Maybe. It's hard to know if a later earthquake would have happened or been worse; it is normal for crustal rock to store some level of stress that is never rele

Maybe. It's hard to know if a later earthquake would have happened or been worse; it is normal for crustal rock to store some level of stress that is never released. You would need to know if the stress was changing, and how fast. If it wasn't changing pretty rapidly, it's possible it would have just sat unreleased for a very long time from the human perspective. Major earthquakes are rare; stress is not. There is also the question of what happens now that it has been released. Rocks are all connected, so a release of stress in one place might result in movement somewhere else eventually. BTW it is difficult to measure stress in crustal rocks remotely, without releasing some of it. So all of this is hard to know, and therefore hard to account as risk in new hydraulic injection projects.