Quake risk in eastern US comparable to west coast

Dave Mosher for Wired Science reports on the magnitude 5.8 quake that struck central Virginia today: "This is a reminder that big earthquakes can happen on the East Coast and in the central U.S. It might be today, or tomorrow, or 100 years from now. But they will happen, so it makes sense to prepare."

He presents the Earthquake Disaster Risk Index which civil engineer Rachel Davidson of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center created in 1997 to better assess earthquake risk: "It’s important to think about how many ... buildings there are, what kind of buildings they are, and what kind of soil they sit on. (...) It doesn’t have to be expensive to make a building earthquake-resistant."