What happens when a great earthquake strikes on the New Madrid fault, 45 miles from Memphis, Tennessee? Some predict the disaster while others scoff at the danger. Then twenty-three and a half seconds of fracturing create the magnitude 7.9 earthwaves that destroy the upper Mississippi River Delta and wreak havoc across the eastern United States. The lives of those involved tell what it is like to be part of the Memphis 7.9.
I am Sam Penny, also known to some as the "Prudent RVer." I am a futurist and writer, touring the USA full-time with my wife in our Portable Home (PH), also know as an RV. In our case, this is a fifth-wheel trailer.
Before retiring in 1998 I wrote extensively in the scientific and trade press while working in Silicon Valley, and upon retiring decided to write a novel. It would be based on my development of a scientific scenario of an earthquake in the center of the country.
Memphis 7.9 was first published in 2003, and revised in 2005. It was the first in a planned series to describe the effects of a 7.9 magnitude earthquake on the New Madrid Fault, just like what happened 200 years ago that killed an estimated 20% of the 5,000 white people living in the affected region in 1811. There are over 32,000,000 living there now, and Memphis is toast.
My second novel, Broken River, was a companion piece to the first, telling of how such an earthquake will destroy the Mississippi River.
I planned a third novel to tell of how the USA approached the problems of recovering from such an event when Katrina and Rita gave too graphic a hint of our planning and response inadequacies. So I set that work aside.
As a writing exercise with NaNoWriMo I started a new tale, the memoirs of my yet-to-be-born great-grandson who lives through the last 85 years of this century and sees the world collapse around him. His life is one of the possible scenarios of our civilization, made more probable by the inaction of today's leaders to handle resource depletion, climate change, and population explosion. The results of that effort is a new story, Was A Time When. It will be published at Amazon in January as a bound book and a kindle book.
My wife and I have spent a good part of the past 28 years traveling, oftentimes boondocking on the deserts and seashores and in the forests and mountains of our great country. We practice living prudently and keeping our carbon footprint small.
Our mission is to be far-sighted in our search for the key elements of a lifestyle that is thrifty, wise, and frugal. We are vigilant to real opportunities and wary of choices and habits that threaten our existence, and the existence of the rest of humanity. We wish to share this knowledge.
I turned to teaching people how to live prudently, and offered a line of LED lighting for RVs at www.prudentrver.com and selling the lights on the road as we traveled around the country.
I like digging into the real science and engineering of our time and uncovering the unintended consequences of what we do. There is so much more to write about.
