Are they crazy? Earthquakes anyone?

In the coming decades, the international lawyers are going to get awfully rich. Part of the free trade agreements are terms that seem like common sense: legal protection and the capability to bring suit internationally. On the face of it, that makes sense for consumer protection and corporate claims. Where it is going to cost American companies untold billions of dollars is in lawsuits for earthquakes.

Any student of seismology (the study of earthquakes) could explain in better detail but the paths of principle pulses resulting from earthquakes resonate through the Earth, bouncing off the mantle at the core and, like a tidal wave, pop up on some distant shore or mountain range. Some of these pulses go down, bounce off and rebound directly upwards resulting in initially small quakes called pre-quakes, resonating until they are added to and become full blown earthquakes, then subsiding and still bouncing off and back up as aftershocks. So you start with a preliminary tremor, then the principle portion followed by the end portion.

What scientist Robert Mallet (1846) and then M. S. de Rossi (1874) found was that the preliminary tremor did not always result in a principle portion in the same locale. You could have a preliminary tremor in, say, Sicily near Mount Etna, to be followed by the principle portion and a massive earthquake some 200 miles away in the Italian countryside, killing hundreds. The greatest earthquake we know of, Lisbon on Nov. 1, 1755, destroyed the city and caused tidal waves that even breeched the walls in Amsterdam 800 miles away by sea. And when John Milne founded the Seismological Society of Japan in 1880, his study there convinced him that minor earthquakes around the world could set off — and maybe did set off — major quakes in Japan.

Why? Because seismological study has since shown that the tectonic plates that form the earth’s crust have fracture points created when one plate rubs up against another. But in a sense they are all touching. An energy wave can flow from, say, a slight plate rupture in Indonesia, rippling, bouncing energy, all along the plates until it hits a weaker spot off of California already straining under pressure, ready to release. He postulated this may have been the trigger for the San Francisco earthquake. The energy from Indonesia would have diminished greatly by then but it may have been sufficient to cause the pressure in the fault in SF to release, killing thousands.

So why are the lawyers going to get rich? Oklahoma has had a series of earthquakes because of fracking. Thousands of them in less than a year, when previously they had a handful of minor tremors yearly. Where do their ripples end up? When the science of tracking these waves gets better (the science is there, the funding for tracking, like the FAA tracks aircraft, is missing), if the Oklahoma frackers are found to be culpable for the 6,000 dead in Nepal? Lawyers will be busy.

And in case you think that is too far away to worry about … California has allowed fracking right smack dab on and near the St. Andreas fault and all its dozens of lesser fracture points. Baldwin Hills (near LA, 1 million people live near there), at sea in the Santa Barbara Channel, and, worst of all, in the Central Valley right atop the fault. Given the Oklahoma evidence linking fracking with earthquakes, are they not crazy?

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.