EarthQuakes Part I: Analyze hazards associated with the New Madrid fault zone

Objective: Examine and analyze the hazards on a population if an earthquake, like the New Madrid quake of 1811-1812, were to happen today.
Back ground: During the winter of 1811 – 1812, four great earthquakes rocked the central Mississippi valley, near New Madrid, Missouri. In recent years, concern has been growing over the possibility of a similar event hitting the central United States in the future.  An examination of the data quickly reveals that highest magnitude zones (IX & X) are near Memphis Tennessee so it follows that it would sustain the most damage of any city.  The summary tool allowed me to see that there were 60,088,857 total people affected by the VI or more magnitude earthquake.

Detailed steps

1. Open the NewMadrid.mxd map document. 
2. Turn on Quakes 5 layer, showing earthquakes greater than magnitude 5.0 since 1800.
3. Turn on Urban Areas layer to view major urban areas.

Next we were asked to calculate population Density.

1. Turn on Counties layer, open attribute table and add a new field named Pop_Density, (Double) precision
2. Use the field calculator function, divide the 2001 population by the area of the county. [POP2001]/[Shape_Area].  This provides and answer in  persons per sq. meter. 
3. Use the Intersect tool in the ArcToolbox to intersect the data from the counties file with the NewMadrid MMI information and save it as County_MMI. 
4. In the new CountyMMI attribute table, add a long integer field named POP2001ADJ,
5. Calculate field using the expression [Pop_Density]*[Shape_Area] 
6. Right-click MMI field and select the summarize function. This will summarized MMI field by Pop2001ADJ sum, select "yes" to add new table to map.
   using the
7. keeping the attribute table open, I created the a bar graph showing the total population for each MMI.

Identify the most vulnerable interstates

1. Add a new field to the New Madrid attribute table that converts the roman numeral MMI to an integer, then select those MMI values greater than or equal to the intensity in which vehicle operation would be disturbed. (VIII+)
2. Turn on Interstates layer and clip to MMI features >= 8.
3. Turn off the Interstates layer
4. Turn on railroads layer and performed same clip process but  this time to the Rail road lines that are within MMI >=10
5. Make a map and upload to dropbox.
6. Turn Dams layer on and select MMI zones >=8
7. Select dams within that area to create a new layer file.
8. Save the map!