EL PASO, Texas -- Wood house are very flexible in an earthquake... Adobe could come collapsing down.
Seismologist say El Paso could experience a magnitude 7 earthquake.
The Franklin Mountains are proof that the El Paso area has scene earthquakes. The last big tectonic plate shifts were close to 5,000 years ago.
Just east of the mountains, underground, is a fault line called the Rio Grande Rift that runs all the way to Colorado.
A couple of earthquakes were felt in El Paso in April and May. The larger ones happened about 80 miles south of El Paso, in Chihuahua, Mexico.
People don't really think of El Paso as an earthquake place because most earthquakes happen on the edge of tectonic plates and we're in the middle of the North American plate but so is Washington D.C. and all of Colorado.
Diane Doser is a geological professor at the University of Texas in El Paso. She explains that earthquakes can occur in the middle of a tectonic plates.
Doser said there are plenty of websites that give tips on earthquake preparedness.
No comments:
Post a Comment