The 2008 Wells Earthquake

At sixteen minutes past six on the morning of February twenty-first, two thousand eight, Wells woke up to the largest earthquake in the contiguous United States outside California in more than twenty years. The earthquake had a magnitude of roughly six, its epicenter a few miles northeast of downtown, and it lasted only seconds. The damage it caused lasted years.

The older brick buildings in the historic downtown bore the worst of it. Chimneys toppled. Facades cracked and collapsed. Sections of masonry walls fell into the street. The only grocery store in town was severely damaged and had to close for months, leaving a community of a few thousand people without a local food source. More than a hundred and fifty structures were tagged as unsafe to enter. Three people were injured.

The earthquake exposed something specific about small rural Nevada towns: they operate with almost no redundancy. There is one grocery store, one hardware store, a handful of restaurants, and a historic downtown whose buildings are the accumulated investment of a century. Losing any of those things constitutes a real crisis for a community that cannot absorb the loss. The recovery took years. Some buildings were demolished rather than repaired, leaving gaps in the historic streetscape still visible today.

Geologists noted that the earthquake was also a reminder of the basin-and-range geology that defines this region. The Great Basin is an active extensional landscape, its faults creeping and occasionally lurching, and the surface expression of that geology is occasionally a very bad morning in a very small town.