There was no question that the notice issuance and the publicity had hurt. Property values dropped at least 35 percent (from an already-inflated level), and would stay depressed (even though the number of visitors both summer and winter would continue to increase over the following years).
In the meantime, the USGS scientists hurried to install an impressive array of monitoring instruments in Long Valley, but refused to rescind the notice for want of any evidence that the hazard had abated. As far as the volcanologists could tell, the cessation of the magma flow could last for decades, or only for weeks. The underlying threat was still there (and the bulge in the caldera continued, although at a somewhat slower rate). Therefore, they concluded, the notice would remain.
But the USGS men and women had been slammed into the wall of societal reality. Their concentration on the “pure science” of the problem had led them in all innocence to trigger a series of human events which, in the absence of a volcanic event, added up to possibly unnecessary damage. If in no other way, the survey’s insensitivity to the delicate nature of the public response to a warning or a notice had led to instant polarization of the populace. After that, mutual understanding was difficult at best. The lesson, however costly to Mammoth Lakes, had national overtones. The ability of the USGS to bring a community properly and carefully up to the point of understanding the true scope and depth of a seismic or volcanic hazard will be critical. As the science progresses, the knowledge of who is at risk will expand. Delivering such news will never be easy, but obtaining community (and political) cooperation will be essential to reducing the exposure of the public to danger.
But what of the uninformed who blunder in? What of the retiree who, on arriving at this new place called Mammoth Lakes with his life savings and a desire to settle in the mountains, sees only pure air and blue skies, pine trees and sweet-smelling woodsmoke wafting from beautifully attractive condominiums? What can protect such a person who knows virtually nothing of the volcanic threat?
The USGS eventually replaced its three-tiered warning system with a simple warning or no-warning system (a move prompted in part by the outcry from Mammoth Lakes). By 1984, though the threat had not changed, it would no longer rise to the threshold criteria of the new warning system—thus the hated notice was allowed to expire. But without the notice, there would be no formal truth-in-advertising legislation or other structured means of assuring that the incoming uninformed became informed.
The real estate salesman sat in a corner of his Mammoth Lakes office, pondering the question. “What of that innocent, uninformed potential buyer?” he was asked. “There’s no formal warning out there. Are you going to tell him?”
The agent shook his head in the negative. “No.”
“No?”
“No! There are no warnings … there are no alerts … there’s no reason for us to have to say anything.”
He paused again, pondering his own words.
“I’ve never told anyone about it.… I don’t think that’s anything that any of us [in real estate] would discuss … Christ, we wouldn’t make a sale if we did. Period.”
Chapter 20
Coalinga, California—May 2, 1983
It looked, she thought, like Germany during the war. Like Dresden after the air raid—a bombed-out shell of a city.
Standing in the middle of Elm Street, Marlene Dakessian perceived only rubble and destruction: The old Coalinga Inn was on fire, its brick facade collapsed along with its upper floor; the Flower Pot restaurant’s back wall was gone; and the wreckage of the Service pharmacy was visible a block farther to the northeast, bricks and pieces of jagged concrete littering the street as if an angry child had taken a grand swipe at a carefully constructed stack of blocks—and walked away.
Her mother had painted such scenes for her as a little girl, weaving dark memories of terror-filled nights in wartime Germany into word pictures for her young daughter to understand—images of a shattered world of rubble and destruction and screaming, exploding air raids in which life carried no guarantee but those of the present moment. She had wanted Marlene, in the security of her American youth, to understand what could happen in war. Mrs. Dakessian had wanted her daughter to see and feel and understand the reasons why immigration to America had been so important, and had brought such security.
Until now. Before living through the horrid scene in front of her—a scene of dust and rubble and flames consuming the formerly sedate image of her town of Coalinga—the thirty-three-year-old divorcée had never understood such images, or such destruction.
Nor had she appreciated how fast it could occur. It was frightening to see other dazed people running back and forth like ants, firemen appearing from behind her to flail away at the fire, others clawing at rubble, some with otherworldly expressions, obviously even more stunned than she.
It had been only minutes before that the first jolt had thumped Marlene out of a late-afternoon nap, the frantic scampering of her cats toward the back door of the daintily decorated owner’s apartment at the Kruger Motel motivating her dash to the doorway—the ingrained response all native Californians are taught to trigger when the ground begins to move.
Her cats had streaked off into the alley when she threw open the door to stand there, being shoved back and forth with increasing violence as the doorjamb itself gyrated into a parallelogram and back through the vertical, back and forth, nails squealing in wooden members as she turned to see her precious possessions—little glass figurines and books and records, a crystal piano, a treasured lamp—all catapulted from their shelves and tabletops to crash on the floor. With the roar of the quake in her ears and the sounds of the internal destruction of brittle materials and tinkling glass providing the upper range of accompaniment to the cacophonous symphony of domestic disaster, she had briefly thought her own end might be near—then rejected the idea. After all, Coalinga did not have disastrous earthquakes.
Whoever is at the center of this is really getting hurt! That thought was clear. It might be Bakersfield, or the San Andreas Fault some twenty miles to the west (which would mean Parkfield was getting a far worse hammering than expected). It never occurred to Marlene that the seismic waves shaking her town apart had originated moments before beneath the oilfield to the northwest in Coalinga’s backyard. Coalinga had earthquakes, but never anything like this!
Thirty feet to the east in an adjacent house the terrified wife of the man who had built Marlene’s home and business, the Kruger Motel, fought a combination of panic and grief as the cherished bric-a-brac she had collected during a lifetime (and during her early years in Germany) disintegrated all around her. The Krugers, like Marlene’s parents, had been refugees from wartime Germany, and there were disturbing memories and overtones to the violence of the earthquake—overtones which ran very deep.
And in the downtown area, two blocks away, heavy bricks had begun raining from disintegrating facades, as walls undulated away from floor beams, and roofs and ceilings dropped onto stores and offices and shops below. One man rode a disintegrating second story down to the first, a woman at the Coalinga Inn crawled through a minefield of bouncing tables to safety, and the owner of an auto parts store ran headlong into an avalanche of bricks as he tried to escape.
In his small stationery and gift shop, John Bunker, now in his senior years, had felt the quake start, and watched the work of a lifetime rapidly disintegrate into shards of glass and overturned shelves amidst fallen ceiling tiles and overturned fixtures as he dove beneath a counter to survive. A half mile away his wife, Florence Bunker, a former Coalinga City councilwoman, watched their china and furniture smashing onto the floor and worried about her husband. Anyone caught in the midst of Coalinga’s downtown section of unreinforced masonry buildings dating back to 1912 would be in danger during an earthquake; she knew that instinctively.
And in forty seconds it was over. Marlene Dakessian glanced at the disastrous remains of her possessions on the apartment floor, realized that being alive m
ade the mess a small matter, and turned her attention to comforting Mrs. Kruger, who had emerged into the alley in tears, her home’s interior equally in ruins.
Outside the downtown district the damage was less apparent, but in some cases just as catastrophic. Hundreds of homes had been jerked partially or completely from their foundations, chimneys were down, brick walls cracked or crumbled, some roofs completely collapsed, and the interiors covered with the debris of whatever had not rested on the floor when the shaking started.
Several blocks from the heart of Elm Street, Paul Lopez looked at his destroyed home and wondered. His family was safe, but their thirty-three-year-old house was obviously a total loss: cracked, shattered, thrown off the foundation, and ruined.
Four days before, however, on Thursday, Paul Lopez had stopped in town to renew his homeowner’s insurance policy. Remembering a small quake the previous year and feeling nervous about their brittle masonry home, Lopez had paid the additional amount for earthquake insurance.
That had been on Thursday. This was Monday. Was he covered? Would they pay? And, of course, the central question that thousands of Coalingans were asking themselves in silent panic: Can we recover?
The thirty-two-year-old mayor of Coalinga thought a bomb had gone off at first. It was a curious idea—he had never heard a bomb—but through endless television portrayals, Americans vicariously experience many things with a contradictory, distant realism that at times of stress can make unfamiliar situations very familiar, and very frightening.
The rapid arrival of the side-to-side S waves had solved the puzzle, of course, and Mayor Keith Scrivner had hung on as the forty seconds of battering seismic undulations tossed his office around. At first he raced around the shattered town, locating his wife and four kids, gathering all four daughters one by one from various locations—all of them shaken, but all of them safe. Now he stood at City Hall with other wide-eyed, shell-shocked, city officials, each person trying to muster reserves of personal strength, and each of them struggling to think with crystal clarity and maturity. They had been hit, and they had been hurt badly as a community, and so far the outside world did not know. The city had plans for disasters, but when something massive and totally unexpected occurs, only one question really ricochets around the cranium of a young city official: What on earth do we do now?
Most of the phones were out, electricity was out, and crews were already running as fast as possible to turn off the gas lines. Only the WATS line in Scrivner’s office was working, and that was already in use to summon help.
The town’s brick buildings were gone, the downtown section destroyed, and hundreds of homes were badly mauled. As a contractor, Keith Scrivner understood such things very well. The image of his own home had been shoved to the back of his mind as his family had been dispatched to a relative’s ranch outside town. He would worry about it later, he told himself, but there was no question about it structurally. From one brief glimpse it was obvious that the Scrivner house had been destroyed.
Fortuitous timing—traditionally the only salvation for unprepared Californians—had saved the people once again. The massive waves had torn into Coalinga at 4:42 P.M. The shops had been in the process of closing, and the post 4:30 P.M. time meant that downtown restaurants and bars were between crowds. There had been few people left on the streets, exposed to the potentially deadly rain of shattered masonry that began with the first shaking, a downpour of heavy missiles from the fragmenting walls of unreinforced, unreconstructed, uninspected, and uncontrolled ancient masonry and brick buildings, which, because they had been untouched by modern seismic engineering codes and standards, had always been seismic bombs waiting to explode.
Indeed, in that sense, a deadly string of bombs had gone off in Coalinga—but they had been internally generated—as well as internally detonated by something mysterious beneath the surface only a few miles distant.
Dr. Karen McNally had been in her small office in Santa Cruz at 4:42 P.M. The beauty of a shady Pacific Coast forest scene outside her window—adjacent to the Charles F. Richter Seismological Laboratory at the new University of California at Santa Cruz—gave the office an almost stereotypical look, as if to certify that here was the lair of a working professor.
She was bending over in her chair to retrieve something from one of the endless stacks of papers and studies arrayed on the floor behind her desk when her chair began to move, the little wheels coming alive in response to a linear motion of the floor, as a rather sickening dizziness overcame Dr. McNally.
A woozy thought shot through her mind as she realized she was moving involuntarily: Either I’m getting sick and disoriented, or someone’s having an earthquake.
A quick trip to the seismographs provided the answer. It was a quake, and in the middle 6.0 magnitude range. The epicenter, however, was uncertain.
At first it appeared to be to the southeast, and that was somewhat chilling. The main trace of the San Andreas Fault in middle California was to the southeast. Parkfield—a community which was expecting a moderate quake, and for which the first formal USGS earthquake prediction was about to be issued—was also to the southeast.
As they refined the data and listened to the radio, the usual checklist of questions ran through Karen’s mind: Should we go? Who else is going? What data can we get that we need? Who in the department can go? Are we field-ready? Do we have enough money?
When the small town named Coalinga emerged as the epicenter in the constant calculations of fellow professors and excited students, the fact that there were no known faults in that location which could produce a Richter magnitude ML 6.7 quake beneath the adjacent oilfield pressed in hard. What, indeed, was down there that had caused this? And why hadn’t the seismological community known about it?
By evening, the decision had been made and acted upon, and McNally had a team assembled and in motion, planning to rendezvous with members of the California Division of Mines and Geology as they drove down from Sacramento that evening. There would surely be a host of aftershocks, and McNally’s seismographs would be needed in the field to capture the wave forms. The seismic, near-field record was absolutely vital if they were to figure out what, seismologically, had occurred. And, of course, whether whatever had occurred, could occur again.
By 8:00 P.M. Monday—within four hours of the earthquake—a veritable army of rescue and relief forces was in motion. A fleet of ambulances from all over the state had been dispatched, unaware of the light casualties; a convoy of fire trucks from adjacent fire districts had been scrambled; state officials from the governor’s office to the Office of Emergency Services as well as the Division of Mines and Geology were in motion; commanders of the California Highway Patrol had joined with officials of Fresno County (several of whom had flown in by private plane) to head for the stricken town; and troops of the National Guard, representatives of the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army, Federal Emergency Agency (FEMA) officials, the USGS, Karen McNally’s team, and others all had gone into action, converging from the four points of the compass on the small town of Coalinga.
In addition, the news media had responded in force as soon as it became clear that the quake was very significant, and that the town of Coalinga was the victim.
“Where?”
“Coalinga. About halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, just west of Interstate Five, and twenty miles east of the San Andreas Fault.”
“Never heard of it.”
The same conversation was repeated in many California newsrooms. In many others nationwide there was no one to provide the answers, and many a dash to the nearest interstate map was accompanied by the whistled realization that Coalinga was a remote community. Within hours an incoming tide of reporters, photographers, television news teams, television helicopters, and other journalists began rolling toward Coalinga as well, flowing in from Southern California and Northern California to converge at the outskirts of Coalinga—where they all ran into a brick wall, so to speak.
With immediate arguments and angry words, threats of resort to superseding state officials countered by threat of arrest from those maintaining the roadblock, and a growing line of vehicles stretching to the horizon, all of which had been denied entry (a line which included ambulances, fire trucks, and the cars of relatives of Coalinga residents, who, finding the telephone lines out, had dashed in to locate loved ones), the decision was an instant debacle. When the press joined the fray, however—smashing into the municipal wall on the outskirts of town—the level of fury and outrage at the denied entry reached new levels.
It was to be the start of a secondary and self-induced crisis that would echo all the way from a critical postmortem hearing (held months later by the Office of Emergency Services) to various threatened legal actions. Keith Scrivner had been instantly worried about looting. That was the traditional first thought of government officials whose jurisdiction lay exposed and bleeding at the hands of some disaster. That was the primary motivation for sealing off the town. Just like his counterparts in many other cities at many other times facing many other disasters involving shattered storefronts and spilled merchandise, Scrivner was equally unaware that in such crises looting is rarely, if ever, a problem—certainly not a problem requiring the instant quarantine of an entire town from many of the very people sent to help it. The young mayor was to take much political and personal heat for his decision, but in the growing darkness of Monday evening, the leaders of the bleeding town refused to budge.
On Shaky Ground Page 29