8.4

by Peter Hernon

  Atkins looked up and saw the helicopter hovering over the roof of the building. Leaning out the cargo door with a rifle, the crew chief was covering them.

  Atkins waved to him.

  Elizabeth had the door open. He jumped in behind her and slammed it shut.

  OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY

  OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE

  JANUARY 14

  9:25 A.M.

  THE FIRES HAD BEEN BROUGHT UNDER CONTROL OR extinguished at the ORNL’s Y-12 plant. Engineering teams were out inspecting the damage, trying to determine which buildings had to be demolished. It was dangerous work because of the frequent, strong aftershocks. A bad one killed two engineers when a steel I-beam fell as they tried to check out the “Mouse House.” The eight-story building contained the biology division and got its name from the 125,000 mice kept there as laboratory animals.

  Fred Booker scoped out the damage through a pair of powerful Zeiss binoculars. He stood on the deck of his home in the hills that overlooked the plant. Except for losing electricity and having a couple of large windows broken, his tightly constructed, well-anchored A-frame had come through the quake virtually unscathed. Booker got his water from a well operated by a gas-powered pump: he also had an ample stock of canned foods. And Jack Daniel’s. He was in fairly good shape to sit things out.

  Booker planned to go back to Y-12 later in the day and offer whatever help he could.

  Meanwhile, he had two houseguests—Len Miller and Ed Graves, the young geophysicists he’d been working with in the Shock Wave Laboratory before the quake. They lived in Knoxville, forty miles to the east; Booker had put them up when they were unable to get home.

  Both were worried about the flurry of aftershocks.

  “There’s still a hell of a lot of strain energy in the ground,” Miller said.

  “It’s hard to figure,” said Graves. He’d borrowed one of Booker’s jackets and was standing on the deck in the bright winter sunlight. “Mid-plate quakes like these are damned near impossible to understand. I keep asking myself if something in the lower crust is putting stress on the faults.”

  “My guess is it’s a hotspot,” Miller said. Hotspots were well known to geophysicists. Born deep in the earth’s mantle, the layer between the crust and core, they were thermal plumes, gigantic bubbles of molten rock that rose from two thousand miles underground. As much as a thousand miles across and often shaped like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast, hotspots played a vital role in keeping the planet from turning into a chunk of space ice.

  Graves and Miller likened the earth to a boiling pot of oatmeal. Percolating in a circular convection, it kept pulling heat and hot rock from great depths to the surface, then back down again.

  It was their work in this area that prompted their heat studies at the Shock Wave Lab. These slowly rising hotspots helped create volcanoes. And Miller had long believed they could also cause enough deformity in the crust to trigger earthquakes at depths of well over four hundred miles.

  Booker wasn’t paying much attention to the discussion. Then Graves casually mentioned how inactive faults could be brought to life by a process called “lubrication.” He likened it to loosening a stuck door hinge with a couple squirts of oil; by reducing friction within the locked fault, you could facilitate motion.

  Fascinated, Booker put down his binoculars and listened.

  “It’s long been thought mineral fluids or water trapped in a fault could lubricate it enough to trigger an earthquake,” said Graves. “They proved it out in Colorado back in the sixties.” He described how a series of small earthquakes had rocked Denver, an area that had had virtually no seismic activity. During a nine-month period, more than seven hundred small quakes were recorded; then they mysteriously stopped for an entire year. The lull was followed by another outbreak. Eventually, geologists discovered that the Army was injecting contaminated water from weapons production at its Rocky Mountain arsenal deep into the ground.

  “They were using bore holes about twelve thousand feet deep,” Graves said. “There was a perfect correlation between the quakes and the injections.”

  Miller said, “Remember that USGS experiment in western Colorado? They went out to the oil fields around Rangely and pumped water into some of the wells at high pressure. Guess what? They started getting earthquakes. They could turn them on or off whenever they wanted just by regulating the injections. Turn on the faucet, you get quakes. Turn it off, they stop.”

  Graves said, “We had some lively seminar discussions out at Cal Tech about whether you could short-circuit or prevent a big earthquake from happening by setting off a series of smaller quakes. The theory was that if you relieved enough stress building on a fault maybe you could defuse a big one.”

  Following the conversation intently, Booker asked, “Could you use a technique like that to relieve the rock stress in this area?”

  “Watch it, Ed,” Miller said. “He’s got that wild look in his eyes.”

  Booker’s eyes were a dead giveaway whenever he was excited about a concept or an idea. They gave off a burning intensity as they did now. Booker was impatient. He couldn’t wait to rush his two guests back into his spacious living room, so he could ask more questions. He actually nudged them along with light taps on their shoulders.

  The room was book-lined and decorated with Navaho blankets and Zuni pottery collected during Booker’s long years at the Nevada Test Site.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Ed,” Booker said. He’d begun pacing the length of the room, hands in his pockets, head down. He could hardly stand still. “Could you use the technique you were just talking about to relieve rock stress?”

  Graves shook his head. “Even if you were sure it might work—and that’s a huge if in such a geologically unstable area—it would take too long. You’d have to drill all those bore holes and figure out how to get tremendous amounts of water down into the fault at high pressure.”

  “You’d also have to decide where to trigger your control quake,” Miller said. “That would be incredibly complicated. And who’s to say you wouldn’t actually set off the very thing you were trying to prevent.”

  “But it would still take too long,” Graves insisted. “Granted, we don’t know how much time we’ve got until another big quake hits, if one hits. It might not happen for another two hundred years. But say it was imminent, tomorrow. It would take months, years, and a billion dollars to get enough deep holes bored. The advantage of doing the experiment at Rangely was they were able to use existing deep oil wells.”

  Booker had taken out a notebook and was furiously scribbling notes. He stood there a few moments working through a series of figures. Then he slapped the notebook against his leg and said, “Boys, I know a faster way.”

  MEMPHIS

  JANUARY 14

  9:30 A.M.

  THE POWER WAS OUT IN THE SPENCER BUILDING. Atkins and Elizabeth used flashlights as they groped their way down a pitch-dark hallway. The ground shook again, another aftershock. The building shuddered and swayed, but the base isolation system cushioned the impact. The walls didn’t buckle or collapse.

  “I’m glad to see the aftershocks are finally dying out,” Atkins said sarcastically. Their power and frequency continued to astound him. The ground remained incredibly active.

  The building, a modern structure with a handsome, pink granite facade, had escaped serious damage, but the interior was a mess. Desks, computer terminals, and file cabinets were overturned. A bank of security monitors lay shattered on the floor. Office partitions had been knocked over. Window glass littered the carpets.

  Atkins opened a door marked with a red exit light and they descended to the basement.

  “There it is,” Elizabeth said, playing her flashlight against the far wall. Two steel tables supported an impressive array of seismic instruments, all of them battery powered. There were two types of sensors, both state-of-the-art strong-motion sensing devices: an FBA-23 triaxial sensor and an FBA-11. The data was store
d digitally on tape and computer disk. It could easily be downloaded into a laptop.

  “Elizabeth, look here,” Atkins said. One of the devices was equipped with a GPS-synchronized clock. The amber “on” light was lit.

  “Yes!” he said, clenching his fists. “The GPS network must be back in operation.” If true, it was the best news he’d had in days. They could finally run critical calculations on how much the ground surface had moved during the quake. And, more important, if it was still moving. The amount of deformation would tell them a great deal about whether seismic energy was loading up again in the fault system.

  Atkins remembered that the building was also equipped with a GPS monitor. They climbed the stairwell and opened a door to the roof. The GPS antenna, a three-foot-high platform, was bolted to a corner. Its latitude and longitude positions were preset, so it could automatically lock on to the proper array of satellites. Electrical cables connected it to a receiver and modem. A battery and solar panel provided the power.

  Like the seismographs, the data was stored on disk. They could format it back at the university. The receiver control panel indicated it had been operational for nearly six hours.

  Elizabeth looked out at the city of Memphis as Atkins removed the data recorder. The roof offered an excellent view of the downtown district from the riverfront, extending far to the east. The devastation was much more immediate than when seen from the air. She could feel the heat from the fires, smell the smoke, taste it. Several buildings less than a block away were burning fiercely. One was a high-rise bank. Already big, the fire there was growing larger as a strong wind spread the flames from floor to floor.

  Elizabeth tried to count the fires, but gave it up. “No one ever expected this,” she said. The drone of fire engine sirens made it hard to talk without shouting. “We had some fires in Northridge and during the San Prieto quake, but nothing like this. It reminds me of Kobe.”

  The fire that had swept through the Japanese seaport in 1995 had almost reached conflagration status. A lot of the construction was wood, small frame houses that went up like dry hay. Memphis was built mainly of brick and masonry, especially in the downtown district. The buildings weren’t supposed to burn, but many of them were doing just that.

  Elizabeth was struck by the randomness of the fires. Some blocks were untouched. Others were raging infernos.

  “If I’m oriented right, the university’s roughly in that direction,” Atkins said, pointing toward the east with his hands folded. “We’ve got a nice walk ahead of us.”

  “How far?” Elizabeth asked.

  Atkins shook his head. “Three, maybe four miles.” Getting there wasn’t going to be easy. Not with so many streets blocked. They’d have to pick their way through the damage just as night was starting to fall.

  “This wind is really spreading the fire,” Atkins said. It worried him.

  Columns of flaming embers sucked skyward were spreading to the roofs of other buildings. To the south, toward Beale Street and the old cotton warehouse district, they were burning more fiercely. Atkins later learned many of the homes in South Memphis were made of wood. It was a poorer, older section of the city, dense with dilapidated, single- and two-story houses. The wind was sweeping burning embers and sparks from those fires across the entire downtown district.

  Atkins watched in amazement as a woman’s burning dress drifted by high in the sky, the sleeves flung wide.

  A tremendous explosion nearby rocked the building. A fireball curled into the sky behind them. A gas tank had blown up somewhere along the riverfront, a big one.

  Atkins didn’t like the way the fires were starting to ring them in.

  “We’re leaving,” he said. “Now.”

  FRANKFORT, KENTUCKY

  JANUARY 14

  10:15 A.M.

  DURING THE FIRST HOURS OF THE CRISIS, Governor Tad Parker had been strangely paralyzed, unable to decide what to do. That wasn’t like him. He prided himself on his ability to make quick decisions. It didn’t seem possible that only a day earlier, a lifetime ago, he’d been confidently trying to raise money to run for president.

  Parker was overwhelmed. His only decisive act was to order a National Guard helicopter to take Paul Weston and other staff members of the Seismic Safety Commission down to Memphis. He’d never liked Weston and remembered his calm assurances about Kentucky Dam when those cracks appeared in the walls after the first earthquake. He planned to revisit that subject with him later, but right now Weston was the most knowledgeable man in the state about earthquakes. More than anything, Parker needed information about what was happening in the ground. He hoped to hear from Weston soon.

  There’d been so many disasters—all of them piling up at once, each requiring immediate attention: the clouds of lethal gas that had killed a couple hundred people near the uranium enrichment plant at Paducah before the gas dissipated; the dam break; the continuous reports of casualties from every large city in the state.

  In those early hours Parker had fired his chief of disaster operations, a political hack who’d gotten the high-paying job solely because of his connections. Parker had gone to the disaster operations office in the state capitol building and found the man seated at his desk, drinking straight from a bottle of scotch. Parker’s bodyguard had to pull him off the man.

  They didn’t have enough shortwave radios and portable satellite dishes. And no one had thought what they would do if almost every large hospital in the state had to shut down because it was either destroyed or badly damaged.

  They couldn’t even get a reliable casualty count. Parker knew instinctively that the numbers were going to be horrendous. On the short drive from the governor’s mansion to the capitol, he’d counted eleven bodies himself. Lying on the side of the road and covered with blankets, they’d been removed from damaged buildings and homes.

  He ordered his driver to stop. An elderly man sat on the porch of his collapsed brick home, holding the body of his dead wife. Despite the cold, he wore a thin bathrobe. His face was bloody. Weeping softly, he clutched her to his chest as he rocked back and forth.

  “What am I going to do?” he sobbed, recognizing the governor, who sat down next to him and offered his condolences.

  It galvanized Parker, who’d been in mild shock ever since the quake. He stayed with the man for a couple of minutes, trying to comfort him. When the next crisis came, and it came soon, he was able to make decisions.

  A shortwave transmission came in from the director of the state prison at Eddyville, 180 miles south of Lexington. The quake had knocked down one of the dormitories, which dated to the turn of the century. Some of the crenellated walls had collapsed. Another prisoners’ building was badly damaged.

  “We’ve got a dangerous situation here, governor,” the warden said excitedly. “Most of the guard towers are down. We’ve got prisoners getting away. Half my people are dead or injured.”

  The man started to ramble.

  Parker shut him up.

  “I want you to do just what I tell you,” he said. “You march twenty men with shotguns into that mob and shoot over their heads. If that doesn’t work, open up again, and this time tell your people to shoot to kill. That ought to quiet them down until I can get some National Guard troops over there to help out. You got that, warden?”

  “Governor, I can’t do—”

  Shouting into the radio, Parker said, “I’m not going to lose control of that prison. I don’t care how many people you’ve got to shoot. You just carry out those orders. If you don’t, I’ll get somebody else up there who will.”

  MEMPHIS

  JANUARY 14

  1:35 P.M.

  ATKINS AND ELIZABETH WENT OUT A FIRE DOOR ON the side of the building and were soon on Exchange Avenue, heading east through downtown Memphis. For the next hour they took whatever unobstructed road or alley they could find. Sometimes they managed only half a block before they ran into a collapsed wall or building and had to change course.

  More peo
ple were out. Many had come from their homes in other parts of Memphis to try to rescue papers and documents from their downtown offices only to get trapped. Their stalled cars and vans added to the congestion and confusion. The streets were hopelessly jammed.

  The sound of sirens, exploding glass and the frequent crash of falling bricks made talking difficult. Atkins and Elizabeth often had to shout in gusting smoke that was getting thicker. For the first time, Atkins began to wonder if they were going to get clear of the flames.

  They were on Poplar Avenue. He vaguely remembered Walt Jacobs telling him that Poplar was one of the city’s main east-west arteries. They headed east but the smoke suddenly shifted direction and was in front of them again. Somehow, the fires had moved around them.

  Through drifting smoke they saw a yellow fire-pumper pulled to a curb. A team of firefighters stood next to it, pouring a single stream of water into what looked like a new building. Their hoses weren’t attached to hydrants. They were using the pumper’s water supply.

  Atkins knew what that meant. The quake had knocked out the city’s water mains. When their pumper ran dry, they’d have to pull back. It looked like the fire hadn’t taken hold yet in the three-story building. Thinking it could be saved, the firemen were sticking it out as long as possible.

  The building suddenly burst into flames. The fire blew out the windows and doors with a shuddering, explosive roar. A sheet of flame swept across the street.

  Atkins felt the heat from the blast. He lost sight of the firemen and pulled Elizabeth around a corner. They ran down another smoke-filled street. It was no good. The flames were ahead of them again. They turned up a street, then another, and realized they’d gone in a full circle. They were back at the exact spot where they’d first seen the firemen battling the fire.