The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, centered in Missouri and Arkansas, changed the flow of the Mississippi River, and were felt along the East coast of the US. The probability of a powerful earthquake in the region in the next decades is small, but nontrivial, and would undoubtedly have devastating effects on middle Tennessee.

This Engineering first-year seminar will explore the implications of the next New Madrid earthquake on Vanderbilt University and Nashville, and investigate what we can do to prepare for it. The seminar addresses the implications of an earthquake on scientific, engineering, and management issues such as earthquake dynamics, modeling, and measurement; safety of buildings and other structures; resilience of transportation networks; water and power infrastructures; communication and computing capabilities; supply chains of food and other necessities; risk assessment of low probability, high impact events; and disaster response, logistics, and law enforcement by local teams at Vanderbilt, Nashville, and Tennessee.

Students are asked to think both skeptically and openly about the known science of and response plans to a New Madrid earthquake.

Students will develop an individual or group project (e.g., designing a mobile application to warn of incoming shock waves; a report on emergency robotics search and rescue, including demonstrations with drones; roles for residential faculty and staff, and provisioning of their residences; an analysis of telework and teleclass capabilities under disaster conditions; development of training and awareness materials; researching the 1811-12 earthquake effects on early Nashville, and today’s methodology for estimating their magnitude; a fictional short-story, set in the near future, on the implications of an earthquake on Vanderbilt and Nashville, with some treatment of engineering and technology; a graphic design poster/flyer/e-image to increase awareness).

Student projects will be presented at a poster session, open to the University, at the end of the semester.

Douglas Fisher, Computer Science and Computer Engineering
Janey Camp, Civil & Environmental Engineering