In WNY, Castner adds, “we have earthquakes often enough where the general public says, ‘This must be earthquake country.’ But a lot of it is folklore. If the Clarendon-Linden fault ruptured here, I’d not be expecting any buildings to fall, except maybe a barn. But if I lived in Attica or Batavia, I’d strap my hot water heater to the wall, and connect taller bookshelves to the wall. I would do common-sense things.”

Paul Chimera is an independent journalist, marketing writer, and adjunct professor of media writing at Daemen College in Amherst.