The following is a work of fiction, and this must be stressed. But unlike other disaster movies such as San Andreas, the earthquake depicted here is actually plausible—and worse, avoidable. The damage potential is drawn from data found around the internet. “20 Minutes Into the Future” refers to TV Tropes—a story that’s set in the very near future. It’s a long read, so settle in.
It is about 2:30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday in mid-summer. It’s been hot and dry for a very long while in this particular summer. Rain hasn’t happened in weeks.
At 2:32 pm on this hot summer Tuesday, a previously unknown fault associated with the Nemaha Uplift and fault zone, which trends northward through Central Oklahoma through Kansas and Nebraska, finally snaps.
The quake is the result of years of intense wastewater injection. The injection has caused swarms of minor to moderate earthquakes around Oklahoma City for years, forcing the state government to impose some restrictions on the practice. But the injected salty wastewater still has raised pore pressures beneath the ground, causing already critically stressed faults to slip. The Nemaha and its associated faults may be ancient, but they are not dead, as everyone is about to find out.
The hypocenter—the location 6 miles down where the earthquake begins—is not directly beneath the city but off to the northeast, closer to Edmond. P-waves radiate outwards and upwards quickly, followed by S-waves, a bit slower, and the destructive Rayleigh waves, even slower.
Animals react to the passage of the P-wave. Birds take flight. Pets freak out. Animals at the Oklahoma City Zoo do as well. Not many in Central Oklahoma—from Norman to Tulsa—interpret this as a warning, and at any rate it’s too late. The shaking begins almost immediately soon after.
Many who can take shelter beneath desks and tables or in doorjambs. Even more flee outside, a fatal decision for some. Lots get on twitter and other social media, and manage to send out one message: earthquake. The volume of tweets and social media messages alerts the USGS in Boulder before the seismic waves even reach their seismographs. The tweets outrun the seismic waves—the whole world knows something terrible is occurring even before the earthquake stops.
This gives cities like Wichita, Tulsa, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Kansas City warning. Savvy people in all places evacuate buildings or get under sturdy furniture, bemusing their co-workers and companions, who soon follow when the ground begins to shake.
The fault rupture is roughly 50 kilometers long. It zips through that in a snap. The quake itself lasts about 35 to 40 seconds, and its final magnitude is an astonishing Mw7.1 It rings the entire central and eastern US like a bell.
Damage within 30 miles of the epicenter is extreme. Interstates become impassible as the quake shears the supports of overpasses and flyover ramps. These collapse. Brick faces on wood frame homes shear off; chimneys come crashing down. Unreinforced masonry buildings by the thousands shake themselves to pieces, entombing their occupants. Well-constructed structures like hospitals suffer damage, some severe, but remain standing.
Golfers in golf courses watch the landscape literally ripple, like ocean waves, and the quake throws them to the ground. At Arcadia Lake, the depleted reservoir seiches, splashing out of the reservoir in places. The ground deformation above the fault relocates streams for dozens of miles along the rupture. Some of them run backwards for a time.
In Oklahoma City skyscrapers sway, then shudder violently. The Devon Energy tower loses much of its glass face. The Oklahoma State Capitol Building manages to remain standing but its dome---discovered to be cracked in multiple locations in 2014---shatters. Apartment buildings with soft stories---a building type that has vexed California—pancake. The Bricktown neighborhood becomes piles of brick rubble. Chesapeake Arena’s roof collapses and its windows shatter. The city’s civil infrastructure shatters as well. Sewers rupture, water mains snap and gas lines break. Police and fire stations don’t fare well either---many are in buildings that are not re-enforced. Many remain standing but are unusable. As gas lines break, fires begin, and with the hot dry weather, a few become conflagrations. Tinker Air Force Base is temporarily disabled as buildings collapse. Its staff immediately begins relief work, even as huge plumes of smoke rise up around them because so many places are on fire. Their first priority---getting Tinker’s runways open.
It only takes a matter of moments to reduce a good portion of Oklahoma City and Edmond to rubble. Nearby Norman and El Reno suffer much of the same fate as the destructive seismic waves reach them as well. Communications infrastructure, wired and wireless, fail as well, as does the electrical grid.
The waves of catastrophe radiate outward. At Stillwater, where shaking is less severe but still damaging, Oklahoma State University’s brick buildings fare poorly. There will be no fall semester this year. At Cushing, where the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is located, the age of the facility becomes apparent as a number of tanks fail during the shaking. Only the quick action of the staff prevents an explosion that would have obliterated Cushing, but there’s still an environmental catastrophe as millions of gallons of oil spill.
Tulsa, where some people have some quick warning thanks to social media, the shaking is strong enough to terrify, but not damage severely. Windows break, objects fall from shelves, brick chimneys fall and brick buildings crack but the city is still functional and intact. Blacked out, because the quake has triggered cascading outages that quickly are advancing across the Midwest, but functional. It will serve as the temporary home of the state’s government as Oklahoma City is completely wrecked.
The news of the earthquake has outrun its actual seismic waves all over the Central US. A couple minutes after OKC is wrecked, Dallas-Fort Worth begins to shake, enough to terrify and crack some buildings. The same follows for Wichita, Topeka, and Kansas City. Tourists at the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis feel it sway violently. Church bells are set to ringing across Missouri. Tall buildings and skyscrapers in Houston, New Orleans, Memphis and Little Rock sway. The earthquake is perceptible even in Minneapolis, and even tall buildings in Chicago sway. Afterwards the USGS receives scattered reports that people perceived the quake as far away as Denver, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Toronto, Buffalo, Pittsburgh—even New York City, although these cannot be verified and are considered outlier reports. Over 100 million people feel the earthquake.
And then the lights go out.
Because the region is in a heat wave there are hefty demands on electricity. The sudden severing of service in Oklahoma cascades outward due to the interconnected grid. The quick action of workers monitoring the electrical grid prevents blackouts outside of Oklahoma from lasting longer than a few hours, but blackouts cascade all over the Midwest.
In Oklahoma it is dire. The quake cracked several dams, and some smaller ones have failed, causing floods. Officials scramble to draw down lakes like Arcadia Lake to relieve pressure on damaged dams. Still, hundreds of already damaged homes flood.
Cities on fire—and flooded thanks to ruptured dams. Shattered pipelines leaking oil and natural gas. Collapsed buildings. An impassible interstate network. The world is shocked, especially after the market effects ripple around the world. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands are homeless and in need of shelter. Hundreds to thousands are dead, and many more thousands are injured. Help is mobilized immediately, but it takes time to reach the stricken region, where chaos reigns for a day or so. The damage is crippling to the United States, in a way that prior disasters such as Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina were not.
SOURCE MATERIAL
Now, the above scenario was entirely fiction---but well-informed fiction. Wastewater injection does induce earthquake swarms under certain conditions, cases and places. Those earthquakes then trigger other earthquakes, some quite large. Oklahoma is riddled with faults (auto play at link, apologies, this link is to the actual map), some already critically stressed. Central Oklahoma has lots of faults, some that cross under critical infrastructure. Over 1500 years ago, a massive earthquake ruptured a fault called the Meers Fault in southwestern Oklahoma, so we know Oklahoma has the potential for large earthquakes. But we also know that despite this, the ongoing earthquake swarm in Oklahoma is not entirely natural. It was induced by human action.
I’m unable, of course, to provide concrete numbers in the above fictional scenario. Why? No real scenarios like this have been run by FEMA or other emergency management agencies for Oklahoma. I drew on what already is in existence, such as the state’s Hazard Mitigation Plan and some from Oklahoma County, which you can see here. Hazard mitigation plans are a federal requirement for cities, counties and states, and are generally paid for by the Federal government.
Much of this fictional scenario was drawn from a preliminary study focusing on transportation done by Oklahoma State University. The idea that social media would alert the world came from XKCD (which was then observed in August of 2011 when an earthquake struck central Virginia, in a known area of elevated seismicity. People in New York City saw the tweets from VA and the DC area, and then some moments later, felt the quake. You can watch this effect on this video here, where a training session in Virginia is interrupted---and then people viewing the training session in Ohio feel the quake after they’ve watched it.
The USGS does indeed monitor Twitter and social media for instances of the word “earthquake” in many different languages. That such a massive earthquake would be widely felt is a function of the earth’s crust east of the Rockies, and a scientific explanation can be read here. I discovered, while researching this, that Oklahoma quietly seems to be interested in seismically retrofitting the State Capitol building (PDF) and it was indeed discovered to be cracked in 2014, 12 years after it’d been refurbished. The story assumes some of that retrofitting was done. As for unreinforced masonry—we’ve known for millennia that they are death traps even in moderate earthquakes. Look at what just happened in Italy, in Tanzania, and quite a few other places this year. Even in Pawnee, Oklahoma.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is indeed aging.
I wrote this fictional scenario, unfortunately without much concrete numbers, because I think it’s long past time for some further action to ensure this remains fiction. But without that, people need to know what the consequences are if the worst happens. Such scenarios have been run for other parts of the country, even if they’re unlikely. Loss estimation studies exist for New York City. The Central US Loss Estimation study for New Madrid is comprehensive and in depth (and just as dire).
The Pawnee quake should be a wakeup call. It was larger than the Prague quake in 2011. Oklahoma remains lucky that these earthquakes have yet not occurred beneath a densely populated area—they would be incredibly damaging even despite their moderate-large size. People are still worried about faults and earthquakes and the Pawnee quake seems to confirm a hypothesis given at a Geological Society of America presentation last year. “Accelerated Seismic-moment release” has its detractors but I’m no longer really one of them.
Disposal by subsurface injection of wastewater derived from energy technologies poses a risk of induced seismicity but, relative to the large number of operating disposal wells, few events are documented over the past decades. However, where large net volumes of injected fluids are involved, the potential exists for inducing larger seismic events. In Oklahoma, an exponential increase in seismicity coincides with a comparable increase in economic benefit from enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations, from which an intrinsic by-product is up to an order-of-magnitude greater volume of saline wastewater. An initial (2008-2011) cycle of accelerating seismic-moment release (ASR) culminated in the Mw5.6 Prague earthquake.Since 2012 Oklahoma experiences a second ASR cycle, during which Mw4+ earthquakes - rare in 2013 - have become an almost weekly occurrence in the latter part of 2014. On a 0.02-yr analytical basis, extrapolation of the exponential ASR trend into 2015 and beyond indicates that an Mw5+ threshold may be breached by 2016. The spatial distribution of epicentres illuminates hidden faults, some favourably oriented for re-activation in the roughly WSW-ENE direction of maximum horizontal crustal stress. An epicentral alignment, extending SW-NE through the areas around Guthrie, Langston and Stillwater (GLS), is also recognizable in the pattern of aeromagnetic anomalies, and may be related to splay and transfer structures from the larger Nemaha-Wilzetta fault system. If a major part or the whole of the GLS structure is accidentally re-activated in a low-stress-drop regime by wastewater injection, it is capable of generating a significant earthquake in the range Mw5.5-6.5 or greater, for fault length in the range 20-70 km and fault slip 5-10 cm. The current seismicity gives rise to concern and restlessness in the general population, not easily allayed by calming rhetoric based on standard probabilistic seismic hazard and risk assessment (PSHA). Quantitative loss-modelling of reasonable worst-case (Mw6.5?) scenarios, and motivation of the population to prepare for them, may be psychologically and practically better. In this regard, Oklahoma hydroseismicity provides lessons for other regions (e.g., Karoo Basin, South Africa) where unconventional hydrocarbon development is contemplated.
To my knowledge no such qualitative loss-modeling has really been done, other than the transportation related study. I’m aware that Oklahoma City is in the process of updating its hazard mitigation plan and has done some very preliminary work, which is probably why the plan I linked to in this diary is no longer available. Or perhaps, someone didn’t really want people looking at it. I’m going with option one---I almost never assume malice amongst civil servants, probably because I am one in real life and I know how we are.
Most places with earthquake hazards know what future quakes will do them. We all read the New Yorker piece on the Pacific Northwest with horror. We’ve all seen Earthquake, San Andreas, and the Great Los Angeles Earthquake miniseries from the early 90s (only the latter is remotely scientifically accurate however). Even New York City has an idea what a moderate earthquake centered under the Rockaways will do---because it happened in 1884, and somewhere there’s a FEMA study from the late 1980s that depicts a recurrence of a 1755 earthquake on Boston. I linked to the sobering study of a repeated New Madrid earthquake above and here it is again---one of those occurring tomorrow afternoon would kill 4,200 people in Memphis alone and thousands more in neighboring states. Nothing really like this exists for Oklahoma. It’s time it did. My hope is that this floats around the internet and metaphorically lights a fire under some feet. If we’re not going to stop drilling (and let’s face it, we’re still a couple decades away from being totally free of fossil fuels—I’m being optimistic here), and Oklahoma’s regulations aren’t working, then it’s time to take action, and one of those ways are sobering qualitative studies of what will be lost if the worst happen. Scenarios like this get run all the time, even if they’re unlikely. Every March East Coast emergency managers participate in tsunami drills, for example, even when the likelihood of such an event is very small. There exist hazard studies that depict what would happen if one actually does happen. Time for the same, for Oklahoma, so people know exactly what they face.
At least, though, Oklahomans have the right to sue. That’s a step forward.