Science and Technology

[Fox News] Is the East Coast on the brink of a major earthquake — and are we prepared?

The earthquake that struck the East Coast earlier this month was felt by an estimated 42 million people and luckily caused little damage, but what are the chances of a bigger, more powerful quake striking the area? And if it does, what could it look like — and are we prepared?

The April 5 phenomenon was a 4.8 magnitude earthquake centered near Whitehouse Station in New Jersey, which is about 40 miles west of New York City.

Shaking was felt from Washington D.C. to Maine, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and it followed a much smaller, 1.7 magnitude earthquake in New York City on Jan. 2. 

Earthquakes are rare along the East Coast, with the most powerful one in the last 100 years hitting in August 2011, clocking 5.8 on the Richter scale. It was centered in Virginia and felt from Washington, D.C. to Boston.

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Before that, an earthquake in South Carolina in 1886 is understood to have measured between 6.6 and 7.3 on the Richter scale. There is no definitive measurement of that quake since the Richter scale has only been around since the mid-1930s, but the tectonic shift still killed 60 people.

Professor John Ebel, a seismologist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College, tells Fox News Digital that when quakes start breaking 5.0 on the Richter scale, damage begins to occur. 

For instance, the devastating earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria last year measured 7.8 and resulted in the death of nearly 62,000 people as tens of thousands of buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged.

California’s Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, meanwhile, measured 6.9 and caused 69 deaths, and the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the Golden State clocked 6.7, killing 57 people. Thousands more were injured. 

“As you go above magnitude five, the shaking becomes stronger and the area over which the strong shaking is experienced becomes wider,” Ebel says. “So if you get a magnitude six, the shaking is ten times stronger than a magnitude five. So had this month’s earthquake been a 5.8, rather than a 4.8, then we would be looking at damage to unreinforced structures in the greater New York City area.”

“Now I have to qualify this and say that in the past few decades, New York City has had an earthquake provision in its building code while New Jersey, New York and Connecticut have all adopted some version of earthquake provisions in their building codes,” Ebel explained. “So modern buildings that are put up today will actually do quite well, even in strong earthquake shaking… If you have a magnitude 6 or even a magnitude seven.”

In terms of the Tri-state area, Ebel says that the region has had smaller earthquakes, but it’s been spared anything that’s been significantly damaging.

An 1884 quake in Brooklyn did cause limited damage and injuries. Seismologists estimated it would have measured in the region of 5.0 and 5.2, while a quake jolted Massachusetts in 1775 in the region of 6.0 and 6.3.

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“In 1884 there were things knocked from shelves, some cracks in walls that were reported, particularly plaster walls, which crack very easily if a building is shaken,” Ebel said. “There were some brick walls that had some cracks and people panicked because of the very strong shaking.”

A magnitude five earthquake hits the tri-state area once every 120 years, says Ebel, who penned the book “New England Earthquakes: The Surprising History of Seismic Activity in the Northeast.”

“The question is, can we have something bigger? And in my opinion, yes we can,” he said. “We can’t predict earthquakes, and we don’t know when the next one is going to occur, but we do have a low, not insignificant probability of a damaging earthquake at some point.”

Ebel said that the April 5 earthquake has left seismologists baffled since it didn’t occur on the Ramapo Fault zone, highlighting just how hard it is to predict the phenomenon from occurring. The Ramapo Fault zone is a series of small fault lines that runs through New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Spanning more than 185 miles, it was formed about 200 million years ago.

“Right now it’s a seismological mystery,” Ebel said. “We have some earthquakes in our region where we don’t have faults mapped. But that’s even true in California. Not every earthquake occurs on a known or mapped fault in California, so there are still a lot of seismologists have to learn about the exact relationship between old faults and modern earthquakes.”

Ebel noted that buildings aren’t the only thing to consider when earthquakes strike. In the California quakes, overpasses crumbled while the electrical grid can go down too, causing electrical surges and fires.  

Toxic chemicals were knocked off of the shelves of a chemistry building in 1989 and the building had to be evacuated, Ebel said. 

“And you think about hospitals and some industrial facilities having that situation,” he explained. “So you have these things that are not catastrophic necessarily, but are going to be a real problem.”

And an earthquake doesn’t necessarily have to rattle land in order to cause destruction.

A jolt out at sea could trigger a dangerous tsunami, like the one on the edge of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in Canada in 1929. It was felt as far away as New York City.

Waves as high as 23 feet crashed on the shore, according to the International Tsunami Information Center, with up to 28 people losing their lives. 

“A tsunami is not necessarily a very high probability event, but it’s one that we have to think about also,” Ebel says in relation to the East Coast.

The Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 was triggered by an earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

Ebel says a tsunami similar to 1929 could cause a storm surge along the lines of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, where 43 people died in New York City. 

“The threat of an earthquake is not as great as in California, but it’s something that we have to take into account and have emergency plans for and have building codes for,” Ebel says. “Our state and local emergency management agencies in all the northeastern states do earthquake planning — what we call tabletop exercises — where they pretend an earthquake occurs.”

“So those kinds of preparations are made on a regular basis,” he concludes. “Building codes are constantly being reevaluated and approved, not just for earthquakes, but for fires and chemical spills and all kinds of things. So we’re getting more prepared all the time.”

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Business

[Fox Business] Electric vehicles are ‘direct wealth transfer’ from owners of gas-powered vehicles to EV owners, experts say

Energy experts are warning about numerous potential issues for electric vehicles, including affordability, range, weather, infrastructure and economic concerns, even as the government and car companies increasingly push them on Americans. 

Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA operations officer and host of the podcast “The Wright Report,” told Fox News Digital that American society has shifted to EVs largely because some people are “just so hellbent on making sure that this transition happens, even if that means wrecking the economy, in terms of electricity, its reliability, the grid, getting brownouts or blackouts or economic wreckage by people who otherwise can’t afford these new vehicles.”

“That cost is being shouldered by buyers and car companies by raising the price of gas-powered vehicles, [which] is basically just a direct wealth transfer, just paying for EV subsidies and that will grow over time, if we continue to keep this regime in place,” Brent Bennett, a policy director for Life:Powered, an initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told Fox News Digital. 

California, Wright said, is likely a “really sad test case” for what the rest of the country could face, where he said it currently costs about $250 an hour to service an EV. The state has made a strong push for EVs under Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Californians will by 2035 not be allowed to buy new gas-powered cars and light trucks.

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“Some of those expenses are going to come down because you’re going to find manufacturing efficiencies and you’re going to be able to lower the cost of that product,” Wright said. “But as of this moment, with all the push, it is a wealth transfer from people who have their current gas vehicles to an EV. I don’t know if that’s going to be the case in 10 or 20 years, but what we see in California is because of some of these dirty green policies.” 

Bennett discussed the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs, which he said “is one small part of the whole equation” when it comes to what the government is doing to subsidize EV production. 

“We calculated that if you add on the socialized infrastructure costs, and then in particular add on California’s zero emission vehicle mandate, which adds cost to all of us because the automakers have to pay to produce more EVs in California, and they spread that cost to the whole country, the federal fuel economy regulations alone are subsidizing each EV by about $20,000. Add all this together, and each EV is getting almost $50,000 in subsidies,” he said.

As a result of these polices, many Californians’ utilities have gone up, which Wright said is only going to continue hurting the lower and middle classes the most.

“The burden of this revolution is it is fundamentally a tax on the working class and on the middle class … a lot of folks struggling in those two worlds and it really is unfair to a lot of the working folks in this country,” he said.

If we continue on the current path, Wright warned of a tremendous amount of economic wreckage in many parts of the country, as well as the world, because infrastructure just cannot support these government mandates. 

“At some point we’re going to face this issue of, we don’t have the charging infrastructure, we don’t have enough electricity overnight, we’re going to have to adjust unless we want to crash the global economy,” he said. 

Jason Isaac, senior fellow with Life:Powered, said EVs have been pitched as a “gadget” through powerful marketing, but argued people are now re-thinking their decisions after hearing stories about their unreliability. The main reasons are attributable to what he calls “range anxiety,” the lack of charging infrastructure, as well as the high cost of the EVs themselves.

Wright explained how charging and the three different levels of electricity available for EVs complicate the experience for EV owners. 

Level one, for example, is what you plug into your wall at home, while level three chargers which are the most powerful, can only be found at the equivalent of a gas station. Level two chargers can be installed in a home, but they cost about $2,000 to $4,000 to install and don’t include the cost of fuel, Wright said. Level 3 chargers, in contrast, are expensive and require significant infrastructure, making them “incredibly difficult” or “impossible” to conveniently build throughout rural America, he said. 

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He also warned that people who are able to charge their EV at a plug-in installed in their home will still likely face high electricity bills.

“You’re plugging it in, but you’ve got an electricity bill, and the cost of that is really going to be dependent on where in the country you are,” he said. “You might have very cheap power with nuclear power or hydropower, or you can have very expensive power with solar and wind.”

Also, those who charge their EVs at home tend to use them between the hours of 10 p.m and 6 a.m. when there simply isn’t enough electricity to go around, which could result in the electricity grid crashing, Wright said.

Bennett said the “socialized costs of electricity” pose a problem, especially when an EV charging overnight consumes as much power as three to four homes. 

In a neighborhood of 80 homes, where everyone has an EV and all of them are charging at the same time, it would be the equivalent of adding four times as many homes to the neighborhood, likely exceeding the neighborhood’s available electrical load.

“Now imagine, instead of over eight hours, you’re trying to charge in 30 minutes on a fast charger,” he said. “Well, now you’re talking about that EV alone drawing as much power from the grid as a small grocery store. You put four of those together at a Tesla supercharging station, you’re talking as much power as a Walmart, so you have to upgrade your electrical infrastructure, your transmission and distribution infrastructure to support that.”

Bennett argued that there are some instances where EVs work well, like as a commuter car, but in a lot of ways, he said they aren’t practical for the average American.

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“Reducing emissions is a good thing, but our government is basically saying, ‘Well it’s all or nothing, it has to be zero emissions or the world ends, it has to be all EVs or nothing,'” he said. “That’s the problem is that we’re creating policy or at least all or nothing types of philosophies.”

Critics of EV technology have been shouted down by the green energy industry and “the media ecosystem,” Wright said. He argued that EV proponents refuse to talk about the shortcomings of the technology because “there are a lot of folks in the White House, in D.C., sadly even some of our car manufacturers, that don’t want to talk about the dirtiness of their vehicles because they don’t want people to know now how disastrous it is.”

As for the climate impact, Isaac said he and Bennett have run models and concluded that “decarbonization doesn’t do anything to mitigate a changing climate” but rather just makes everything more expensive.

“I hope the market corrects, I hope that some companies … stop the politicization of capital and actually get back closer to free markets,” he said. “It would also be nice if they would support American energy producers because we produce it more responsibly than anywhere else on the planet.”

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“I think you’re going to continue to see a movement back towards sanity where we just embrace American innovation [and] the technology that we have today that has made us world leaders in clean air,” he concluded.

As a former battery engineer, Bennett said the biggest myth he always wants people to be aware of is the idea that somehow battery technology will improve at a much faster rate than it has historically, which doesn’t happen with energy technology in general and certainly not with batteries. 

“Not only are we pushing for net-zero, but we’re doing it in a certain time frame that’s physically impossible to achieve,” he said. “We’ll see batteries continue to improve, but at a very slow rate. Not only that, but it takes ten years to commercialize any battery technology and another ten years to really get it mature to where it has wide market penetration.”

He said the attitude so far has been that by pouring money into EVs, we can speed up innovation, but that it doesn’t work that way. 

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“There will be improvements over time, but trying to say that we’re going to do this in the next ten years and trying to force it down our throats is absolutely one of the biggest energy policy blunders we’ve ever made,” he said. “Hopefully, reality is going to hit soon before we spend too much money, waste too much money on this.”

The Biden White House has continually touted electric vehicles and in January released a fact sheet boasting “major progress to electrify the great American road trip.”

“Since the President took office, EV sales have more than quadrupled, with more than four and a half million EVs on the road. EV ownership is more affordable than ever before, with prices down over 20% from one year ago. The number of publicly available charging ports has also grown by over 70 percent, with 170,000 publicly available EV chargers across the country, putting us on track to deploy 500,000 chargers by 2026 – achieving the President’s goal four years early,” the White House said.

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