Browning's earthquake prediction just 6,346 days late

My wife woke up Friday morning already wearing her "Earthquake Survivor" T-shirt.

Spooky, eh?

Some suburbanites are still shaken after being stirred awake early Friday by a 5.2-magnitude earthquake that originated downstate. My wife, accustomed to strange rumblings in a house with three boys and a husband who comes with a snoring magnitude of 7.3, slept through it.

Her omniscient T-shirt was a souvenir I bought her while writing my columns about the great Illinois earthquake of Dec. 3, 1990. You the reader are either too young to recall that earthquake, or old enough to suspect that quake is just another thing lost to their foggy memories.

While I generally believe T-shirts (have you ever seen anybody who wasn't "with stupid" wear that shirt?), the 1990 earthquake on that shirt never happened.

A well-respected climatologist named Iben Browning predicted that an earthquake along the New Madrid fault, which runs through southern Illinois, would cause widespread damage on Dec. 3, 1990.

Given that he had warned of the deadly and devastating 1989 San Francisco earthquake a week before it hit, lots of people took Browning seriously.

The Daily Herald took the earthquake prediction seriously enough to send me to southern Illinois and Missouri for a few days to report on it.

At the time the quake was supposed to hit, I was in the observation deck at the top of the St. Louis arch interviewing everyone from the self-proclaimed "bunch of idiots" who were defiantly tempting fate to the Pentecostal believers who tried to convert me.

(I told them that if the earthquake hit while I was in the arch, we'd all die as Quakers.)

Speaking of religion, the night before the earthquake was supposed to hit, the Catholic Mass at Southern Illinois University drew "tons and tons of people" according to my 1990 interview with then-senior Jane Viernow, who manned the desk in one of the school's three 17-story dormitories.

When she saw university President John Guyon set up shop in the 15th-floor lounge to reassure students that the high-rises were earthquake-safe, Viernow joked that "it's like the captain going down with the ship."

The quake prediction fueled a lot of goofiness and entrepreneurship -- one male student tried to use the quake to persuade his girlfriend to let him sleep in her much-safer room. Some kids rented motel rooms for the night.

People in Carbondale and elsewhere along the fault line in 1990 bought up flashlights, groceries and other emergency supplies.

Friday's quake took people by surprise. But it might inspire Illinois residents to go down to the basement and see if their post-Sept. 11 emergency kits are still good. Or maybe they still have their Y2K rations handy.

Browning the predictor took a lot of grief when the earthquake didn't hit. He died of a heart attack at age 73, less than a year after his prediction.

So the only lasting evidence of his 1990 earthquake that didn't shake might be my wife's old T-shirt, with the cartoon of the New Madrid Fault held together by a Band-Aid.

My family might not be ready when the big one finally does hit, but no one will be able to say we weren't dressed for it.