The Great ShakeOut

Representatives from the City of Socorro, Socorro County, New Mexico Tech, Socorro Schools, Magdalena and Socorro General Hospital came together for an Earthquake tabletop drill organized by the Socorro County Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC).

LEPC Chair, Jason Everett said the exercise aims to simulate multiple impacts to communications and infrastructures and practice operating in a unified command structure.

“Just from my point of view, this unified command conversation seemed really productive,” Everett said during the wrap up of the drill.

He said that compared to the last interagency drill they did he felt the level of communication had improved.

Socorro County Emergency Manager Fred Berger said it was good to see all the entities come together to work through scenarios

“As a group we certainly have some growing to do, but we are here working together to solve problems. I am excited to see the growth over the next few months. We identified some areas that need immediate attention such as interagency communication,” Berger said. “ This is exactly the reason why we get together to work through these challenges.”

City of Socorro Fire Captain Daniel Pacheco said the drill was a real eye opener for him.

“We, as a whole, are not even close to being prepared so this was a good thing for us to start preparing,” Pacheco said.

Earthquakes in Socorro

Urbi Basu, Research Scientist and Manager of the NMT Seismological Observatory, who was in attendance said the presence of a magma body at a depth of 20 kilometers beneath Socorro has a history of seismic activity, including a notable earthquake in 1906.

“Underneath Socorro, we have a magma body; it’s kind of like molten lava. So it’s very hot, somewhat fluid, and it’s sitting like a seed or a pancake at the depth of 20 kilometers, and it’s slowly rising, but that’s at a very slow speed.” Basu said.

She said this year they had a 3.4 earthquake near Lemitar.

“That’s why the Bureau of Geology now maintains a seismic network, so that we are regularly getting the data, locating the earthquakes, and over the time, we check if the rate or the number of earthquakes has increased or not. It hasn’t increased, so that’s a good thing,” Basu said.

The observatory maintains a network of seismic stations to monitor earthquakes, which typically occur at shallow depths and are relatively small (magnitude 2-3). While there is no recent increase in seismic activity, the potential for a large earthquake remains, especially considering the older buildings in Socorro.

“But there’s not a definite timeline we can think of, because the last one was more than 100 years ago, and I think there were two in a very few months time period. So there’s always a potential for a big one,” Basu said.

The multi-agency drill was part of the New Mexico Great ShakeOut state-wide earthquake exercise.