Oklahoma Earthquake Swarm on ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’

• Joe Wertz
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  Joe Wertz was a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma from 2011-2019. He reported on energy and environment issues for national NPR audiences and other national outlets. He previously worked as a managing editor, assistant editor and staff reporter at several major Oklahoma newspapers and studied journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Oklahoma’s earthquake swarm was the subject of a segment on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” last night. Host and commentator Maddow discussed the loud, explosive “booms” that accompany the shallow quakes — a phenomenon reported in Oklahoma and Texas — and, with her signature snark, suggested a way to curtail the shaking, which many seismologists say is linked to disposal wells used by the oil and gas industry.

“It’s totally possible, of course, that it’s all one big coincidence. The earth beneath the Oklahoma City suburbs is just being churned up by some big swing-away ice-crusher or something, right? It’ll all settle down on its own,” Maddow says in the segment, which you can watch above. “But I will note, that when the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport needed to stop its earthquake spike a few years ago, they temporarily shut down the wells that were injecting fracking fluid into the ground at high pressure on the airport property, and lo and behold those earthquakes stopped.

“Everybody knows that would be a crazy experiment for Central Oklahoma, right? But so is 103 earthquakes just since the end of last week.”