study region. About 42,000 search and rescue personnel working in 1,500 teams are required to respond to the earthquakes. Damage to critical infrastructure (essential facilities, transportation, and utility lifelines) is substantial in the 140 impacted counties near the rupture zone, including 3,500 damaged bridges and nearly 425,000 breaks and leaks to both local and interstate pipelines. Approximately 2.6 million households are without power after the earthquake. Nearly 86,000 injuries and fatalities result from damage to infrastructure. Nearly 130 hospitals are damaged and most are located in the impacted counties near the rupture zone. There is extensive damage and substantial travel delays in both Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri, thus hampering search and rescue as well as evacuation. Moreover roughly 15 major bridges are unusable. Three days afterin the Missouri Bootheel town that was destroyed in the wild winter of 1811-1812 by the fault it straddles. The museum is housed in an old saloon in the shadow of a giant Army Corps levee that protects the town from the looming Mississippi. It advertises the town’s unofficial—and strangely plangent—motto on billboards, t-shirts and road signs: “It’s Our Fault!” When I visited New Madrid, the only two people downtown were myself and Sandy Hill, who works at the front desk of the Historical Museum. Hill moved to New Madrid in 1990, when earthquake hype was reaching a crescendo. A prophecy had just been made by an eccentric charlatan named Iben Browning, who falsely claimed to have predicted the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California the year before.