question:  How has America transformed as a country after the events?
context: It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life.
output:  It's now a booming maritime location, with high population and economic growth.
options:  With millions of their people gone, America is still finding a foothold in this new world.  It's now a booming maritime location, with high population and economic growth.  Most of the states have separated and began to live independently again.  The political climate has been completely upended.