February 4, 1875 Haicheng Earthquake

The Haicheng quake is the most successfully predicted earthquake in history. Authorities evacuated the city of 1 million people days before this powerful 7.0 magnitude quake hit on February 4, 1975 at 11:36 UTC (7:36 pm local time). Although over 2,000 people were killed, authorities estimate that over 150,000 fatalities could have occured without the evacuation. Scientists noticed a number of possible precursors, to a quake, including changes in land elevation and water levels, accompanied by an increase in low level seismic activity. People were also encouraged to report odd behaviour of livestock and other animals, which increased before the quake. All of this led to an evacuation of this city of a million people a few days before the expected quake hit. This successful prediction led to a great interest in the sience of earthquake prediction. The citizen monitoring of water levels in wells and animal behaviour led to the hope that community monitoring could provide the breadth of coverage needed to gather the clues that would help predict when and where earthquakes would hit. However subsequent efforts to use the same methods to predict quakes have not been successful. In fact, the next year in Tangshan, China, an earthquake killed 250,000 people without the warning signs observed in Haicheng.

See The Earthquake Museum's Studying Quakes page for more information on Earthquake prediction.

Here is the USGS Page on the Haicheng Quake .