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Press Release: September 1, 2004
Sam Penny Announces
Publication of Broken River
Penny's novel, Book
2 in The 7.9 Scenario, tells how a giant earthquake
destroys the US river system
Bangor, Maine - Sam Penny, author
and lecturer, announced this week that his next novel, Broken
River, has been sent to the printers. Copies will
be available by September 27 for distribution at the National
Earthquake Conference in St. Louis.
"Broken River
is Book 2 of The 7.9 Scenario," Penny says. "It tells
the story of two captains on the Mississippi River who bring
their boats loaded with passengers and refugees to safety after
the central United States is ravaged by the worst earthquake
to strike the country in nearly two hundred years. Their experiences
tell what to expect along our great waterways when a giant earthquake
once again wracks our land."
The book is published under the
TwoPenny Publications imprint with an ISBN of 0-9755671-1-X.
Initial copies will be printed by Booksurge, LLC, of North Charleston,
NC.
The 7.9 Scenario is an analytical
study developed by Penny over the past seven years. "I used
government data to determine the impact of a giant New Madrid
Fault earthquake under the Mississippi River on the United States.
I was startled to find that my calculations showed that as many
as 80,000 people could die, 500,000 people could be injured,
and 10,000,000 people could be left homeless if a 7.9 magnitude
earthquake struck the Fault today."
Penny explains, "An earthquake
that size happened there 193 years ago. The chances are one in
ten that over half the people in the country will live to see
a recurrance of that event."
Dams and levees making up the
core of the central United State's water control and transportation
system would be destroyed. The nation as a whole could lose as
much as 10% of its Gross Domestic Product overnight, enough to
plunge it into the worst depression it has ever seen.
Penny decided to "shine
a light" on the impending danger as a work of fiction rather
than non-fiction. "I felt writing a scientific treatise
on the subject would be a waste of time, mainly because most
people don’t identify with such works. Instead, I chose
to approach the issue as a set of fictional personal experiences
based upon real information I had garnered from my research."
In 2003 Penny published Memphis
7.9, Book 1 of The 7.9 Scenario. That novel describes
the earthquake in detail and its impact on the city of Memphis,
only 45 miles away from the fracture. He used scenes left on
the cutting room floor from the first book as the basis for Broken
River. The two books are companion novels, though
one book does not require the other.
Broken River is a 6 by 9 inch soft-cover trade book
of 238 pages with five maps. It can be ordered from www.the79scenario.com
and will soon be available at www.amazon.com
and www.booksurge.com.
Its list price is $16.99. |
