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.

4.8 MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE STRIKES NEW JERSEY, SHAKING BUILDINGS IN SURROUNDING STATES

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.

WHAT TO DO DURING AN EARTHQUAKE AND HOW TO PREPARE

“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] UAW eyeing further southern expansion after win at Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant

The United Auto Workers (UAW) has notched a breakthrough win for southern expansion following its successful strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year.

Last week, the workers at Volkswagen’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 73% in favor of joining the UAW, marking the union’s first victory in a renewed push to organize nonunion plants – most of which are owned by European and Asian automakers in the South.

The UAW is feeling the momentum.

“The workers at VW are the first domino to fall,” UAW President Shawn Fain told The Guardian in an interview Sunday. “They have shown it is possible. I expect more of the same to come. Workers are fed up.”

DISNEYLAND CAST MEMBERS FILE FOR UNION ELECTION

Labor relations consultant Jason Greer, president of Greer Consulting Inc., and a former board agent with the National Labor Relations Board agrees.

“I’m impressed,” Greer told FOX Business in an interview about UAW’s latest win. “I think what we’re seeing is a UAW that’s been very smart about how to organize; they have learned how to tap into the heart of the employees.”

Greer noted that Volkswagen – whose other plants are all outside the U.S. and are already unionized – remained neutral and did not put up a fight in the UAW’s unionization bid. But he said the potential impact on the South, made up of right-to-work states, could be significant.

“When you have employees from southern states who’ve been traditionally nonunion and haven’t even really felt like there was a need for a union, all of a sudden sit around, saying, ‘Well, I’m working for 15 bucks an hour, but this newly unionized facility down the street, they just got 30 bucks an hour. Why wouldn’t I want that?’ I think it speaks to the growing sense of the ‘us versus them’ divide that has taken hold not just in the South but really across the country,” Greer said.

He added, “There’s almost this new labor movement happening, and the labor movement looks a lot different than it did in the past.”

MORE CVS PHARMACIES JOIN MOVEMENT TO UNIONIZE

Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, told FOX Business there are a couple of things that make this different and probably give it some legs, at least for the near term.

“One is that the government is now engaged in this business,” Mix said, saying that President Biden is leading an “all-hands-on-deck effort by the executive branch to give union officials dramatic new powers over workers and using basically every agency at the federal government to do so.”

He pointed to the United Steelworkers (USW) successfully unionizing a Georgia factory owned by bus maker Blue Bird last year as the first victory.

The facility, which makes electric buses, was granted enormous federal subsidies, and Mix said the Department of Energy, for instance, can pressure companies to remain neutral in a union election in order to qualify for the federal funds.

Indeed, in announcing its victory in September, the USW said in a press release that Blue Bird’s “anti-union rhetoric may have been somewhat muted by the fact that the company, which produces low-emission and electric vehicles, is slated to receive an infusion of federal funding through the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act to boost domestic production of semiconductors, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for clean energy initiatives.”

“It was kind of the thumb of the government on the scale,” Mix said. “And one of the things that I think you’ll see that is a common denominator in these battles going forward … is that there’s going to be an electric battery component in all of this or some kind of electric vehicle component and all of this effort by the UAW over the next five years if Biden wins re-election.”

He said Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant makes EVs, and the UAW’s next target – the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama – also makes electric SUVs.

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Mix said that another reason the UAW is seeking to unionize in right-to-work states is because they have to, saying “that’s where the jobs are now.”

The Right to Work chief presented Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that from 2013 to 2023, manufacturing jobs grew by 12.3% in right-to-work states, compared to 2.5% in “forced union” states.

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Business

[Fox Business] Google AI venture to help military with disaster response

An artificial intelligence (AI) venture backed by Google is partnering with the military to use AI in responding to natural disasters.

Bellwether, a team that’s part of Google parent Alphabet’s X innovation hub, announced Wednesday that it’s working with the National Guard and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to address inefficiencies in the Guard’s disaster response processes. The DIU is tasked with helping the Department of Defense integrate early stage commercial technologies into its operations.

Bellwether worked with the National Guard to develop a system that uses AI and machine learning (ML) to quickly analyze aerial imagery of disaster scenes to identify damage to critical infrastructure. That can then inform National Guard teams coordinating the disaster response as they look to deploy resources most effectively after conducting damage assessments.

The National Guard currently conducts damage assessments manually as humans look over aerial images of a disaster-struck area to compare them against corresponding pictures of those locations to note infrastructure changes caused by the disaster. That process continues as the disaster progresses, and the initial response can be delayed due to the time required to review those details.

AIR FORCE CONFIRMS FIRST SUCCESSFUL AI DOGFIGHT

“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” Col. Brian McGarry – who leads the National Guard’s operations, plans and training division – said in a statement.

“They then have to correlate those images to surrounding infrastructure, label all the relevant features, and only then can highlight the significant damage and send it forward to first responder teams.”

“Using AI and ML to do the routine tasks of georectification, identification, and labeling will greatly speed up how quickly we can get important information to the folks that need it most,” McGarry wrote. “It’s all about saving lives in our communities.”

GOOGLE CONSOLIDATES AI-FOCUSED DEEPMIND, RESEARCH TEAMS

The Bellwether team said they spent nine months building a prototype that uses AI and machine learning to analyze aerial imagery of an area hit by a disaster in mere seconds, using Google’s geospatial assets as a reference to compare what the area looked like before the disaster.

After the images of the disaster scene are analyzed, the Bellwether tool produces a labeled map of affected areas that allows the National Guard to quickly determine how to deploy its resources in response to conditions in the disaster-affected area.

“There is so much information from so many sources about the Earth out there,” Sarah Russell, who leads Project Bellwether at X, said in a release. “Our moonshot is to systematize that information so that disaster response organizations and other entities can use it to make better decisions and plan for the future.”

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

“The DIU supports our mission to build the most effective tools possible as natural disasters continue to occur with worsening severity,” Russell added. “In five years, nobody should have to wait to understand the extent of extreme weather damage and the community’s most urgent needs. It should be seen as reasonable and expected that we immediately know the state of the most important infrastructure across a landscape, and what to do next.”

Google said Bellwether’s results are so encouraging to the DIU that it’s partnering with the team on future disaster response efforts.

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Google’s X innovation hub also noted in a separate post that Bellwether is developing a wildfire prediction tool to calculate fire risk for landscapes and structures up to five years in the future.

The tool estimates the likelihood of wildfire in a location by analyzing historical data about the environment as well as risk drivers like tree species, wind qualities and the types of infrastructure in the area.

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