The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

by Amy Stewart

  The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors 30 to 90 seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.

  Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, canisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

  Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that 75 percent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than 3,000 of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, 15 of the 17 bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.

  Certain disasters stem from many small problems conspiring to cause one very large problem. For want of a nail, the war was lost; for 15 independently insignificant errors, the jetliner was lost. Subduction-zone earthquakes operate on the opposite principle: one enormous problem causes many other enormous problems. The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region—up to 30,000 of them in Seattle alone, the city’s emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen percent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including 17 daycare centers and the homes of some 34,500 people. So is Oregon’s critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of Portland through which flows 90 percent of the state’s liquid fuel and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas terminals. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

  Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the 71,000 people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins. They will be notified to do so only by the earthquake itself—“a vibrate-alert system,” Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, jokes—and they are urged to leave on foot, since the earthquake will render roads impassable. Depending on location, they will have between 10 and 30 minutes to get out. That timeline does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. “When that tsunami is coming, you run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC), says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.”

  The time to save people from a tsunami is before it happens, but the region has not yet taken serious steps toward doing so. Hotels and businesses are not required to post evacuation routes or to provide employees with evacuation training. In Oregon, it has been illegal since 1995 to build hospitals, schools, firehouses, and police stations in the inundation zone, but those which are already in it can stay, and any other new construction is permissible: energy facilities, hotels, retirement homes. In those cases, builders are required only to consult with DOGAMI about evacuation plans. “So you come in and sit down,” Ian Madin says. “And I say, ‘That’s a stupid idea.’ And you say, ‘Thanks. Now we’ve consulted.’”

  These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out. Twenty-two percent of Oregon’s coastal population is 65 or older. Twenty-nine percent of the state’s population is disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties. “We can’t save them,” Kevin Cupples says. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly.’ No. We won’t.” Nor will anyone save the tourists. Washington State Park properties within the inundation zone see an average of 17,029 guests a day. Madin estimates that up to 150,000 people visit Oregon’s beaches on summer weekends. “Most of them won’t have a clue as to how to evacuate,” he says. “And the beaches are the hardest place to evacuate from.”

  Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one. A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from 20 feet to more than 100 feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.

  To see the full scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you would need to be in the International Space Station. The inundation zone will be scoured of structures from California to Canada. The earthquake will have wrought its worst havoc west of the Cascades but caused damage as far away as Sacramento, California—as distant from the worst-hit areas as Fort Wayne, Indiana, is from New York. FEMA expects to coordinate search-and-rescue operations across 100,000 square miles and in the waters off 453 miles of coastline. As for casualties: the figures I cited earlier—27,000 injured, almost 13,000 dead—are based on the agency’s official planni
ng scenario, which has the earthquake striking at 9:41 a.m. on February 6. If, instead, it strikes in the summer, when the beaches are full, those numbers could be off by a horrifying margin.

  Wineglasses, antique vases, Humpty Dumpty, hip bones, hearts: what breaks quickly generally mends slowly, if at all. OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between 1 and 3 months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, 6 months to a year to restore major highways, and 18 months to restore health-care facilities. On the coast, those numbers go up. Whoever chooses or has no choice but to stay there will spend 3 to 6 months without electricity, one to three years without drinking water and sewage systems, and three or more years without hospitals. Those estimates do not apply to the tsunami-inundation zone, which will remain all but uninhabitable for years.

  How much all this will cost is anyone’s guess; FEMA puts every number on its relief-and-recovery plan except a price. But whatever the ultimate figure—and even though U.S. taxpayers will cover 75 to 100 percent of the damage, as happens in declared disasters—the economy of the Pacific Northwest will collapse. Crippled by a lack of basic services, businesses will fail or move away. Many residents will flee as well. OSSPAC predicts a mass-displacement event and a long-term population downturn. Chris Goldfinger didn’t want to be there when it happened. But by many metrics, it will be as bad or worse to be there afterward.

  On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of 3 score years and 10. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

  This problem is bidirectional. The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s San Andreas, while, in neighboring theaters, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.

  That problem is not specific to earthquakes, of course. The Cascadia situation, a calamity in its own right, is also a parable for this age of ecological reckoning, and the questions it raises are ones that we all now face. How should a society respond to a looming crisis of uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions? How can it begin to right itself when its entire infrastructure and culture developed in a way that leaves it profoundly vulnerable to natural disaster?

  The last person I met with in the Pacific Northwest was Doug Dougherty, the superintendent of schools for Seaside, which lies almost entirely within the tsunami-inundation zone. Of the four schools that Dougherty oversees, with a total student population of 1,600, one is relatively safe. The others sit 5 to 15 feet above sea level. When the tsunami comes, they will be as much as 45 feet below it.

  In 2009, Dougherty told me, he found some land for sale outside the inundation zone, and proposed building a new K–12 campus there. Four years later, to foot the $128 million bill, the district put up a bond measure. The tax increase for residents amounted to $2.16 per $1,000 of property value. The measure failed by 62 percent. Dougherty tried seeking help from Oregon’s congressional delegation but came up empty. The state makes money available for seismic upgrades, but buildings within the inundation zone cannot apply. At present, all Dougherty can do is make sure that his students know how to evacuate.

  Some of them, however, will not be able to do so. At an elementary school in the community of Gearhart, the children will be trapped. “They can’t make it out from that school,” Dougherty said. “They have no place to go.” On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a wide, roadless bog. When the tsunami comes, the only place to go in Gearhart is a small ridge just behind the school. At its tallest, it is 45 feet high—lower than the expected wave in a full-margin earthquake. For now, the route to the ridge is marked by signs that say TEMPORARY TSUNAMI ASSEMBLY AREA. I asked Dougherty about the state’s long-range plan. “There is no long-range plan,” he said.

  Dougherty’s office is deep inside the inundation zone, a few blocks from the beach. All day long, just out of sight, the ocean rises up and collapses, spilling foamy overlapping ovals onto the shore. Eighty miles farther out, 10,000 feet below the surface of the sea, the hand of a geological clock is somewhere in its slow sweep. All across the region, seismologists are looking at their watches, wondering how long we have, and what we will do, before geological time catches up to our own.

  GAURAV RAJ TELHAN

  Begin Cutting

  FROM Virginia Quarterly Review

  There exists an allegiance between the dead and the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature.

  —Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead

  MONSTERS. The label was affixed to a display case that housed a collection of glass jars. Sealed with a rusted screw-top lid or damp wooden cork, they contained malformed fetuses preserved in fluid. The term, seemingly a cruel joke, was part of an outmoded medical lexicon and described a fetus with gross congenital anomalies. Shelves of these specimens lined the passageway at the south entrance of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s anatomy laboratory, displayed safely behind glass that spanned the height of the walls. Like many students before me, I passed by this grisly shrine during the first week of medical school and saw my own uneasy reflection in the glare of light against glass.

  Taped to the double doors that led into the laboratory was a list of cadaver assignments by table number and cause of death: respiratory arrest, myocardial infarction, aortic aneurysm, pulmonary embolism, cerebrovascular accident. My cadaver lay at table number 10. Cause of death? Multi-infarct dementia. Death, that is to say, by madness.

  Past the doors, the white cinder-block walls of the lab were lined with posters and diagrams portraying the intricate network of nerves, muscles, and blood vessels in the human body. In one corner, the chalk-white bones of a human skeleton hung from a metal frame. In another corner was a large biohazard bin that could hold several hundred pounds of dissected cadaver waste—about five bodies’ worth. Everywhere in the bleached walls of the laboratory—the sterile linoleum flooring, the burnished metal of dissection tables, the zippered white bags used to veil the dead, the gleaming instruments used to cut them open—I saw the landscape of a story into which I was being written.

  My lab partners and I put on our full-body aprons and white latex gloves, then approached the table that held our cadaver, cocooned still in its polyurethane casing. I leaned and gripped the table’s lip to steady my trembling hands. Touching the table seemed to suggest that I was willing to unzip the body bag. I looked around and saw that other groups had already unwrapped their cadavers and begun the necessary shaving and cleaning of the body. Everyone at table 10 was anxious to begin, so I fumbled for the zipper at the rostral end of the bag, where the head lies, and pulled.

  The bag opened, revealing a woman’s body: anonymous, feeble, and atrophied, in its eighth or ninth decade. Staring at the table, I felt an uncomfortable awareness of my own body’s temporality, and to distract myself I thought of the 16th-century French poets who practiced the art of blason, intimately cataloging the parts of a woman’s bo
dy in verse. I tried to put myself in their position, intent on keeping a mental inventory of the cadaver’s pieces.

  First her name: Stella, Italian for “star.” My lab partner offered the appellation, elevating the frail body skyward. Her hair was next, wispy and uneven, absent in patches, her scalp translucent with blue-green vessels snaking just beneath skin. Several moles and polyps peppered her pallid brow. Her skin was desiccated; her face bore a stony countenance, like that of a mountain gradually eroding. Her cheekbones jutted out at angles. Her lips were deeply fissured, enough to reveal the yellow teeth behind them. She smelled of formaldehyde. Her eyelids, not entirely shut, revealed the green of her irises, afloat in a white scleral sea.

  It didn’t take long to realize that this distraction wasn’t going to work.

  Twelve years have passed since that first day in the anatomy lab, and the image of that anonymous woman beneath the polyurethane veil still grips me. It lingered with me long after her body had been dissected and discarded. To unburden myself, I tried to get to know her better. Was she a willing donor? A stranger with no final resting ground? Was she a practical woman? An idealist? Did she die alone?

  To begin piecing my answers together, I borrowed a page from negative theology—the logic used by religious scholars to describe God in terms of what she is not. It was my own via negativa.