STEWART CO-AUTHORS NEW EARTHQUAKE BOOK

After reading or watching the news about the recent earthquake in California, one is reminded of the area in which we live and if we too will experience an earthquake that will disrupt our day-to-day lives.

Dave Stewart of Marble Hill, is on a mission to alert everyone to that possibility and to educate one and all about our past and greatest earthquake of 1811-12.

After six years of field research Stewart co-authored The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide with Dr. B. Ray Knox of Cape Girardeau. It is the third book in a set, with Knox, concerning the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12 and the associated fault zone.

The first in the set was The Earthquake America Forgot, 2,000 Temblors in Five Months ... And it will happen again. The second book was entitled The Earthquake that Never Went Away ... The Shaking Stopped in 1812, but the Impact Goes On.

Several students from the Geoscience Department at Southeast Missouri State University also traveled along from time to time to assist in the field work and the subsequent analysis.

The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide will show the lay person where to see faults, fissures, earthquake lakes, explosion craters an other seismic scars in the landscape still visible 200 years after the Great New Madrid earthquakes that caused them. The book includes maps, figures, directions, commentary and dozens of photographs.

"Earthquake Alley" a 101-mile stretch of Interstate 55 between Blytheville, Ark. and Benton, is an approximate marker for more than 2,000 epicenters in 1811-12. It also roughly correlates with the most active portions of the New Madrid Fault today. More than 200 small earthquakes are reported there each year along a band 25-30 miles wide. There is a 30 percent chance a small tremor will occur there on any given day.

Driving along at 65 miles an hour, one can recognize the evidence of past earthquakes after reading and studying The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide.

This book will train you to recognize the earthquake features that dot the farm fields that line the highways throughout this region.

Stewart has authored and co-authored more than 200 publications in ten languages, including 13 books. A book published in 1991 that Stewart was commissioned by the government to research and write, details by county what would happen if an earthquake were to occur.

Statistics on structure damage, loss of human and animal life, pipeline damages and much more are listed in this book which is in its fourth printing.

His last book, The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide, was written to aid anyone to be a self-guided explorer.

"Everyone that goes down there [Earthquake Alley] is an explorer," Stewart said. "It's not just a book of knowledge, it's a book of action. There are lots of things that people wanted to do but couldn't because they needed a guide. Now they have a guide, it's themselves.

"It empowers them to be their own geologist."

"The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide" is being used as a textbook in three different colleges in Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. the classes then will go down to I-55 to view the actual sites.

Stewart said writing The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide was a "discovery a day" and has proven to be a very good seller.

Stewart received a BS in math and physics in 1965 from the University of Missouri at Rolla, graduating as salutatorian of his class. After two years as a hydrologist and hydraulic engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey in Garden Grove, Calif., he returned to Rolla to earn an MS and Phd in geophysics in 1971.

He is a former director of the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium of Marion, Ill., former director fo MacCarthy Geophysics Laboratory and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Stewart is the founder and former director of the Center for Earthquake Studies and associate professor at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau and is an adjunct instructor at the Emergency Management Institute, Emmitsburg, Maryland.