On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

Suddenly here came the report from Dr. Press and his panel stating an urgent need for federal funding of new programs and seeming to bypass all the efforts of the engineering community. Press had spotlighted seismology, not engineering, as the savior science. The members of the National Academy of Engineers, for one, were not amused. The idea of earthquake “prediction” as a national goal was, to them, a completely incorrect focus, and they countered by preparing their own major report (eventually issued in 1969), a quality document which predictably relied on potential engineering solutions as the cure for 90 percent of whatever threats earthquakes might pose to civilization.6

  That, said many, is great for future buildings and those you can force into reconstruction, but it ignores the basic questions of what causes earthquakes, when and where they will occur, and what happens to the ground when they do. In addition, ran the reaction, how do we deal with older buildings which were constructed at a time when earthquake-resistant technology was in its infancy (or ignored completely)? What do we do with thousands of unreinforced masonry buildings in San Francisco, for instance, which will turn to lethal falling rubble with the next major quake? The most stringent engineering codes and standards for future construction will never touch that problem.

  In 1968 the survey’s director waded in bravely with an attempted compromise proposal that tried to put the problems into perspective, balancing the engineering goals against the predictive goals and research needs. But the director made a small, significant political and strategic mistake: He put a price tag on the project.7 As a result, the USGS report had nothing more than a temporary impact as interest in his compromise declined in direct inverse proportion to the dollars required to fund it.

  And there the matter sat—until 1969.

  Sometimes, as Bob Wallace had pointed out to many colleagues and visiting students, a galaxy of diverse individuals and interests ends up heading in the same direction, but unable to communicate and combine their efforts for one principal reason: the lack of a catalyst. In chemical terms, the explanation went, a catalyst is “a substance that [starts] a chemical reaction and enables it to proceed under milder conditions than otherwise possible,” but at the end, the catalyst itself is unchanged. In life, it is often a single dedicated and concerned individual who, through force of personality, intellect, and social skills, manages to weld a diverse group together and prod it on to achieving something as a group that never would have been realized as a gaggle.

  In 1969 such a person had emerged from extensive governmental work in the insurance industry to accomplish exactly that. Dr. Karl V. Steinbrugge had accepted appointment as chairman of a task force (within President Nixon’s Office of Science and Technology) that included such leading scientists as seismologist Dr. Clarence R. Allen of Caltech, and Bob Wallace’s close friend and classmate from the same institution, Dr. Richard Jahns, by then dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford.

  There were six other professional people from different disciplinary areas in the group as well, and under Steinbrugge’s leadership, they began to cross the lines of normal interdisciplinary defense systems to state both their mutual objectives and their individual professional concerns, moving toward the formulation of a list of things that needed to be accomplished by the nation regarding the subject of damaging earthquakes.8

  “The mission of this Task Force,” wrote Steinbrugge in his introduction, “… is to develop an appropriate national action program for the reduction of the human suffering and property damage attendant upon an earthquake.…”9

  But the rather brilliant move which pulled the final report (issued in 1970) out of the mire of internecine squabbles in the scientific and technical community and enabled it to become a catalyst for the beginnings of the nation’s first coherent move toward earthquake hazard mitigation, came in the organization of the report. In effect, the task force members avoided placing any one group’s interests in a higher priority than another. Instead, they developed a list of “High Priority Recommendations,” each of which was ranked according to whether the benefits to the public could be expected within five years (short term), between five to ten years (intermediate term), or in more than ten years (long term). By use of that technique, no one’s ox ended up gored, and interests as diverse as basic seismological research and engineering research found themselves admirably represented and recommended on the same page with such short-term “after-the-fact” elements of the equation as disaster response planning on the federal level.

  And, wisely, they did not mention money. Of course, the report dropped enough funding hints to create small earthquakes of its own, but there was no price tag attached, and thus no direct threat to the various interests around the country that guarded their percentages of the research pie like a hungry mother hawk.

  In the end, the effectiveness of the report was not only an accolade to (and an affirmation of) Karl Steinbrugge’s tour de force performance in the deft social management of the diverse people and interests involved, it was also an affirmation of worth for the principles that Bob Wallace had been advocating so quietly yet so effectively from his office at Menlo Park—always seeking to be a mediator, and always seeking to increase the degree of communication across scientific lines.

  In many ways, Wallace’s role as a pivotal catalyst in the process of intellectual ferment would be of inestimable value, not only during the formative period following the Good Friday quake, but in his widespread influence on the young seismologists and geologists whose maturation as major forces in earth science in so many cases included exposure to the teachings and melding influences of Dr. Wallace.

  As the veteran geologist checked the following week’s appointments on the few pages remaining in his 1970 calendar, getting ready to head home from his Menlo Park office, the larger national stage outside had been set for massive—seismic, if you will—change in the landscape of America’s (and the world’s) ability to perceive and cope with dangerous earthquakes. But even with the distance traveled—even with the release of the Steinbrugge task force’s report, renewed interest in Washington, and growing excitement in the earth sciences community—the body politic and its representatives would need much more convincing.

  And, as always, the forces of nature were preparing to give the process another formidable push. The pressures building in the rocks four hundred miles south of Menlo Park would not wait for human initiative.

  Chapter 13

  Long Valley Caldera, California—February 1971

  The snows of winter, once melted on the eastern slopes of the majestic high Sierra Nevada mountains in central California, cascade and tumble as the freshest form of water down into myriad streams and rivulets, in constant motion through such beautiful areas as Mono Lake, Long Valley (near the resort town of Mammoth Lakes), and south through Crowley Lake into Bishop, dropping from seven thousand feet to four thousand feet in altitude southbound into the breathtaking Owens Valley. Funneled between the Sierras on one side and the White and Inyo mountains on the other, the crystal-clear waters pass over some of the most seriously disturbed, volcanically active, fault-ridden and earthquake-prone territory in the United States as they head for the water faucets of Los Angeles.

  Flowing out of the Owens Valley through the southern portion of a 338-mile-long pipeline-aqueduct system that starts at Mono Lake, the water flows inexorably across the main trace of the east-west Garlock Fault in the western margin of the Mojave Desert, across the San Andreas Fault within twenty-five miles of Fort Tejon (site of the great Fort Tejon quake in 1857), and approaches the northern foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, using simply the force of gravity to push the continuous flow up and over a low pass lying along the highway as it crosses the mountain ridge within the confines of gargantuan water pipes. On the other side, at the head of the San Fernando Valley, the water spills into the two reservoirs forming an important part of the water supply for the Los Angeles metropolitan area of 3.6 million people.

  In the surprisingly
warm predawn hours of Tuesday, February 9, 1971, 6.7 billion gallons of water diverted from the high Sierras lapped at the dam of the Lower Van Norman Reservoir, an earthen dam built in 1915—some 27.9 million tons of liquid ready for delivery to the maze of water mains in Los Angeles.

  And below the Lower Van Norman Dam—literally across the street from the foot of the huge dirt structure—lay a trusting segment of American suburbia. Twenty square miles of attractive middle American homes stretched toward L.A., homes which just before sunrise held some eighty thousand residents (many of them still asleep) living in a natural aquatic channel more than two miles wide and stretching some eight miles to the south.

  Charlie Richter had warned them.1 Many times during previous years he and other seismologists had pointed out that the exact mechanism driving the San Andreas Fault did not have to be understood for the seismological community to know that it was hazardous to the health of Los Angeles. Obviously there was slippage along the hundreds of miles spanned by the fault. Obviously the portions of the fault that had not slipped in many, many years were building up strain. And just as obviously, when that strain ultimately was released, the elastic rebound of the rocks on both sides (and for many miles below the surface of California) would send seismic waves of energy coursing through the earth, shaking the state in various directions and with various intensities.2

  Los Angeles was not ready for a major quake, and certainly not a great quake. There were innumerable things which needed to be done to prepare and which would save lives and property—but such efforts cost time and money. And, more than anything else, such efforts and expenditures require leaders who are convinced of the danger. What evidence do we have, the questions commonly went, that a major quake will hit in our lifetimes? What certainty do we have that we need to prepare?

  The answers, of course, were in the history of the cataclysmic quake that jolted sparsely populated Fort Tejon in 1857. In the clear record of what those seismic waves did to the land south of Fort Tejon—the land on which Greater Los Angeles sits today—lay all the facts that politicians and businessmen alike really needed to justify massive expenditures of time, effort, and money to get ready for the next one. As Richter knew well, if present-day Los Angeles were hit by a quake the magnitude and intensity of the 1857 event, tens of thousands of Angelenos would die beneath the rubble of buildings and freeways and homes and offices from the damage that the earth shaking would cause—damage that could run as high as sixty billion dollars.

  The point was very simple—and very hard to get across. The San Andreas had not slipped north of Los Angeles since 1857. Therefore, another large or great earthquake at or near Fort Tejon just north of the San Gabriel Mountains (twenty-five miles north of L.A.) could occur again at any time. It could be in ten minutes or a hundred years; but the risk was real and deadly—and the buildings of L.A. (not to mention the residents) were unprepared.

  As Professor Charles Francis Richter slept in the early hours of February 9, the needle of a small seismometer he kept in another room of his Altadena home (just above Caltech’s Pasadena campus) continued to run, jerking occasionally from small waves arriving at random through the metamorphic bedrock of the San Gabriel Mountains, which sat just to the north of his property.3

  Suddenly, at forty-seven seconds past 6:00 A.M., the needle began cycling wildly in both directions as a primary wave front of intense magnitude rippled beneath Dr. Richter’s den, shaking the foundations of his house, and shaking perhaps the world’s best-known living seismologist bolt upright and instantly awake in bed.

  Charles Richter yelped something incoherent as his wife, Lillian, awoke and watched him disappear at amazing speed through the bedroom door, which was shaking and gyrating. While the family cat hung on to the bedroom rug (as much in terror from his owner’s sudden passage as from the shaking), Richter made his way over a shifting, shaking floor, now obviously in the grip of S waves from somewhere close.

  Was this it? Was this Fort Tejon? The thought had been crystal clear in his mind the second he awoke, but the shaking was not yet catastrophic enough to be a Fort Tejon magnitude quake. Richter continued in motion, heading for his seismometer.

  Twenty miles to the west and a bit over five miles beneath the surface, something had snapped less than ten seconds earlier at a point where the San Gabriel Mountains had been pushing for millions of years over the alluvium (sediments) that formed the San Fernando Valley. The sudden movement of the rocks had created massive seismic energy waves which lashed out from the hypocenter to reach the surface somewhat to the southwest, combining with newly created surface waves to kick the ground up and sideways below the Pacoima Dam in the foothills, beneath the Veterans Administration hospital (the VA’s “garden spot” facility) in Sylmar, and underneath the earthen Lower Van Norman Dam, as well as the ground structure of the entire San Fernando basin.

  Within six seconds of the first P wave arrival, the north-south and up-down needles on the strong motion seismographs at the Pacoima location recorded a pulse of energy which would make seismic history. Acceleration—the rate at which the ground is yanked in any direction—had never been recorded at greater than the force of one gravity. Now, however, the needles registered 1.25 times the force of gravity in two of the three axes—at the very same moment that the walls and the structure of hundreds of masonry buildings all over the immediate area of San Fernando and northern Los Angeles began to fail.4

  Robert Dutton had been sitting in his wheelchair, unhappily waiting for yet another medical test (this one much too early in the morning), when the first waves shuddered in from just a few miles distant. Deep inside the third story of the four-hundred-patient VA hospital where he was being treated for a back injury, the military veteran felt the shaking begin, felt the building respond with a massive rumble, and instantly knew he was in danger. Time became elastic, giving him more room to think as he catapulted himself from the wheelchair, oblivious to the consequences to his back, somehow moving through the doorway to the hall just beyond in a matter of seconds. The smell of hospital disinfectant from the freshly swabbed linoleum floor caught the periphery of his attention as he passed through the doorframe, intent on escape from the shuddering enclosure of the third floor, which was shaking now, vibrating, lurching (seemingly in all directions) with a horrendous noise of groaning and screeching and rumbling. He knew there were patients throughout the building, but only the thought of escape filled his head. With the doorway behind him, Dutton turned to look at the waiting room from which he’d come.

  There was nothing there. The room was gone, falling away even as his eyes focused on the void where it had been.

  Two of the wings of the hospital were in free fall, concrete floors pancaking down on the ones below, instantly crushing many of the human beings between them, throwing others into alcoves and corners, traumatized, uncomprehending, but alive. With an unbelievable noise of protesting metal, shattering glass, and rumbling concrete, two wings of the forty-five-year-old building, which had just passed a major engineering inspection following a face-lift, collapsed into rubble, instantly taking the lives of at least thirty-five people, and pinning dozens of emphysema and tuberculosis patients (along with some staff members) in the twisted wreckage.

  Among those who would not emerge were several veterans who had just returned from America’s stalemated jungle war—men recovering from wounds received in Vietnam.

  The sight from the breakfast table was beyond belief, but as the young high school student watched from the den of his uncle’s house just to the west of the Golden State Freeway in Newhall, the water in the swimming pool next door lifted up as a unit—all of it—holding together in exactly the same kidney shape as the pool which had contained it, rising like a semitransparent blue bubble ten feet into the air as the ground, which had suddenly lurched upward with a neck-snapping jolt, now slammed back down, out from under the water, leaving the pool’s contents suspended in midair. In a slow-motion sequence like nothing he h
ad ever experienced before, the young man watched the pool and the entire backyard of his neighbor’s house descend out from under the giant lens of water and lurch sideways!

  The water began to descend, but the pool was no longer exactly beneath it. In fact, the pool was now off to the south, it seemed, maybe only a few inches, maybe a few feet. In what seemed an eternity, a substantial portion of what had to be thousands of gallons of chlorinated swimming pool water crashed like a mini-tsunami onto the back porch and through the sliding glass doors of the neighbor’s house to inundate the interior.

  At the same moment, responding to the initial lurch upward and the following 1.25 gravity descent of the terrain, hundreds of other swimming pools in the Valley had danced the same dance, and within minutes hundreds of homeowners would emerge from the terror of the earthquake to find their living rooms and dens filled with their swimming pools.

  Less than two miles to the west of the VA hospital, the enclosed five-story stairwells attached to each end of the brand-new twenty-three-million-dollar Olive View Medical Center (an 850-bed facility run by the county) peeled away in opposite directions with the force of the major shocks, only six seconds into the quake. The remaining structure slumped and tilted at the same time, preserving the lives of most of those inside the main section, but completely destroying the building. The facility had been described as “earthquake-proof,” but in the grips of a real earthquake it had lasted exactly seven seconds.

  To the immediate east of the Lower Van Norman Dam concrete dust was rising in a billowing cloud, as freeway overpasses from Interstate 5 and Interstate 405 twisted and crashed onto, and through, the concrete decking of the roadway, crushing two men in a small delivery truck that happened to be in the wrong place at exactly the worst possible moment on the otherwise deserted freeway, and creating a scene which would be described from the air as resembling the scattered toys of an angry child.