In the winter of 1811 and 1812, three earthquakes of magnitude 7, and possibly as high as 7.7, and countless punishing aftershocks thereafter, rocked the sparsely inhabited frontier of the American Midwest. The shocks occurred on what today is the least understood seismic zone in the United States. And depending who you ask, another major earthquake here represents either a towering threat for which the Central U.S. is woefully unprepared, or a wildly over-hyped phantom costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in needless infrastructure improvements.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/the-great-middle-american-earthquake/486623/
