"One notably (and perhaps ominously) quiet section of the fault is the 220 km long Meiktila segment, between the large city of Mandalay and the new capital of Naw Pyi Daw. This long quiet section separates a southern cluster of ruptures in 1929 and 1930 from a northern cluster between 1931 and 2012. The length of the Meiktila segment implies that it is capable of producing an earthquake as large as Mw 7.8 to 7.9, if it ruptures all at once [Wells and Coppersmith, 1994; Blaser et al., 2010] (Figure 22 and Table 4).
We speculate, on the basis of sparse historical records of shaking, that the 1839 Ava earthquake may have resulted from the failure of Meiktila segment, in conjunction with the Sagaing segment, its neighbor on the north. If the Meiktila segment has been dormant since then, and the fault is fully coupled down to a depth between 12 and 15 km, as Vigny et al. [2003] and Socquet et al. [2006] suggest, then accumulated slip potency on the Meiktila segment after 1839 is enough to generate a Mw 7.6 earthquake."