"Jack Campin" wrote in message
...
I won't be buying this house. John went to look at it. As charming
as
it appears, there are structural problems.
Good. Buy a house made of bricks, not wood.
LOL! If there's an earthquake, a brick house will be nothing but a pile
of
bricks. And yes, there can be earthquakes anywhere. Just because they
aren't common in a location, or it has been decades since there has been
one, doesn't mean they can't happen.

I grew up in a wooden house in NZ, and went through a tremor big
enough that it might well have cracked a brick one (the house just
rocked like a boat). Structural brick was illegal, and for good
reason; look what happened to older brick buildings in Christchurch,
like the Cathedral.

Arkansas is part of the region most affected by the New Madrid
earthquakes, the most damaging in the history of the US.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquak.../1811-1812.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1812_New_Madrid_earthquake

I would NOT like to be inside a brick building for a repeat of that.

Memphis was on the New Madrid fault, too. That fault runs from Cairo,
Illinois to Marked Tree, Arkansas. It's about 600 miles west of Eureka
Springs so I doubt they'd feel an earthquake.

I remember an earthquake along that fault in 1976. My mother was in Ohio
attending her mother's funeral. Dad and I were alone in the house. I was
in my bedroom reading a book. All of a sudden the bedside lamp started
swaying back and forth. I got up and walked to the bedroom door. I was
nearly jolted off my feet and had to grab onto the door jamb to stay
upright. (Turns out that's a good structural place to be during an
earthquake.) I held on. Then I went out to the den where my father was.
He exclaimed, "That was an earthquake! Pack a bag, get your coat! We have
to leave!" Um, where do you think we're going to go? LOL The news reported
the epicenter was a hundred miles north of us. There was no need to
evacuate. Dad simply reacted to being alone in the house with a teenage
daughter in a completely unforeseen situation.

That house was made of brick. If the quake had actually centered in Memphis
yes, it would have been reduced to a pile of rubble.

Jill