On Sat, 1 Sep 2007 16:45:39 -0500, wrote:

Can y'all imagine if a ''Camille'' hit New York City? y'all wouldn't
want to be there! There is a big Eartquake fault zone under New York
City too.I don't ever want to be there.

The existence of significant fault zones in New York is a commonly
repeated fallacy. I have personally spoken to one of the engineers at
the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at
the State University of New York at Buffalo regarding this (a few
years back, he was the guest speaker at a meeting of the ham radio
club I belong to), and was told that contrary to popular belief, there
are actually no major fault lines anywhere in the state of New
York...and relatively few minor ones.

There have been earthquakes in New York state - as well as seismic
events that were attributed to earthquakes but may in fact have been
the result of something else entirely. But, as noted at
http://www.greatdreams.com/ny/newyork_quakes.htm in the quote there
from New York State seismologist Frank Revetta, "There aren't any
major fault lines here like you have with California, that the
earthquakes occur along. Up here, the earthquakes are diffuse in the
area and they don't line up along any particular fault."

While researching a magazine article I wrote a few months ago on the
state of emergency communications preparedness in and around NYC now
as opposed to September 2001, I learned that emergency management
officials around there are a lot more concerned about the possibility
of getting hit by a hurricane than they are about the likelihood of an
earthquake. As part of their duties, emergency management people do
risk assessments and make it a priority to try and prepare for the
scenarios they're most likely to actually encounter. They did a major
assessment on the hurricane scenario and figured out that if a
category three hurricane (equivalent to a 4 or 5 down south) hit Long
Island, the worst case scenario included complete submersion of Fire
island and part of Montauk and along the south shore, while the storm
surge could leave Kennedy Airport under water:

http://wcbstv.com/prepared/local_story_271175735.html

That story notes that the damage could exceed $35 billion, and that
some observers say it's not a question of if but of when.

This doesn't mean they're completely unconcerned about earthquakes;
Nassau County (for example) has identified the possibility of an
earthquake as a hazard, noting that earthquakes affecting that county
have occurred in the past and that the peak ground acceleration with a
10% probability of exceedance over 50 years for that county is between
4% and 5% (e.g., it exceeds the 2% that FEMA recommends for
earthquakes to be considered for further evaluation during the
planning for a mitigation plan). But they ranked severe storms and
hurricanes as a much higher hazard:

http://www.nassaucountyny.gov/agenci...estionaire.pdf

Other such documents produced at the state and county level can be
found on the web as well by diligently using Google, from which you
can see that earthquakes are something that emergency managers around
here do consider a possibility, but not nearly as likely an occurrence
as severe weather events or other types of threats.

In the event something major happened in New York, the ham radio nets
for RACES and ARES would be active. You can find the New York State
RACES SOP document at:

http://www.semo.state.ny.us/uploads/2007_RACES_SOP.pdf

That document gives very little frequency information, so from my own
knowledge as a member of the ARES/RACES group in Erie County of NY
State and as a coordinator of emergency operations for the ham radio
club I belong to:

NEW YORK STATE EMERGENCY FREQUENCIES AND NETS

3913.0 LSB New York State ARES Emergency Net
3925.0 LSB New York State ARES Emergency Net
3993.5 LSB New York State RACES
7230.0 LSB New York State ARES Emergency Net
7245.0 LSB New York State RACES

Beyond that, the HF activity would be on the usual FEMA and other
federal nets the frequencies for which I'd expect everyone already has
(such as the SHARES net and those obscure federal agency nets you can
hear testing on Wednesday mornings at around 9:00 AM eastern time), as
well as the other usual ham radio frequencies for the SATERN net,
Hurricane Watch Net, etc. - all of which are well documented on the
net so I won't repost them here.

Needless to say, the volume of radio traffic on HF would pale in
comparison to the volume of traffic on VHF/UHF, but we're already far
enough off topic without me posting VHF/UHF frequencies here! Thus,
check out a good NY scanner frequency reference such as David Stark's
NF2G Scannist Pages at http://nf2g.com/scannist/index.html for those.

73 de John, KC2HMZ, KNY2VS
Tonawanda, NY, USA
TS-450S-AT, DX-394, Wires
http://www.kc2hmz.net