The College of Charleston provides a little perspective:
SCEEP reports that while South Carolina is not known for its earthquakes, it does experience between two and five felt earthquakes a year. These earthquakes tend to be between magnitude 2.0 and 5.0 on the Richter scale and cause little damage, approximately 71 earthquakes of this size were recorded in SC between 1973 and 2007.
And, we have to look back at a story we did last year on the potential (or lack thereof) for major earthquakes in Charleston.
A recent study from Northwestern University seismologists suggests the worries of the school district and others regarding an imminent earthquake in Charleston may be a good 250 years too soon. It’s not that the threat is nonexistent — the region was home to one of the largest historical quakes on the East Coast in 1886, killing 60 people and causing about $6 million in damage.
While standard hazard predictions suggest that the next quake could happen at any time, the new study by seismologist Seth Stein and Northwestern senior James Bebden notes existing data does not account for the relatively short time that’s passed since the last quake. They argue that the threat for the next few decades is less than half what federal hazard maps currently predict. Under Stein’s model, it will take until about 2300 or later before we’re at the threat levels that Charleston is currently designing buildings to withstand.
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