The Cache Valley earthquakes are a reminder of the potential for the Great Utah Earthquake

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Estimated reading time: 2-3 minutes

Logan – Cache Valley has experienced over a dozen earthquakes in the space of a few days – all centered around the western side of the county.

They are very small earthquakes but they still deserve our attention.

In all, 14 rocked the Cache Valley and served as a reminder that we are likely to witness a major event in the next 50 years somewhere along the Wasatch Front.

The damage can be catastrophic, and we need to be prepared.

“I think I’ve felt like eight so far,” said Benson resident Levi Jensen. “It was kind of wild, only the earthquakes woke me up at night and during the day. We had quite a few.”

Brady Cox has been keeping a close eye on the activity. “The biggest earthquake was yesterday afternoon (Tuesday). It was a magnitude 3.1 earthquake and that’s the earthquake most people felt,” Cox said.

This is relatively small, said the Utah State University professor, but it should make us all really think about how prepared we are for a major earthquake.

Many residents of the Wasatch Front and I-15 sit along a major fault line in Utah.

“In fact, there is about a 50 percent chance that a magnitude 7 earthquake will occur in the next 50 years,” said Cox.

As a civil engineer, he has traveled to ground zero of major earthquakes around the world. He studied the seismic effect on buildings in Turkey and Haiti. Even first world countries like New Zealand see the devastation. His main interest is buildings of brick or stacked stone that do not contain rebar. “They perform horribly in earthquakes. They are the leading cause of death in earthquakes around the world,” he said.

Utah has about 144,000 of them. There has been a lot of work to modify major structures such as the Salt Lake Temple. The temple project is expected to be completed in 2025.

While this is a big job, Cox said we must also see how well prepared we are at home, with food, water and other daily needs.

He said that a neighborhood in New Zealand had been sharing mobile toilets for several months.

You can download the Utah Earthquake Preparedness Handbook here.

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Mike Anderson often works as his own photographer, shooting and editing most of his stories. He came to KSL in April 2011 after working for several years at various broadcast news outlets.

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