Las Vegas area not safe anymore!

The Las Vegas Valley is being thrashed and pummeled by earthquakes today! 

First there was a 1.5 microquake about 12 miles NNW of town at 4:55pm on
Monday, and, just now, at 2:52 pm., only twenty-two hours later, a 1.9 shocker
about 16 miles SSW of town, near the near-imaginary town (can hardly find it on
a map!)  of Erie, Nevada. 

Could the 1.5 microquake be said to have been the foreshock to the 1.9 temblor?
Not likely, since the one shock was a good 20+ miles from the other shock!

Okay, okay, so I'm pulling your leg a little on this one!  1.5 and 1.9 are
very, very small quakes -- and a good thing, too, when one considers the
billions of dollars' worth of improvements in Las Vegas, and that something
like 4 out of  5 of the largest hotels in the world are on the Las Vegas Strip.
 Good thing this area has low frequency of larger quakes -- none in the past
100+ years, in fact! But the area is hardly aseismic! 

The faults that have come into play in this pair of earthquakes are important
to note:  They occurred on NO faults shown on the USGS map!  This is not at all
unusual, as 90% of the quakes that occur in this part of Nevada occur where no
faultline has been drawn on the map.  I've seen the USGS map. Here is also the
University of Nevada at Reno map, although it wisely does not even try to show
faults since most quakes don't seem fault-related in this area at all:  

http://www.seismo.unr.edu/Catalog/nbe-big.gif 

1.5 and 1.9.  My goodness!  Nothing bigger than this great show put on by
Mother Nature has taken place geologically here in Vegas in months, or maybe
years! There have indeed been larger quakes here, all of them just to the east
and spread out mostly to the south of the Las Vegas Valley. No less than ELEVEN
earthquakes of magnitude 4.0--4.9 have occurred here since 1900, and ONE quake
of magnitude 5.0 slammed this area, not far from Hoover Dam, as well. Although
averaging about 10 to 20 miles from Las Vegas itself, it is believed most of
these quakes would have been, and were, felt in Las Vegas.  Certainly a 5.0
would have been felt in the highrises along Las Vegas Blvd. (The Strip) and the
downtown buildings. At least some of these quakes seem to have some
relationship with the filling of Lake Mead following the construction of Hoover
Dam in the early 1930's.  No quakes of the larger magnitudes (4.0 or greater)
have been felt in this area for many, many years.   Here is a URL which
dramatically shows the distribution of these quakes of which I've been
speaking:

http://seismo.unr.edu/graphics/Maps/las-vegas-seism.jpg

Thanks, as always!  (Trolls will be ignored!)


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