On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

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  Praise for the Writing of John J. Nance

  “King of the modern-day aviation thriller.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Nance is a wonderful storyteller.” —Chicago Tribune

  Final Approach

  “A taut high-tech mystery that could have been written only by an airline industry insider.” —New York Times–bestselling author Stephen Coonts

  Scorpion Strike

  “Gripping.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  Phoenix Rising

  “Harrowing … Nance delivers suspense and smooth writing. A classy job.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Pandora’s Clock

  “A ticking time bomb of suspense.” —Chicago Tribune

  “A combination of The Hot Zone and Speed.” —USA Today

  Medusa’s Child

  “So compelling it’s tough to look away.” —People

  The Last Hostage

  “A thrilling ride … [Will] keep even the most experienced thriller addicts strapped into their seats for the whole flight.” —People

  Blackout

  “A high tension, white knuckle thriller … Joltingly scary.” —New York Post

  Turbulence

  “Mesmerizing in-flight details [and] a compelling cast of realistic characters … once again prove John J. Nance ‘the king of the modern-day aviation thriller’.” —Publishers Weekly

  Skyhook

  “Readers are in for death-defying plane rides, lively dialogue, and realistic characters who survive crises with courage and humor.” —Associated Press

  On Shaky Ground: America’s Earthquake Alert

  “Gripping! Breathlessly unrolls a succession of disasters.… If you want a literary equivalent of the quake experience, On Shaky Ground is the book for you.” —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  On Shaky Ground

  America’s Earthquake Alert

  John J. Nance

  To Harold Simmons

  Introduction

  Living on this planet can be hazardous to our health, because the structures we occupy on its surface are at constant risk from damaging earthquakes.

  Only in the last twenty years, however, have we really begun to understand the nature of this risk, and how widespread it is across North America. And only during the last decade have we realized that we do have the ability to minimize that risk, provided we also have the resolve to act quickly.

  Major earthquakes have shaken and savaged North America at various points from the East Coast to the West throughout its geologic history. But to protect ourselves from future episodes, we have to know where those previous quakes occurred. The earthquakes that rocked the East Coast from Boston to Charleston during the previous three hundred years are well documented, as are the three great quakes that shook the Midwest at the start of the nineteenth century. But there were uncounted earthquakes that came before the arrival of the colonists—previously unknown seismic convulsions now traceable through tantalizing shreds of telltale evidence left behind in layers of muds and silts and soil. These are records of ancient upheavals in maritime marshes and silent streams—the harbingers of future earth shaking in unsuspecting realms.

  We know now that where major earthquakes have occurred before, such quakes will probably occur again, ripping and roiling the surface of the earth where once stood only the prairies and forests of primeval America, landscapes now supporting delicate dwellings and workplaces, the vulnerable dams and marginally protected nuclear power and petroleum storage facilities, and the fragile web of vital utility networks carrying a bewildering variety of water, gas, communications, and transportation lifelines as they weave through the fabric of America.

  We have only begun to uncover those seismic histories and decipher their meanings, and the story of that process alone is fascinating. But equally important is the realization that these new discoveries dictate immediate action, from a Saturday afternoon of family earthquake preparation in our homes to the need for a natural hazards insurance program and the funding of much more scientific research along with regional programs to teach hazard mitigation techniques to people and communities alike.

  These are unsettling discoveries, focusing us for the first time on just how exposed we are as a people to massive, catastrophic earthquakes. Los Angeles, for example, is almost certain to be hit by a great earthquake in the next few decades, a monstrous repeat of an 1857 quake which this time around may kill ten thousand fellow Americans and cause sixty billion dollars of damage. The financial impact alone of such a cataclysm would affect virtually everyone in the nation.

  And by no means is this sort of threat limited to the West. The greatest known quake in the United States occurred along the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Memphis, and another such earthquake may occur again at any time. In fact, thirty-nine states in the United States, including Missouri, South Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, and even Texas—and all the great cities and citizens within them—live daily in the shadow of sudden destructive earth shaking. They live as well with the possibility of shattered lives and financial ruin which can occur when building codes are inadequate, earthquake insurance is unavailable, and hazard reduction programs at city and state level do not exist. We know, in other words, what steps to apply to live with earthquakes in far greater safety. The question is, Are we willing to take those steps before a great quake proves they are needed?

  The progress in the last twenty-five years in understanding earthquakes—the science of seismology and related fields—has been staggering. But progress in the last few years in applying that new knowledge to our buildings and houses and bridges and dams has been far too slow. What has saved Americans repeatedly in past major earthquakes is luck, but luck will not save us indefinitely.

  As usual in our vibrant, free society, it is up to us to decide whether to face the reality of the seismic threat and embrace the availability of the solutions or to continue to lie helpless before quakes which can flatten our houses, destroy our employers, damage our national economy and national defense, and wipe out the financial equity of a lifetime in a mere thirty seconds of ground shaking.

  What follows, then, is a dynamic human story of the great distance we have come, and the distance we have yet to travel.

  Chapter 1

  Neah Bay, Washington—1986

  He seemed terribly out of place—barely visible in the midst of a wet, verdant meadow—crouching suspiciously at the edge of the small tidal stream which meandered with picturesque abandon toward the waters of the Pacific Ocean less than a mile to the south.

  The visual richness around him was startling. The spruce-carpeted ridgeline to the east bordered the short, green valley that ran only a few feet above sea level from the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the north end to the ocean beaches on the south end, almost making an island of the highland mountain to the west. That lone mountain, covered with western red cedar and spruce and standing 1,395 feet above sea level, was the northwestern most piece of real estate in the continental United States: Cape Flattery.

  From the eye of a passing eagle, watching the solitary human through the hanging mists of a Pacific Northwest late afternoon, the meadow seemed a tranquil, peaceful setting. For uncounted afternoons it must have looked the same, the majesty of nature at its finest, accompanied by the gentle sounds of softly flowing stream water in the foreground, riding lightly over the basso profundo thunder of crashing surf and boiling sea-foam in the distance, in concert with the gentle patter of raindrops falling like an afterthought through the foggy air.

&n
bsp; The valley and the people of the Makah Indian tribe had coexisted in functional harmony for centuries, the patterns of daily human life molded to the imperatives of the seasons, blending into the backdrop of falling rains and flowing waters. But the actions of the lone figure at streamside were in contrast with those patterns—unusual, audacious, and unfamiliar. With short strokes of a camp shovel chopping into the dirt and sand of the embankment, Brian Atwater was obviously searching for something—a geological detective looking for evidence nature was suspected of hiding.

  Atwater looked around at the ghostly image of the tree-covered ridge to the west, barely visible through the steady rain which had been dampening his spirits and seeping through his rain gear for much of the day.

  He glanced back to the east, conscious of the rise in the landscape on that side—conscious that the area between the two sides had probably once contained the free-flowing waters of the Pacific Ocean, making Cape Flattery, to the west, a true island.

  He had expected that. He had expected to find some evidence that this meadow had evolved from an ocean inlet.

  But Atwater was not expecting what his shovel had just uncovered on the first series of thrusts: a black line—a flat layer—running horizontally through the sand and silt which formed the wall of the streambed.

  What on earth did it mean?

  There, several feet down from the top of the bank where the grasses and roots of the meadow above were anchoring a thin layer of humus—below several feet of loosely compacted gray sand with the remains of dead grass roots embedded here and there—the sand suddenly, abruptly rested on a layer of black peat.

  Brian stared at the layer at first, struggling to put it into perspective.

  “Okay, what do we have here?” The words were spoken to the riverbank, and to himself—a practiced, professional breakpoint between action and analysis.

  He began digging into the peat then with a knife, finding the buried stems of grass like plants killed long ago interlaced in the dark material. It looked, in fact, like the remains of a brackish-water marsh, perhaps from some previous century—a marsh which had been buried so quickly and deeply by sand that its soil had been preserved.

  But how could that be?

  If a great ocean wave—a tsunami—had overrun the ancient meadow, could giant waves or surging salt water have washed up that much sand to cover the area completely? Or could the entire marsh have suddenly dropped below sea level?

  One thing was indisputable: The layer of peat in front of him definitely existed, and that meant something catastrophic had happened in this beautiful place. But when?

  He poked at the peat some more, satisfied there would be enough material to send for analysis. Once a properly equipped lab had measured the amount of radioactive decay in the carbon, he would have a reasonably close idea of how long ago the marsh had died.

  Brian Atwater began digging again in earnest, spading away at an adjacent wall of the stream bank, standing on the narrow bank between water and dirt wall, exposing more of the black layer that had surprised him. His feet were protected from the water seeping around his knees by the hip waders he was wearing, while a knitted watch cap diverted much of the drizzle from his head. Even with the protection of a coarse wool sweater (a hand woven gift from his sister), the pervasive cold had distracted him.

  No longer, however, was he conscious of the chill in the air. This was far too intriguing.

  Atwater knew some of the theories, of course. That was why he had come to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery looking for a record of changes in the level of the land—evidence of how much it had risen or fallen relative to sea level over the centuries. He was aware of the work of a young seismologist in California, Dr. Tom Heaton, who along with several others had found some scary similarities between what was happening to the ocean floor off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, which did not seem to have a history of great, damaging earthquakes, and what was happening off the coasts of southern Japan and southern Chile, which did.

  Atwater knew that Heaton had developed a substantial amount of circumstantial, scientific evidence that the Pacific Northwest should be no different from those areas of Chile and Japan that had been rocked by earthquakes so great that they were capable of killing thousands of people and producing unbelievably huge tsunamis. Such quakes were the result of incredible planetary forces shoving the ocean floor (oceanic plates) into and beneath the equally thick plates of rock which formed the major continents. It was a process called subduction in which layers of rock, each one miles thick, were being shoved in opposite directions, snagging against each other for centuries at a time, and building up incredible pressure year by year as a result.

  Along the Pacific Northwest coast, the battle line between the tectonic plates was called the Cascadia subduction zone, and Tom Heaton had a growing suspicion that it was dangerous. If he was correct, the immense pressures which would inevitably build up between any snagged crustal plates as they strained to move past each other would eventually overcome the snags and release the energy, causing great, catastrophic earthquakes in the process.

  But Tom Heaton was hamstrung without hard evidence. While the last monstrous quake in southern Chile—one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history—had rocked the South American coast in 1960 killing fifty-seven hundred people, and southern Japan had been hit by quakes in 1944 and 1946, there was no recorded history of great earthquakes (with magnitudes above 8.0) in the Pacific Northwest from Vancouver, Canada, all the way south to the redwood forests of Northern California. If they had occurred in the Northwest, the last one must have been before white settlers arrived in the late 1700’s.

  Brian Atwater stopped his digging, momentarily unsure. What if this peat layer was not continuous? What if he couldn’t find it elsewhere—couldn’t validate what he was sure it had to represent: a suddenly deceased marsh from centuries past? That was always a possibility, but if the next few days of digging did find the same layer at different points, it would be time to head for the local post office in Neah Bay to send a postcard to Tom Heaton. He had never corresponded with Heaton before, but tempered by normal scientific caution, Brian was beginning to get excited.

  It was by chance he was there to begin with. In 1985 he had moved his family to Puget Sound to be closer to medical and therapeutic help for his young daughter Sarah, a Down’s syndrome child who had suffered brain damage from meningitis.

  The family home had been in San Francisco, California, a forty-minute train ride from Menlo Park, the locale of the western headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), for which Brian Atwater had worked as a geologist since 1973.

  But the San Francisco Bay area is an expensive place to live, and Sarah’s disabilities were proving difficult to combat—problems which did not escape the attention of Dr. Atwater’s USGS managers. They encouraged the young geologist to find a place where the best medical care would be available.

  That place was Seattle, which held the teaching hospital at the University of Washington, a Down’s syndrome specialty center. With great human caring and concern—and no small expense—the Geological Survey transferred Brian, his wife, Fran, and their daughters Sarah and Patricia to the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 1985, even though no one had any clear idea what projects the thirty-four-year-old geologist would work on once he settled there.

  The move helped, and the professional reception was gracious: The chairman of the university’s Geology Department gave Brian an office on campus almost immediately (a recognition of the value of having a USGS scientist in residence). It was a gesture that helped keep the workplace, their new home, and the hospital where little Sarah underwent frequent therapy, all within blocks of each other. And it was the best that could be made of a difficult situation.

  Even before leaving San Francisco, Brian Atwater had figured he could make himself professionally useful in his new Seattle posting by mapping poorly identified areas of seismic (earthquake) risk and seismic shaking ar
ound Puget Sound, a sort of mapping that was sorely needed.

  There was, however, an area of research which needed his skills even more—a project which could meld the fields of seismology and geology in search of answers to new and disturbing questions about the exposure of the Pacific Northwest to great earthquakes. It was a scientific need he knew little about—until he heard Tom Heaton address a Seattle seminar in October 1985.

  Heaton, a thirty-four-year-old seismologist Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, had come to speak to the group because he knew the possibility of great quakes in the Pacific Northwest couldn’t be ignored. If the enormous section of the ocean floor off the coasts of Washington and Oregon did produce great earthquakes, they held the frightening potential for damage and destruction and deaths to the people and structures of the Pacific Northwest on a scale never before imagined.

  Shaped roughly like a huge triangle with its hypotenuse running parallel to the coastline some eighty miles offshore, that particular part of the planetary crust along the northwest coast had been named the Juan de Fuca plate and it had some unusual characteristics. As all the so-called plates which make up the earth’s crust, it too was forever in motion. As seismologists like Heaton had come to understand, new lava was constantly coming up from the depths of the planet’s interior at the western boundaries of the plate as it moves approximately 2 centimeters per year toward the east. At the eastern edge, however, the plate meets the rather impressive obstacle of the North American continent—the North American plate—which at the same time is moving westward at the same steady speed of at least 2 centimeters per year, driven by the same sort of mid-ocean lava flows (known as crustal spreading) more than five thousand miles away in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The colossal collision between the plates has been going on in very slow motion for literally tens of millions of years, but that motion—as Heaton had patiently explained to so many—is the basic engine which created most mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes on earth.