En Route to St. Louis, Missouri—March 28, 1964
As Otto Nuttli knew so well, the great quake which had just hit Alaska with such devastating force would further imperil the safety of the middle and eastern United States. That seemed a strange result, but he knew it would be inevitable. The national focus on Alaska’s agony would reinforce the mistaken idea that damaging earthquakes occurred only west of the Rockies.
The seismology professor from St. Louis University had spent much of his career studying what lay beneath the surface of the eastern part of the nation, from Colorado to the Atlantic coast. He knew, as did most geologists, that the thousands of feet of sedimentary rock layers deposited over millions of years at the bottom of ancient oceans which once covered what had become North America were now the heartland of the country, from eastern Colorado to the Appalachians. He also knew that below those layers—forever hidden from easy observation—was the bedrock of the North American continent (also called the North American craton). All that was standard knowledge, but few people understood that those hundreds of thousands of square miles of bedrock forming the foundation of the United States undoubtedly held many significant faults, invisible beneath the wheat fields of Kansas and rolling hills of Kentucky and the urban sprawl of the industrial East. Yet these were faults which could easily be capable of producing unexpected, major earthquakes.
No one knew—no one could know—where the faults were beneath the eastern or midwestern United States until future technological breakthroughs provided ways to “look” beneath the surface. Any particular city in the nation might be sitting on an ancient fault under incredible pressure and close to the limits of endurance. Nuttli had been warning for years that if such a breaking point were reached in an unknown buried fault, the resulting snap could send an unexpected cataclysm of seismic waves slamming into cities that were totally unprepared to deal with major earthquakes.
And of course, as Otto Nuttli had come to realize, the ground beneath the eastern two-thirds of the nation had one very special, very dangerous characteristic which the West Coast didn’t share: It could transmit seismic waves for hundreds and even thousands of miles with terribly damaging efficiency.
There were many ways to illustrate the point. A catastrophic 8.5 magnitude quake in the Los Angeles area which could do sixty billion dollars of damage to L.A., for instance, might scarcely bobble San Francisco nearly four hundred miles to the north because the convoluted folds and differences in the geologic structure of the landscape in California (and everywhere west of the Rockies) absorb too much of the seismic energy, attenuating—or lessening—the seismic waves with increasing distance.
But the eastern two-thirds of the nation has no such built-in protection. Place the epicenter of the same quake near St. Louis, and the surrounding landscape of the Midwest and the eastern seaboard will transmit the seismic energy with a hundred times greater efficiency, causing monstrous levels of damage and the potential for thousands of deaths in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and even Washington, New York, and Boston in addition to the horrific destruction it would cause in St. Louis. Therefore, a smaller earthquake of, for instance, only 7.0 magnitude could cause distant widespread damage the equal of which would require an 8.0 magnitude great quake in California.
Otto Nuttli knew that even fellow seismologists were hard to convince of the heightened dangers east of the Rockies, but the entire Midwest and East act like a solid, continuous slab of material when shaken. Strike it hard or shake it back and forth, and the waves will travel faithfully from one end to the other. Masonry buildings anywhere in the path of such waves could collapse, dams could break or liquefy, and high-rise buildings in distant cities could fall.
Dr. Nuttli knew he was developing into a bit of a Cassandra (as one local newsman would label him), but, damn it, these things were real and threatening.
“Okay, but what do we do about it? Abandon the East Coast and the Midwest on mere speculation that there might be a fault which might cause an earthquake someday?”
It was a typical question, almost always asked by someone who did not realize that the danger to the eastern two-thirds of the country came from almost total lack of preparation, as well as of understanding. Few, if any, of the communities east of the Rockies had building codes which gave the slightest consideration to the possibility of earthquakes. In fact, few, if any, of those municipalities and states had ever seriously considered looking into the potential seismic hazards in their areas—hazards which begged questions of intelligent land use planning and zoning. There was little or no official concern over buildings placed on saturated, unconsolidated soils that could liquefy if shaken, because they never expected them to be shaken. Almost none of the city fathers or county commissioners east of Denver realized the extreme vulnerability of unreinforced masonry buildings common throughout the Midwest and East, or the potential vulnerability of skyscrapers built with little or no thought to seismic resistance engineering. And, of course, the idea that local governments might need coherent rescue and recovery plans to guide them in case a damaging earthquake did occur was laughable. Dangerous earthquakes, you see, just don’t happen east of the Rockies. Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, and fires, yes. But not earthquakes.
Modern-day New York City, for instance, has never been devastated by a major earthquake.1 Neither has Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., or Chicago. Therefore, none of them ever will be. That, as Professor Nuttli knew, had always been the popular perception—and the problem.
However, if the land beneath any of those cities had undulated with catastrophic seismic waves in the recent geologic past—five hundred or a thousand years ago—we would not know about it. And wherever such quakes have occurred once, they may occur again, violently shaking landscapes that once held only forests and grassy plains, but that now hold tens of thousands of buildings and residences, bridges, roads, sewers, pipelines, water mains, and a bewildering maze of the physical works of man—almost none of it engineered to survive severe earth shaking. There was a basic truth that Nuttli was determined to keep hammering into his students and anyone else who would listen: For any particular spot in the nation, the fact that we don’t know of a history of past earthquakes must not be interpreted as evidence that no earthquake threat exists.
And, in fact, for the eastern United States, there is a recorded history of earthquakes.
In 1727 the New World colonists in New England were shaken by a significant quake. Then again, shortly before dawn on the frigid morning of November 18, 1755 (seventeen days after Lisbon, Portugal, was leveled by a catastrophic earthquake), Boston and the entire eastern seaboard from South Carolina to Nova Scotia were rattled by a series of sharp tremors. Fifteen hundred chimneys were toppled, gables fell from brick houses, mantels and heavy wooden furniture crashed into floors, the famous gilded cricket atop Faneuil Hall’s weather vane in Boston snapped off, and the inhabitants of the eastern seaboard were shaken to the depths of their being. A one-thousand-foot-long fissure opened in Newington, New Hampshire; cracks opened elsewhere near Massachusetts Bay, spewing dust and sand; and people spoke of seeing the landscape covered with waves as if it were the surface of the sea. Within the dour and dark philosophies of Calvinist New England, the earthquakes gave preachers the fuel for their fiery verbal indictments of the human misdeeds and wickedness which surely had called down the displeasure of the Almighty in the form of shaking ground. Prayer and fasting, frenetic church attendance, and pulpit pounding marked the following months, but did nothing to explain the geophysical causes of the quakes.2
Then, more than a hundred years later, in August 1886, Charleston, South Carolina, was badly mauled by a massive quake which probably approached a magnitude of 7.5 on the Richter magnitude scale.3 But no one yet knew what had caused either seismic event—or whether such things would occur again anytime soon. Certainly no catastrophic East Coast earthquakes had diverted anyone’s atten
tion from California after 1886, with the 1906 San Francisco quake seemingly a confirmation that the problem was entirely a western phenomenon. Nuttli knew the reaction to expect from the Alaska quake. It would provide misguided confirmation to the smug and the unconcerned that only the earth beneath Californians and Alaskans was not to be trusted.
Watching his fellow scientists in a grand state of excitement in Seattle brought such ironies to mind. Of course, he shared that excitement, too: The Alaska disaster was a major scientific opportunity, and he could hardly wait to get back to the university’s seismological observatory to look at the first seismogram tracings to get a feel for the magnitude of the event. The quake would undoubtedly teach them much, and they certainly had a lot to learn.
Otto Nuttli sat in a window seat of the Boeing 707 lifting off from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport and bound for his home in St. Louis and watched the magnificent image of Mount Rainier swim into view, one of the crown jewels of the world’s stratovolcanoes, and merely sleeping at that. Rainier was listed as dormant and considered highly subject to future eruption, as was its sister volcano, the beautiful Mount St. Helens, visible now just to the south.
The beauty of this region was almost jarring. Through the windows on the left side of the cabin he could see Mount Baker, another snowcapped, dormant volcano just inside the Washington line to the south of British Columbia. Back to the right side—the south view—beyond Rainier and east of St. Helens sat Mount Adams, and to the south of those two the sharp, snowcapped pinnacle of Mount Hood jabbed the sky east of Portland, Oregon. Several other major stratovolcanos of this group, including Crater Lake in southern Oregon and Mounts Shasta and Lassen in Northern California, formed a coherent line of volcanic peaks marching down the northwestern coast. All of them were set back a hundred miles or so from the seashore, providing mute testimony to the forces and the processes that push molten rock up from depths fifty miles below to form such magnificent—and geologically temporary—sentinels.
But what, exactly, was that process? Fellow earth scientists within a developing, separate subdiscipline known as volcanology were scratching their collective heads over that question. This straight, north-south rampart of volcanoes was stark evidence of some specific planetary process at work. As with the other volcanoes around the Pacific basin which joined the American volcanoes in forming the so-called Pacific Rim of Fire, the process was not unique to the Pacific Northwest—just unexplained. When it was finally discovered, knowledge of that geologic mechanism would probably spur great advances in seismology as well. There were some intriguing new theories, Nuttli knew, and some people out there who wanted to resurrect a now-discredited idea more than forty years old called continental drift. But there were sure to be years of hard work and (they hoped) exciting discoveries ahead before they really knew.
As the jetliner cruised east, gaining altitude steadily, leaving the Cascade Mountains and the Cascade volcanoes behind, the convoluted geology of the western United States began to unfold steadily below. At speeds and altitudes like this, the Boeing was as much a flying geology lab as a means of conveyance. The erosional deltas of mountain streams, the sudden upthrust of a range of mountains, or the grand sculpturing of the Columbia River flowing steadily through the canyons it had carved were spread out in living color. The geologic processes which were so hard to interpret at times at ground level were clear and obvious from thirty-five thousand feet.
It would be nice if seismologic facts could be seen as clearly. It was incredible what could be learned from a seismograph tracing—carefully comparing the vertical, north-south, or the east-west tracings of the seismograph stylus and determining which were P waves, which were S waves, when they arrived, and from which distance they had come. It was similar to reading a specialized language, but the process was one of interpretation, mathematically and logically.
Again that brought Nuttli’s thoughts to the eastern seaboard. California could see its faults. Missouri seismologists could only look at the ink lines on the seismograph drums and guess what was down there.
Nuttli was more of an observational seismologist and academician. He left the fieldwork to others, such as the cadres from various universities and the USGS who were gathering portable seismographs and field notebooks and getting ready to race north to Alaska even as he flew east. There was much to be learned from reading the various seismograms they would record of the aftershocks which were still occurring almost hourly beneath Alaska, but Otto Nuttli had classes to teach back in St. Louis.
Nuttli’s academic home, St. Louis University, had come rather naturally to a position of prominence in geophysics and seismology. As a Jesuit school, it joined several others around the nation as principal academic centers for earthquake research. There were many Jesuit fathers who had been deeply involved in the field over the decades, leading to the joke that in fact, seismology was a Jesuit science because only Jesuit priests had the patience and the time to tend basement seismographs and interpret miles of seismogram data.
But Otto Nuttli was not a priest. He was a professor and researcher who had been spending more and more time in recent years on the questions of seismic risk to the central United States. It was an area of increasing worry, especially when Nuttli thought back to the granddaddy of all American earthquakes—the most awesome, powerful, and frightening seismic energy release ever recorded on the North American continent. It was an earthquake most Americans knew absolutely nothing about, yet it was possibly the most important earthquake in American history.
A series of massive tremors had rocked the western fringes of a young nation, releasing seismic energy which had reached every city, killing some, frightening many. It was a monstrous release of tectonic forces of unknown origin, which had exploded beneath the bed of the Mississippi River halfway between the young settlements of St. Louis and Memphis, near a tiny, dying town that one promoter had planned to make the capital city of Spanish America: New Madrid, in the Louisiana Territory. Somewhere beneath the alluvial muds of the great river in an area geologically known as the Mississippi Embayment, for some reason, and at great depth, something snapped on a frigid morning in December in the year 1811.
Chapter 10
Louisiana Territory—1811
With St. Louis getting colder and winter definitely on its way, John Bradbury had been anxious to start his journey to New Orleans. The previous two years of exploring the Missouri River’s upper limits all the way to its headwaters in the frontier fringes of an unknown land had left the Scottish naturalist exhilarated but exhausted. It had also left him frustrated with a nagging fever and confinement to bed for several months in the small frontier town. St. Louis wasn’t much in 1811, but it was at least a pocket of civilization, tucked conveniently near the confluence of the Missouri and the mammoth river named Mississippi. It had served well as his jumping-off point—his outpost in the New World. Now, however, it was time to go.
The expedition of Lewis and Clark had opened the way into the fascinating interior of the North American continent just five years before, and although Bradbury had not traveled nearly as far to the west as that expedition, he had walked on land and crossed streams no white man had ever seen before. Many brave souls were setting out each year from St. Louis, some with visions of empire in their heads, such as Zebulon M. Pike with his recent discovery of a wall of mountains several months journey to the west; others were spurred only by the desire for adventure or profit, or both. The Missouri River (also known as the Big Muddy) ran heavy each spring with flatboats and canoes carrying French trappers, American explorers, and many others westward into the unknown.
For Bradbury, riches were measured in discovery. New plants abounded in this land; he had samples of thousands of specimens, which had preceded him down the Mississippi to New Orleans, bound eventually for Liverpool and home. It would take years to study all he had collected—provided the samples made the journey intact.1
The shipment had left in early November, shortly after B
radbury began feeling well again, and now he, too, was on his way south, signing on as temporary master of a commercial flatboat laden with thirty thousand pounds of lead consigned for delivery in New Orleans. With more than a week on the river behind them, John Bradbury and his crew already had passed Island Number Ten, more than a hundred miles south of St. Louis.2
Bradbury’s tiny entourage formed an interesting cross section of humanity: four Creole oarsmen, a patron (crew boss or bosun) by the name of Joseph Morin, and a fellow of slightly greater refinement named John Bridge, who also hailed from England but was apparently on a rather aimless pursuit of his fortune.
If the crew was strange to Bradbury, he was stranger still to the crew. Two years of plunging into his work in thickets, swamps, forests, or mud flats to get the specimens he sought had given a routine and a rhythm to his single-minded pursuit of nature. His zeal constantly seemed to startle the others. He thought nothing of cajoling the patron into landing the boat at strange, tangled places along the river, jumping into the water and disappearing for protracted periods in the most inhospitable mess of vegetation, returning hours later with nothing more than a handful of “seedpods and leaves.” The energetic botanist would climb aboard, filthy and mud-caked, smiling through a sweat-stained face which always seemed ruddy and sunburned, and then discourse for hours more on technical matters beyond the grasp (or, it can be surmised, the interests) of the crew.
Even after a day of such antics, Bradbury would spend half the night carefully entering observations in his journal or plotting the course of a comet the men had been watching with apprehension in the northern sky. While he scribbled notes about the comet, they “crossed themselves and offered a pinch of tobacco to the river.”3
John Bradbury’s flatboat and crew had reached the Kentucky Bend section of the Mississippi by the afternoon of December 14, 1811, stopping for the night at the small riverfront town of New Madrid (pronounced Mad’-rid, unlike the Spanish capital), a confused and tenuous little community that had suddenly found itself a part of the United States just eight years before.
On Shaky Ground Page 14