A reoccurring theme here on my blog is that of the hysterical public and media reaction to things like death and destruction caused by natural disasters and other things like human interaction with sharks and lightning and power lines, etc.
Lets face it people, we all live in relative safety here in the United By-God States of America in the 21st century. You can actually be a blithering, mindless, pathetic moron and honestly expect to not walk out your front door each day and have a Panther or a Grizzly bear tear your head and arms off and eat them for dinner or drag them back to their den to feed them to their cubs.
That’s a good thing, because most of us today rely on laws and lawyers to protect us even from ourselves, and if things ever went back to the way they were in 1800, I’m fairly certain that the population would decline by about 95% in less than six months.
Being an engineer and geology fan, I know things that most people haven’t bothered to worry about. For instance, almost everyone worries about earthquakes in California because beginning with the 1906 San Fran quake, popular culture equates earthquakes with the west coast.
Did you know that one of the biggest earthquakes east of the Mississippi river occurred in Charleston, South Carolina in August of 1886? Brick buildings over on the Battery are still shaking today from that one.
Or what about the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 on the Mississippi river north of Memphis? They say that the ground moved enough to cause the river to flow north UPSTREAM for months after the shaking ended.
Until the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption back in 1980, everyone basically ignored volcanoes except to shudder at stories of Mt. Vesuvius and Etna in Italy, but the Northwest area of the US is really ripe with opportunity for a repeat performance in the next ten years or so.
In support of this theory, look at this story about these three poor bastards that fell into a volcanic fissure while on Ski Patrol out in California.
These guys actually fell into a volcanic “fissure”--so much for worrying about avalanches and earthquakes and brush fires in California, now we know that the ground is just opening up and swallowing people while they’re minding their own business.
The story reminds me of one of my favorite Limerick Poems that I learned as a teenager:
That fished from the edge of a Fissure
A Fish with a Grin
Pulled The Fisherman in…
Now they’re fishing the fissure for Fischer.
Yuck, yuck, yuck
Hardy, har, har,
hee, hee, hee,
giggle giggle
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