SoylentNews

HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

The NYT reported on October 14, 2015 that a magnitude 4.5 quake struck Saturday afternoon about three miles northwest of the Cushing Hub [nytimes.com], a sprawling tank farm that is among the largest oil storage facilities in the world, now holding 53 million barrels of crude with a capacity for 85 million barrels. The Cushing oil hub stores oil piped from across North America [wikipedia.org] until it is dispatched to refineries. The Department of Homeland Security has gauged potential earthquake dangers to the hub and concluded that a quake equivalent to the record magnitude 5.7 could significantly damage the tanks and a study by Dr. Daniel McNamara study concludes that recent earthquakes have increased stresses along two stretches of fault that could lead to quakes of that size. "It’s the eye of the storm,” says Dana Murphy, vice chairman of the state’s oil and gas regulatory body, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

“When we see these fault systems producing multiple magnitude 4s, we start to get concerned that it could knock into higher magnitudes,” says Daniel McNamara, author of a paper published online that a large earthquake near the storage hub “could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines. [wiley.com]” “Given the number of magnitude 4s here, it’s a high concern.” Nevertheless, Oklahoma’s attempt to deal with the earthquakes this autumn faces continuing obstacles. The government’s chief seismologist, who came under oil industry pressure to minimize the quakes’ origins in waste disposal, left this fall, and his successor is scheduled to depart soon. The state budget for the fiscal year that began in July slashed appropriations to the Corporation Commission by nearly 45 percent [newsok.com].

---

Original Submission