StuartDonald
90.2K posts

StuartDonald
@StuartDonald
Chef, food writer and co-host of 'Sip and Chew with Mike and Stu' on 106.5 FM. Host of Delta Safari @DeltaSafariShow FB, YT, TT.





INTEL: How soon QB Will Hammond could be cleared + checking the vibe inside Texas Tech’s football program on Brendan Sorsby’s chances to play again 🤔 Read: on3.com/sites/red-raid…












It was two in the morning on December 16, 1811, when the sleeping towns of the Mississippi Valley were swallowed by something ancient and terrifying. No warning. No rumble building slowly in the distance. Just a sudden, savage lurch that threw men and women out of their beds and sent furniture crashing across the floor. Children screamed. Dogs howled. The cold December air filled with the sound of splintering timber and exploding brick. People ran barefoot into frozen fields, wearing nothing but nightclothes, watching their homes shake apart in the darkness. The ground beneath them was no longer solid. It moved in waves, like the surface of a lake struck by a stone. Massive fissures tore open in the earth, some wide enough to swallow a man, then slammed shut again. Sand and water exploded upward in geysers thirty feet high. Out on the Mississippi River, a Scottish naturalist named John Bradbury was traveling by boat. The quake hurled him from his bunk. When he clawed his way onto the deck, he witnessed something that defied every law of nature he had ever learned. The river had stopped. The mighty Mississippi, draining half a continent, sat momentarily still. Then it began to flow the other way. Upstream. Boats were dragged backward. Vessels collided in the chaos. Riverbanks caved into the churning water. Islands that had stood for generations disappeared beneath the surface. That was only the first act. On January 23, 1812, the earth struck again, possibly with even greater force. Survivors who had begun rebuilding watched their repairs collapse in seconds. Then came February 7, the most violent blow of all. Estimated between magnitude 7.7 and 8.1, the shaking was felt across fifty thousand square miles. Church bells rang spontaneously in Boston, more than a thousand miles away. Clocks stopped mid-swing in South Carolina. People stumbled through the streets of Washington D.C., convinced the city was under attack. In western Tennessee, an entire forest sank into the earth and filled with water. Within days, a lake fifteen thousand acres wide had appeared from nothing. Reelfoot Lake. It still exists today. The New Madrid Seismic Zone never went quiet. It is still active. Memphis sits directly above it. St. Louis lies within its reach. Seismologists put the odds of another magnitude-7 quake in the next fifty years at somewhere between seven and ten percent. The infrastructure of the central United States, bridges, pipelines, power grids, was never designed for this kind of violence. Damage estimates for a repeat event exceed three hundred billion dollars. Most Americans have never heard of New Madrid. The fault has not forgotten us. 📷© United States Geological Survey (Restored & Colorized) © The History Drop #archaeohistories





















