After a minor but highly unusual earthquake shook East Tennessee in December, USA TODAY editors wondered whether the Big One could hit the East Coast.
The answer: A major fault line sits right beside the Mississippi River, and scientists have evidence that the area has felt major earthquakes for at least the past 4,000 years.
The problem: The most recent time a sizeable earthquake struck that fault was more than 200 years ago. St. Louis had about 1,500 residents in 1811 and 1812 vs. 2.8 million today; Memphis hadn’t even been settled. But the strongest of the quakes, estimated at 7.5 to 7.7 magnitude, were felt more than 1,000 miles away in Connecticut.
To give other USAT editors what they wanted on deadline, I had only a look at what might happen in Kentucky, courtesy of The Courier Journal in Louisville.
I knew where to find what the story needed — a bit of history, some projections and a way for people to understand the power of what could be. I’m a Tennessee native, and early in my career I had done a similar story without such tight time constraints on the New Madrid fault, named after a town of about 400 that was destroyed in the third of the 1811-12 major tremors.
The Louisville reporter’s interviews became the direct quotes necessary to the narrative, and he received the byline.
By the end of the month, his story had received about 10,000 page views. My version had more than 350,000 hits in the same period, most on the first and second days, and also had among the longest engagement times on usatoday.com.
Three months later, the national story remains on the first page of Google and Google News search results for New Madrid fault.
