Bad News for New England

Lewis Don Leet, crack Harvard seismologist, does not want to be an alarmist --but he does his duty when he sees it. In the closing days of 1940, two earthquakes shook solid old New England, which is far outside the zone of major quakes (TIME, Jan. 6). Property damage was small and casualties practically nil; in Peru, Japan or California, the shocks would have been dismissed as trivial. Last week Dr. Leet said they might augur worse shocks to come.

A good many seismologists believe that quakes in northeastern North America, whose rocks are old and relatively stable, are caused by an intermittent, jerky rising of the earth crust released from the great weight of the last Glacial Age. Dr. Leet dissents from this view, at least to the extent of pigeonholing it as a guess. In the Harvard Alumni Bulletin last week, he declared that deep forces are at work under New England and eastern Canada--moreover that the region is in a period of "increasing seismicity." He notes that relatively strong shocks were felt in 1663, 1755, 1850, 1870, 1897, 1904, 1914, 1925, 1929, 1935, 1939, 1940--conspicuously shortening intervals. In general, it looks as though something seismologically big might be building up for New England.

Dr. Leet says flatly that earthquakes cannot be predicted. But he thinks there is a definite possibility that, sometime in the next half century, a really lethal quake may hit Portland, Boston, Worcester, Springfield, Hartford, Bridgeport, Providence or New York. To minimize the hazard, he advised those cities to start earthquake protection for buildings and utilities--now.

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