Students around Poplar Bluff ducked under their desks and covered their heads for one minute this Thursday. Millions of other schools, businesses and families around the world did the same as part of the Great ShakeOut Drill.
The ShakeOut is held on the third Thursday of every October to inform people about the likelihood of earthquakes in their area and teach them to weather the tremors by dropping to the ground, taking cover under a table or doorframe and holding on until the quake stops.
“Not reacting to an emergency correctly can be a life-threatening situation,” said principal Josh Teeter of Poplar Bluff Middle School.
PBMS runs storm, fire and intruder drills throughout the year, but Teeter says earthquake drills are the easiest because all students need to do is duck under their desks. In one special case, a class was out in the hall when the drill was called. Teeter and the teachers coordinated to get them under nearby doorframes instead.
“There’s always an outlier,” he noted, “You have to try to plan for the unknown.”
Charles Kinsey, director of the Poplar Bluff Technical Career Center, believed the ShakeOut was important for his students because the Center is different from the rest of the Poplar Bluff High School, which it adjoins.
“Our school is quite a bit different than most of the other schools — we have people moving around, we’re open to the public. We want to make sure that people are kind of prepared and ready at any given time for what may happen,” he said.
Both Kinsey and Teeter were pleased with how seriously their students took the drill
Poplar Bluff stands in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which zigzags from Arkansas to southern Illinois and is the most seismically active area east of the Rocky Mountains. In 1811 and 1812 the New Madrid fault exploded into rapid-fire earthquakes that demolished settlements, caused landslides as far away as Kentucky and temporarily reversed the flow of the Mississippi River. They were felt as far away as Connecticut.
Robbie Myers is the Missouri Emergency Management Agency director in Butler County. Earthquake prediction is not an exact science, he explained, but some geologists believe the odds of experiencing another 7.0-8.0 earthquake within the next 50 years is 10%.
“We’re working with our FEMA partners and SEMA partners on our New Madrid Seismic Zone plans, on what different response activities would be, in case an earthquake happens. We are hopeful here, where we sit...should be on pretty solid ground, but things to the east and south of us could be subject to liquefaction or strong damage to bridges... we want to be able to recover quickly in Butler County (and) also help if those people need to be evacuated,” he said.
Liquefaction is when strong quakes cause soil to behave more like liquid, severely damaging buildings and infrastructure. The flatter, less rocky Bootheel terrain would be particularly vulnerable to this.
“Hopefully that isn’t something happens here,” Myers noted, “We’re more concerned about structure damage and how, when the structures fall, individuals get hurt from falling debris.”
The ShakeOut also encourages to plan ahead and stock up for natural disasters.
“We also want people to look at things of not just for this, but any disaster. How would you communicate and meet up with your family, or co-workers, or whoever you would? An emergency kit — what do you have?” said Myers.
More information about the Great ShakeOut can be found at shakeout.org, and additional facts about the New Madrid Seismic Zone are online at drn.mo.gov under the Land and Geology tab.