Money for earthquake preparing still limited, officials say

“It’s like any other long-term threat, like global warming. We discount the threat when it’s long term,” said Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of the Center for Hazards and Risk Research at Columbia University.

“Getting across the idea that geological inevitability has major consequences in our lifetime is a major task for people in my business,” he said.

The Central United States Earthquake Consortium, a federally funded agency charged with helping coordinate earthquake preparedness, says its annual budget of $450,000 is barely enough to stay in business.

With a modest budget increase, CUSEC could put on training exercises for emergency response agencies throughout the region, said James Bassham, director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency and a member of CUSEC’s board of directors.

CUSEC could also increase its efforts to persuade residents around the New Madrid Fault Zone to stock up on emergency supplies, food and water in preparation for a quake, Bassham said.

The fault zone, which includes a web of deep cracks in the earth’s surface, runs from southern Illinois to northeastern Arkansas.

“If every family in Mississippi and Louisiana had food and water for 72 hours, we wouldn’t have seen as many of the problems we saw (following Hurricane Katrina),” Bassham said. “Those kinds of (messages) have to be hammered in, more than once every two or three years.”

Scientists studying the New Madrid Fault say financing for their work also has been slow.

The fault, which produces more than 200 small temblors a year, was responsible in the early 1800s for some of the strongest earthquakes ever to hit the United States.

Researchers notes that the Advanced National Seismic System, a network of earth monitoring devices, was approved by Congress in 2000 but still is not fully funded.

Congress authorized spending $35 million a year to build the $175 million system. But through 2006, less than $26 million has been appropriated.

The network needs thousands of sensors, but so far, the devices in place can be counted in the dozens, said Arch Johnston, director of the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis.

“For six years we’ve tried to get the appropriation at the authorization level,” Johnston said. “It’s been appropriated at 10 percent or less. There’s just no way to do a national program at that level of funding.”