[CEUS-earthquake-hazards] From A Layman's Perspective . . . .

[Jack Kindell]

Jim Wilkinson is right, just about anyone can join this listserve, and just
about "anyone" did!  You all don't know me from Adam, but I now know of you.
For the past year or so I've been monitoring this board and the various
topics discussed, not as a degreed professional for I have none in these
fields.

This email is not to say, as a layman, how much I enjoyed turning over rocks
in creeks while growing up as a child, nor how mineral specimens in museums
still enthrall me as an adult.

This email, rather, is to say, if no one else has ever said it to you,
either individually or collectively, on the street or in a meeting, at a
dinner or in a store, in a church or a temple, on a beach, in the woods, up
in the mountains or in the canyons of a city:

THANK YOU!

Thank you for your passion for your professions!  Thank you for your drive
to "get it right!"  Thank you for all your struggles and sacrifices and time
spent in undergraduate and graduate and field work and workshops and
seminars and briefings and debates and the like!  Thanks for all the muddy
boots, the endured heat and cold, the arid and soakings!
And my hat's off to those who stand by their data and even more to those who
accept new findings from others that only adds more to everyone's collective
knowledge that pushes the envelope even further into the unknown!

Thank you for your efforts in the discovery of, in the effort of forecasting
of, and in the struggle to work with other entities to mitigate the
calamities of geologic 911s.  As well as engaging in a host of other
initiatives that contribute to making me and my family and the tens and the
hundreds and the thousands and millions of us as safe as possible!

The home that I live in, the company where I work, the bridge that I drive
over, the subway that I ride, the hospital where we seek care, the schools,
the malls, the dams, the power plants.  Never giving thought to what is
under my feet.  The codes, the probabilities, the contingency plans, etc.,
etc.  Where to build, what to build, how to build.

No matter how sharp your debates (the content of which is way over my head!)
what comes through loud and clear, to me as a layman fly on the wall, is
that there are Wizards up there in OZ who really care about working out the
physics to make life in Munchkin land a little better, a litter safer.  Your
knowledge baffles me.  Your passion comforts me.

Now, if I can just find both a geologic and a statistical dictionary to help
with all the translations I need . . .  Ah, yes, here it is: "Dick and Jane
visit the New Madrid Fault Zone, See Spot do a M9" What the . . ?

Jack Kindell sends . . . .