By State › Tennessee

Tennessee: Overview

Download all of Tennessee as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Tennessee exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Tennessee go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Memphis: the major city most directly exposed to the New Madrid Seismic Zone

Illinois’s page on this site covers the New Madrid Seismic Zone through its southern counties, like Cairo, which sit geographically close to the zone but have small populations. Memphis is a different scale of exposure entirely: a metro area of more than a million people sitting inside the same seismic zone, with aging, often unreinforced infrastructure and a documented soil liquefaction risk along the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers that would make ground shaking substantially worse downtown. See the Risks page for the full data.

The Great Smoky Mountains: wildfire risk in a place most people don’t expect it

In November 2016, the Chimney Tops 2 Fire started in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and, five days later, spread directly into Gatlinburg, killing 14 people and becoming the deadliest wildfire in the eastern United States since the 1940s. This is a genuinely different wildfire context from California’s or Oregon’s dry, western forest fires, dense Appalachian hardwood terrain, high humidity most of the year, and a fire season most residents didn’t think applied to them until it did.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Tennessee: Memphis-area households should treat earthquake preparedness (secured furniture, a practiced drop-cover-hold plan, water and supplies that don’t depend on undamaged infrastructure) as a real Tier 1-2 priority, not an abstraction, and households in or near the Smokies and other forested East Tennessee terrain should keep a wildfire evacuation plan even without living in a state typically associated with fire risk.

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