1975 Haicheng, China Quake
The Haicheng quake is the most successfully predicted earthquake in
history. Authorities evacuated the city of 1 million people days before this
powerful 7.0 magnitude quake hit on February 4, 1975 at 11:36 UTC (7:36 pm
local time). Although over 2,000 people were killed, authorities estimate
that over 150,000 fatalities could have occured without the evacuation. Scientists
noticed a number of possible precursors, to a quake, including changes in
land elevation and water levels, accompanied by an increase in low level
seismic activity. People were also encouraged to report odd behaviour of
livestock and other animals, which increased before the quake. All of this
led to an evacuation of this city of a million people a few days before the
expected quake hit. This successful prediction led to a great interest in
the sience of earthquake prediction. The citizen monitoring of water levels
in wells and animal behaviour led to the hope that community monitoring could
provide the breadth of coverage needed to gather the clues that would help
predict when and where earthquakes would hit. However subsequent efforts
to use the same methods to predict quakes have not been successful. In fact,
the next year in Tangshan, China, an earthquake killed
250,000 people
without the warning signs observed in Haicheng.
See The Earthquake Museum's Studying Quakes page for more information on Earthquake prediction. Here is the USGS Page on the Haicheng Quake .
See The Earthquake Museum's Studying Quakes page for more information on Earthquake prediction. Here is the USGS Page on the Haicheng Quake .