Earthquakes on Their Mind

With the appalling devastation that has struck Port-au-Prince, a lot of people are thinking about fault lines. Ha'aretz headlines that "Israel is Due, and Ill-Prepared, for a Major Earthquake." Unlike the Caribbean, where big quakes are pretty rare, the Middle East is a fault zone, and of course the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley are part of the Great Rift Valley that runs down all the way through Africa.

Most often we associate Middle Eastern quakes with mountainous areas of Iran, Turkey, or Armenia, all of which have had a number of truly devastating quakes. But sometimes they hit the big cities — Cairo 1992 and Istanbul 1999 come to mind, and I knew people affected by both of those, including one who sustained serious injuries — not to mention Yerevan 1988, which accellerated the collapse of the Soviet Union and Armenian independence, so it isn't surprising that Israelis are looking with a certain nervousness at their own fault lines.