8.4

by Peter Hernon

  Stopping immediately, he opened his mouth to cry for help, but no sound came out. He fell to his knees and vomited.

  Jacobs took another look at the gaping face. The girl’s hair was brown and matted.

  He heard someone come up behind him. A young man.

  Still on his knees, Jacob waved the youth away and tried to warn him not to come any closer. It was too late. The student already had taken a good look.

  “Oh, God!” he cried, and put his hand over his mouth. He dropped next to Jacobs and retched.

  Jacobs saw a man he recognized, a middle-aged doctor who lived in the neighborhood. Wearing a gold jogging suit and carrying a small black bag, he was moving around the piles of brick and glass, trying to help the injured.

  Jacobs called to the man, but his voice was thick with bile. He was fighting to control his stomach.

  He finally got the words out.

  The doctor came over, took one look at the body, and angrily said, “Don’t waste my time with the dead!”

  On the way back to the earthquake center, Jacobs had to stop several times. He felt weak, drained, and couldn’t remember when he’d last slept.

  When he got to his office, he found Guy Thompson. He was still having trouble with his stomach.

  “Any improvements with our communications?” he asked.

  Thompson frowned. “Nada, but all is not hopeless.”

  Overshadowing their many other problems was the need for information on what was happening in the ground. The quake had knocked out telephone lines, which meant they couldn’t access data from their PADS network. All but a few of the seismic instruments were linked to the office by telephone lines. So were the handful of GPS monitors they’d only recently installed at sites in western Tennessee and Kentucky.

  Two of the six GPS units and four of the seismic instruments operating in the New Madrid Seismic Zone transmitted data by radio wave, but the radio towers had been knocked down or otherwise disabled. The units were still recording data but there was no way to send it back to Memphis.

  “We’re going to have to get out in the field and collect it ourselves,” Jacobs said. “And that’s a bitch with all the roads torn to hell and the bridges out.”

  It angered him that they’d never considered the importance of arranging for a helicopter to retrieve data. They also needed to do flyovers of the earthquake zone to see what the ground looked like. Pretty basic, but hopeless. No helicopters or planes were available.

  They’d repeatedly tried the military and national guard, but every available aircraft continued to be used for emergency medical flights.

  Jacobs bitterly remembered the many disaster planning sessions he’d attended. The assumption had always been that a quake, even a big one, wouldn’t knock out all the land lines. Everyone figured that patchy telephone connections would somehow survive and that they’d be able to receive at least some real-time seismic data.

  Their assumptions had proven all wrong, every damn one of them. When they needed precise seismic information the most, it wasn’t available.

  Thompson reported they’d had better luck keeping in touch with the USGS earthquake evaluation center in Boulder. Thanks to a system called “packet radio,” they’d been able to use a special radio modem technically called a Terminal Node Controller, or TNC. The device connected to a two-way fifty-watt shortwave radio receiver and could hook up to a computer terminal.

  They could send and receive computer data through “packets” of radio waves. Jacobs remembered how some staffers had thought the system was a waste of time and money. But it was paying for itself in gold. The major shortcoming was that it was agonizingly slow. Using packet radio, a computer could send at only 4800 baud per minute. Even a discount department store computer could transmit at 9600 baud.

  Still, it was something. They had two TNC units up and running. They also had a “fly away” satellite hookup. Jacobs had set up the suitcase-sized device on a courtyard bench just outside the annex. The opened lid of the forty-pound unit served as the antenna. By adjusting the compass and punching in the right code coordinates, they locked in on a satellite so they could transmit. A laptop computer was patched in with a keyboard and eight-inch video screen. Once they uplinked with a satellite, the unit functioned as a telephone. They could also send and receive computer data.

  The only problem: it wasn’t working.

  Intense solar flares had knocked it out along with the Global Positioning System.

  Jacobs angrily threw across the room a chunk of plaster that had fallen on his desk.

  “We’re operating blind here!”

  He thought, again, about Atkins. It had been hours since they last talked. Jacobs wondered if his friend had made it to the epicenter and gotten his seismograph set up. There’d been reports that the bridges over the Mississippi from north of Memphis five hundred miles to Hannibal, Missouri, were either knocked down or heavily damaged. Every one of them.

  Jacobs hoped Atkins had been able to cross the river. They needed his data. Among other things, it would help them gauge the depth and size of the fault that had triggered the monster quake.

  Guy Thompson cried out: “Hey, I just got an E-mail through to Boulder.” His laptop was hooked to one of the TNC units. Thompson was wearing a cowboy hat with an eagle feather tucked in the band. He’d also put on another Western shirt, bright red with pearl buttons. “They’re trying to send a team here, but the Memphis airport’s out of service.” He looked at Jacobs. “They say the control tower’s been knocked over. Demolished.”

  “Any more on the exact location of the epicenter?” Jacobs asked. With their seismic network in shambles, they had to rely on USGS in Boulder for precise information.

  “No change. It remains approximately ninety miles north, northwest of Memphis. Longitude ninety degrees west. Latitude thirty-six degrees north. Right at Blytheville. It’s been felt as far north as Montreal.”

  The location corresponded with data from their own seismographs, which were running on an emergency power generator. They had a bank of four rolling drum instruments. The first big shock wave had knocked all of them off scale. Since then they’d recorded three major aftershocks in the magnitude 7 range and dozens of minor temblors.

  Jacobs knew where and when the quake had occurred, but he still didn’t have the complete picture. He wanted to know the depth of the epicenter. That alone would tell them a great deal about seismic wave propagation, the shape of the fault, its size.

  The emergency traffic they were picking up off the shortwave channels was catastrophic.

  Memphis General Hospital was out of service. Several major buildings in the medical complex had collapsed. Only one of the city’s hospitals could still admit patients, and it was overwhelmed with the seriously injured. National Guard units were trying to set up a first-aid station at Forrest Park. There were desperate calls for plasma and blood donors.

  “Here’s some good news,” Guy Thompson blurted out. “I just got through to Boulder again.”

  “I could sure use some,” Jacobs muttered.

  “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration just sent out a bulletin,” Thompson said. “The GPS system is coming back on-line, and the tracking stations are back in business.”

  Every seismologist in the annex clapped and whistled. Jacobs closed his eyes. Yes, good news. But tempered by the realization that with telephone lines down, they still needed to get out in the field to collect the data.

  The constellation of twenty-four satellites had been out of service for the last five days, the result of severe solar flares. Their precise measurements would show to the millimeter how much the earth’s surface had been deformed by the earthquake, how much it had risen or fallen. That would help them set up a strain-field pattern, a way of calculating whether seismic energy was still building.

  Unlike the sophisticated array of GPS stations scattered along the San Andreas Fault, only a handful had been installed along the NMSZ, where they
were more difficult and costly to set up. It was crucial that each GPS platform remain stationary, a constant problem in the soggy Mississippi Valley. The instruments were anchored with steel rods driven deep into the ground. Each unit was equipped with an SSE receiver and antenna; the receivers were mounted on surveying tripods.

  The system was expensive and most USGS funding went to southern California’s network, a continuing source of irritation to Jacobs, but a fact of life. Quake-prone California always got the cake; the other parts of the country got crumbs.

  Maybe that’s going to change, Jacobs thought bitterly.

  “Walt, we just got through to Atkins on the shortwave,” one of the seismologists shouted. “You’re not going to like what he’s got to say.”

  NEAR BLYTHEVILLE, ARKANSAS

  JANUARY 13

  7:15 P.M.

  ATKINS SPOKE QUICKLY, FORCING HIMSELF TO BE concise and brief. He didn’t know how long they’d have a clear communication channel open with Walt Jacobs in Memphis. The static-plagued shortwave band was proving increasingly unreliable.

  He’d just spent the last hour with Elizabeth examining readouts of the seismic wave patterns they’d downloaded straight from the seismograph into their laptop.

  Dogs were still prowling around the Explorer. They’d heard barks along the bank of the creek, but none of the animals had shown themselves.

  As he spoke with Jacobs, Atkins tried to keep his voice calm, professional. The readings had worried him.

  “I’ve never seen peak accelerations at this level occurring so long after the main seismic event,” he said into the radio’s microphone.

  The seismic tracings indicated a series of sharp peaks and valleys representing the ground’s vertical and horizontal shaking. The secondary and surface waves showed vertical accelerations nearly seventy percent that of gravity. Vertical accelerations of fifty percent the rate of gravity were considered large.

  The measurement, known as “acceleration due to gravity,” was nothing more than an attempt to show how fast and hard the ground was shaking by comparing it with known gravitational forces. The baseline measurement was the speed with which a ball falls, an acceleration assigned a value of lg. That’s the same as racing a car 100 meters from a dead stop in four and a half seconds. Moderate earthquakes produced acceleration rates of .05g to .4g. The rate here was .7g. That was considered huge.

  The acceleration rates were troubling enough, but Atkins was also worried about the consistently strong aftershocks—and what they might signify. During the last seven hours, they’d had at least eight quakes that he estimated in the magnitude 5 range, strong enough to rock the Explorer on its axles.

  Jacobs confirmed the aftershocks. The seismographs in Memphis had recorded every one of them.

  “It looks like the epicenters are bunched roughly forty to fifty miles northeast of us,” Elizabeth said.

  They could do only the roughest field calculations. By measuring the time difference between the arrival of the quake’s primary and secondary waves, they were able to compute how far the epicenters were located from them. The calculations were based on the differing speeds of the waves. Both left the earthquake focus at the same moment, but the faster-moving P waves reached the seismograph first, followed by the S waves. The delay in arrival time was proportional to the distance traveled by the waves.

  Atkins knew that Jacobs realized what all this meant: the probable existence of another new fault branching out from the New Madrid Seismic Zone. It was the only logical explanation for such a tight bunching of aftershocks that were apparently outside the main fault system.

  The radio clicked back on. “John, we’re looking at the same information right now,” Jacobs said. “We’re going to have to confirm it, but it appears the epicenters are clustered in northwestern Tennessee and western Kentucky anywhere from thirty to forty miles east of Kentucky Lake.” The seismographs running nonstop in the library annex had recorded all of them.

  Atkins detected the strain in his friend’s voice. His own throat tightened as he explained his concerns. Based on this preliminary data, the NMSZ—once again—had become dramatically larger. Three days earlier, after the magnitude 7.1 event, they’d discovered a new fault running south of Memphis.

  And now this.

  Elizabeth said, “There’s no evidence the faulting process is slowing down.”

  The seismic shock waves were coming far too often for that. The epicenter near Blytheville, the one they were sitting on, continued to generate dozens of microquakes. Then there was the much stronger ground shaking to the northeast. With such instability, the elastic forces in the ground could snap again—at any moment.

  “Have you been able to get through to any other seismic stations to nail down the epicenters?” Elizabeth asked.

  “We’re working on it,” Jacobs said.

  To fix the exact position, data from seismographs at three or more different sites would have to be plotted. The epicenters were the points where the rippling seismic waves overlapped.

  Jacobs expected another data transmission soon from the National Earthquake Center in Boulder. Sophisticated computers were analyzing seismic readings from dozens of instruments scattered around the United States and abroad. That data as well as information recorded by seismographs in Memphis—and now near Blytheville, Arkansas—would fix the exact location of each epicenter.

  This, in turn, would help them delineate what appeared to be another new fracture jutting off from the main New Madrid Seismic Zone.

  Atkins had a map of the NMSZ spread open on his lap. It overlaid a map of the Mississippi Valley. The fault zone was shaped roughly like a hatchet, with the blade running across the intersection of Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The massive quake they’d just experienced had exploded about midway down the handle, which dipped seventy miles into eastern Arkansas, paralleling the Mississippi River.

  The major aftershocks suggested a new branch extending from the top of the hatchet up through northwestern Tennessee well into Kentucky.

  If it held up, the expanded fault zone might run roughly four hundred miles. A long S-shaped series of cracks deep in the earth, extending from just below Memphis, crossing the Mississippi from west to east around Caruthersville, and continuing to within 150 miles or so of Lexington, Kentucky.

  “It’s the dynamics at work here that worry me,” Elizabeth said. “How one major event, the 7.1 quake of three days ago, triggered a series of aftershocks that set up another major event, and now we’re getting more aftershocks.”

  “Liz, what are you saying? That these aftershocks could be leading up to another big one?” Atkins said. Despite his concerns about a possible new fault and the power of the aftershocks, he thought that was going too far. “I know what I just said, but it’s way too premature to start a discussion like that. This could all be part of the normal wind-down after a major earthquake. We could be in for some rough aftershocks for weeks. I know what the seismic history here is. Walt’s told me all about it. But those big quakes happened nearly two hundred years ago. Right now there’s no way we can say all these aftershocks are leading up to another major hit. I’m betting when we start to get some GPS data in, we’re going to see the deformation has started to taper off.”

  “I remember how skeptical we all were about Doctor Prable’s data,” Elizabeth said. “If we had moved more quickly, started an analysis when we—”

  “Then what?” Atkins said. “What would we have done? Warned the public? Made an earthquake prediction? Come on, Elizabeth. Don’t go second-guessing yourself. We’ll have lots of time later to take a close look at Prable’s data and see what we can learn from it. I’m still not convinced it wasn’t one of the best scientific guesses in history.”

  “If we don’t pay attention to those aftershocks, we could find ourselves making the same mistake twice,” Elizabeth said sharply. She didn’t like Atkins’ patronizing tone.

  Atkins raised his hands apologetically. He
didn’t want to get into another argument. Not at a time like this, especially after everything they’d been through.

  Then he suddenly remembered that he hadn’t checked the depth of the focus. It was his oversight. He’d completely forgotten and remembered it only as an afterthought. Any other time an omission like that would have seemed incomprehensible.

  Their seismograph readings indicated the “focus,” or source from which the big quake had emanated, approached a depth of ninety kilometers. That was incredibly deep. Most killer quakes that struck California originated from foci in the upper ten kilometers. The place where the fault had slipped near Blytheville was buried deep in hard crustal rock, the perfect incubator for enhancing the power and reach of seismic waves.

  The radio static hissed. It was Jacobs’ voice again. “We’ve got to get your data back here.”

  Like Jacobs, Atkins and Elizabeth wanted to feed all the information into one of Guy Thompson’s computer modeling programs so they could calculate the true breadth and depth of the faulted area. Combined with GPS data on ground deformation, it would help them gauge the potential for another major earthquake.

  “How does it look to you?” Atkins asked Jacobs.

  “I’m worried, John. I’d be a liar to say otherwise.”

  Jacobs was afraid to reveal the real extent of his fear. He still didn’t know what had happened to his wife and daughter. It had been hours since he’d sent his two grad students to check on them.

  Changing the subject, he asked, “How are you two doing out there?”

  Elizabeth said, “Except for some wild dogs, just fine.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  JANUARY 13

  2:15 A.M.

  PRESIDENT NATHAN ROSS HAD FELT THE tremor as he sat reading in a wing chair on the second floor of the White House. He was trying to slog through a CIA report on Cuba, something he’d put off for days. It was hard going, dense with statistics and pro-and-con recommendations on resuming diplomatic relations with Castro. Ross was starting to drift off to sleep. A sudden strong shaking snapped him awake. The windows in the doors that opened onto the Truman Balcony rattled in their frames. Alarms and warning bells started going off throughout the White House.