Feds: 7M in US at risk of man-made earthquakes

Seven million Americans live or work in areas threatened by earthquakes induced by human activity, federal researchers said Monday. 

For the first time, the United States Geological Society (USGS) factored potential man-made earthquakes into its 2016 seismic activity outlook. The agency concluded such induced earthquakes are possible in a host of states with prevalent oil and natural gas drilling, something researchers have previously blamed for causing such quakes. 

{mosads}Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico and Arkansas are all at risk for induced earthquakes, the agency said. 

The central United States has seen a “dramatic” increase in earthquakes over the past six years, the USGS added. There were an average of 24 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or larger between 1973 and 2008, but an average of 318 per year between 2009 and 2015. 

Officials in some of the most at-risk states have previously pinned the blame for these earthquakes on hydraulic fracturing operations, in which drillers inject wastewater into underground cracks and fissures in order to extract natural gas and other byproducts. The sudden jump in quakes, officials said, led the USGS to distinguish between natural and man-made quakes for the first time this year.

“By including human-induced events, our assessment of earthquake hazards has significantly increased in parts of the U.S.,” Mark Petersen, the chief of the USGS’s National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project, said in a statement. 

“This research also shows that much more of the nation faces a significant chance of having damaging earthquakes over the next year, whether natural or human-induced.”