A recurrence of an 1811-12 type earthquake in the Mississippi Valley would pose severe problems to construction in the valley. As William Stauder has stated in the preceding article, a particular difficulty in understanding the seismicity of this area is that, whereas various surface manifestations of the 1811-12 earthquakes have been well documented (for example, sandblows and sunken lands), active fault zones have never been recognized. There may be different reasons for this.