Don't Panic

So, we all know about the horrible, natural disasters that have been happening lately. Hurricanes in the East Coast, an earthquake in Iran, raging storms and fires…it’s a nightmare.

Just think: for all those refugees from Hurricane Katrina in Huston (the fourth largest city in the U.S.), now they must flee from the city again. People have to start all over…all over. Some people have to file for bankruptcy—the terror of that is enough to chill some blood. But imagine what it’s like to try and file for bankruptcy when you don’t even know if there’s something salvageable in your house.

By the way, it’s an obligation for me to point out that since I was in elementary school I’ve been told by various teachers how the Wasatch Fault (fault lines that sandwich my hometown, Orem) is way overdue for a major earthquake. In February this year, we experienced 20 minor earthquakes. BYU professor Ron Harris, who chronicled the tsunami earthquake, says that between the next fifty to a hundred years, the state is due for earthquake with a magnitude of at least 7.0 (the tsunami earthquake was a 9.0). According to Harris, Utah residents are simply not ready for such an earthquake; highway overpasses would collapse like I-15, hundreds of water pipes such as the one that runs in the canyon next to Orem would burst…and thousands of people would die.

Deseret News painted the following scenario. Imagine that one morning you wake up to this:
A magnitude 7.5 earthquake, centered directly below downtown, hit Salt Lake City this morning shortly before dawn. Residents are sifting through thousands of older homes, which were not retrofitted to earthquake code, looking for survivors. The University of Utah's Marriott Library collapsed, trapping an estimated half dozen maintenance workers.
In Provo, 50 miles away from the quake's epicenter, thousands of BYU students living in off-campus apartments were killed while they slept. Many of the apartment buildings, built more than 30 years ago, collapsed because they were not upgraded to meet the state's seismic building codes.
Visibility is low along the Wasatch Front as smoke from fires caused by ruptured gas and electrical lines clouds the skies. Power lines are also down. The state's main thoroughfare, Interstate 15, is impassable from south of Provo to the Idaho border as many of the roadway's bridges and overpasses have collapsed.
The outlying communities of Ogden and the Cache Valley have sustained significant damage.

And not to mention that volcanic earthquake due at Yellowstone. Have you guys heard about that one? Apparently it’s not due for a while (try about a thousand years), so don't stress. But there’s a sleeping supervolcano underneath the park. A supervolcano is, like, Mount St. Helens times a hundred. The way the faults work at Yellowstone, there’s supposed to be a huge earthquake that causes the supervolcano to erupt. I can’t paint a bad enough picture for this. Imagine the aftermath of Chernobyl all over the U.S., and half of the world. The environment would be permanently altered. To name just one terrible effect, the surrounding states (including Utah) would get covered in a five to ten foot blanket of ash, like poisoned snow. And it wouldn’t stop snowing this ash for weeks. Possibly months. Worse: this has happened before at Yellowstone, millions of years ago. In fact, it might have been what caused the Ice Age.

Well...it's all kinda depressing for me. But hey—if you wanna hear why you shouldn't panic just yet, go read my latest "Confessions".

"Don't Panic"—Coldplay, "Parachutes" (2000)

Bones sinking like stones,
All that we fought for
Homes, places we've grown,
All of us are done for.

We live in a beautiful world
Yeah we do, yeah we do
We live in a beautiful world.

Oh, all that I know,
There's nothing here to run from.
'Cause yeah, everybody here's got somebody to lean on.