There are still three months until the Atlantic hurricane season begins, and residents of Florida aren’t yet ready to contemplate the threat of the next natural disaster. But a rare late-night rumble and shake that startled thousands along the state’s east coast barely two weeks ago has raised the specter of a different and unexpected new menace: earthquakes.
At a magnitude of 4.0, the earthquake that struck 101 miles (163km) east of Cape Canaveral in the late evening of 7 February was the strongest in the US for two years, and significantly more powerful than those experienced on an almost daily basis in more vulnerable western states such as Nevada, New Mexico and California.
