On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

  But these recognitions are slow in coming. In the case of Memphis, for instance—a city which sits on the same grassy bluff which had wiggled like a bowl of possessed Jell-O during all three of the New Madrid quakes—the community has yet to enact a single seismic building code. Unbelievably blasé in the face of cataclysmic danger, Memphis, Tennessee, stands exposed and ready for destruction—and reluctant to face the facts.4

  Yet beneath the runways at Memphis International Airport, beneath the massive facilities of the Federal Express Corporation’s headquarters on the northeast shoulder of the airport, beneath the corporate headquarters of the Holiday Inn Corporation, and beneath the tourist-infested entrance to Elvis Presley’s Graceland, the unconsolidated soils covering the soft sedimentary rocks beneath Memphis stand ready and able to massively amplify the monstrous seismic waves that a new lurch of the New Madrid Fault (which runs as close as forty-four miles away) could send out.

  Unreinforced masonry buildings sitting on shaky foundations atop soggy, water-saturated ground; blocks of city buildings built on well-engineered fill but resting on top of weak and saturated layers of clay and sand which could fail just like the Bootlegger Cove Clay of Anchorage; and tens of thousands of residences and other buildings heavily adorned with bricks and cinder blocks and masonry walls of inadequate reinforcement—all stand ready to collapse in the violent shaking of another 8.0 magnitude quake (or even a lesser quake).

  Damage estimates of more than fifty billion dollars and carnage in excess of eight thousand deaths are considered realistic—yet the members of City Council and the county government had spent the previous two years hemming and hawing and scratching their heads over whether the political risk of passing new codes and slightly increasing building costs might be too great a price to pay for getting their community ready to survive what someday is going to happen. In the particular case of Memphis—sitting astride a seismic bomb of nuclear proportions—the municipal foot dragging is quite obviously madness.

  Paul Flores sat behind his desk with downtown Los Angeles visible over his shoulder considering the long distance his organization had come in six years. The Southern California Earthquake Preparedness Project—known far and wide in Southern California as SCEPP—had no power. Neither Flores, as director, nor the SCEPP itself could make any new laws, compel any city to change its building codes, or force anyone to tear down dangerous buildings. All SCEPP could do was urge and educate people and community leaders about the dangers they all faced in the valleys of the shadow of the San Andreas.5

  “I think we’re more of a catalyst,” he said. “Our trick, our primary means of survival [in demonstrating] that we’re worth the taxpayers’ money, is how successful we are at convincing target groups to take action.”

  SCEPP was the very first “before the disaster” earthquake hazard reduction program in the nation to be sparked by the funding and the momentum of the 1977 federal Hazard Reduction Act. Now there was a similar program in the San Francisco—Oakland Bay area (Bay Area Earthquake Preparedness Project, or BAREPP for short). Both used very small amounts of federal and state funding to push along community awareness and municipal governments.

  The problems had been overwhelming at first, many of them revolving around communications. While SCEPP’s initial focus had been to prepare the L.A. area for responding to a short-term earthquake prediction, the Project quickly began to evolve into a nucleus of people who tried constantly to get various agencies of city and county governments, building departments, fire departments, police and sheriff’s departments, water departments, emergency response coordinating agencies, and the university seismological community simply to talk to each other.

  “The problems just in emergency radio communication were unbelievable. We had over a hundred and forty police and fire jurisdictions all with different radio systems. If there had been a city-wide emergency, none of them could have talked to each other.”

  The focus, however, rapidly broadened to the questions of how to get rid of L.A.’s seismic bombs—the thousands of unreinforced masonry buildings—and how to upgrade the building codes in all the communities around L.A., not just the city itself. With no power to compel anyone to do anything, SCEPP could actually operate more effectively and with much greater freedom by talking, cajoling, urging, informing, pleading, and sometimes building public pressure through public exposure of hazards or local municipal foot dragging. With energy, logic, and the ability to spark action by the myriad of city and county governments throughout the L.A. area, SCEPP began to have an effect, and things began to change.

  Even with substantial progress, and even with all the accomplishments and meetings and coordination, by midyear 1987 SCEPP was just beginning to grapple with the first vestiges of what would be a many-decade battle to put the public safety ahead of the short-term public and private interests.6

  But in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, no equivalents to BAREPP or SCEPP have been formed. Nor are there such organizations in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., or even Salt Lake City (where only a few dedicated people who understand that their home-on-a-fault at the base of the Wasatch Range will shake again violently someday work to educate their neighbors about the reality of seismic hazards).

  By 1987, though, there was at least one place outside California where the populace and the politicians had a responsibility to know better. It is a place where the seismic hazards are more than well known, where the potential for ground failure and massive shaking is well established. It is a community where seismic buildings codes and intelligent zoning should have been coupled with constant earthquake education and hazard mitigation in providing the basis of every act of every building department, city and county government, and zoning commission in the region.

  Yet it is a great American community which has no BAREPP, no SCEPP, no Dr. Lindberg or Dr. Johnston, and no USGS presence of sufficient import to influence or affect community thinking. It is an area which seems to have forgotten its past within months of a cataclysm which had been, in seismological terms, the greatest in North America since the New Madrid quakes.

  That city, in fact, is Anchorage, Alaska.

  Chapter 23

  Anchorage, Alaska—1987

  “The 1964 earthquake? Good grief, that’s ancient history!”

  The Anchorage man paused for a minute, searching for a name.

  “I’m sure there are a lot of people still around who lived through it, but I didn’t come up here till later.”

  Anchorage, in many ways, has forgotten the past—relegating the experiences of the Good Friday disaster to the category of quaint and colorful local history and forgetting any lessons that might have been learned.

  But in truth, that process had begun almost as soon as the ground stopped shaking in 1964. Anchorage residents were hearty and self-sufficient. They wanted no one standing in the way of rebuilding their city.

  Former Alaska Governor Walter Hickel had set the tone himself, within months of the quake, during the summer of 1964, when he broke ground for a new hotel (the Captain Cook) by the site of the L Street slide—running full speed against the professional advice of seismic engineers and municipal planners and federal reconstruction task force officials. Hickel had effectively looked the city and the scientific community in their collective eyes and said, “No damn scientist is going to stand in the way of this city’s progress!”

  And his opponents blinked.

  Anchorage may have traveled chronologically twenty-three years forward by 1987, but in terms of seismic safety, in some respects it was as vulnerable as it had been in 1964. Now 180,000 Anchorage residents live in the crosshairs of future great quakes, yet most were not around that particular Good Friday. Even those who are survivors of the quake—many now wealthy leaders of the community with a heavy responsibility for the public’s safety—have long since begun to wink at the reality that Anchorage has the potential to be a seismic bomb if its houses and buildings a
nd institutions fail to incorporate the lessons of the recent past.

  Yet, as Governor Wally Hickel made very clear within a few months of the cataclysm, the “progress” of Anchorage has always involved the process of calculated and assumed risks, a process that came into nose-to-nose conflict with the honest efforts of concerned geologists, seismologists, politicians, bureaucrats, city planners, and humanitarians in the days and weeks and months following Good Friday, 1964—a cadre of concerned fellow Americans who wanted nothing more than to help their brave frontier neighbors rebuild, but at a lower, more reasonable level of risk.

  But that sparked an inevitable clash between private rights and public interests—an inherent contradiction between the very American desire to decide for yourself how much risk is enough from a particular hazard, and the responsibility of the society (acting through government) to minimize the public’s risk of physical and financial harm from the same hazard. It is, in other words, merely a scaled-up version of a familiar debate: that of the motorcyclist who rages against a state law requiring him to wear a helmet, yet who will become an expensive ward of the state if his failure to wear a helmet should metastasize through an accident and paralysis into the need for lifetime public assistance. In the final analysis, there is no standard answer—only the need for constant, intelligent discussion and decision by the populace and their leaders who must first face the fact that there is a significant seismic risk, and who then must decide how much damage and carnage that same subdivision of society is willing to accept when the inevitable happens. And those subdivisions of society begin with the smallest of governmental units: cities, towns, and communities, and their city councils, county councils, zoning commissions, and any other gathering of two or more citizens concerned about the common good.

  Warren Hines and his wife had been walking their bicycles along the beach below Turnagain when Warren saw the plate. It was a piece of porcelain in the mud. They had passed the same spot before over the years, cycling along the waterline westward from the downtown area toward the city’s Earthquake Park (where the torn and jumbled landscape had been left just as it had settled on March 23, 1964). Year after year the waterline had moved closer to the new Turnagain bluff, the waves eroding the tongue of dirt and clay and sand which had flowed into the inlet on the slippery layer of Bootlegger Cove Clay during the great quake, carrying his neighborhood—and his family home—with it.

  Warren leaned down and began digging for the rest of the object, startled to see the familiar pattern of apples appear as he pulled it free from the sand and mud.

  What on earth?

  At first his mind rebelled at the idea, but the object was unmistakably part of a plate—a set of plates from which the Hines family had eaten many a meal more than twenty years before. Of the many personal possessions that had submerged with the wreckage of their home in 1964, his mother’s china had been one—and here it was again.

  He began clawing at an adjacent clump of sand, uncovering bits of green and pink tile from their downstairs bathroom wall, and then found the carcass of a little red plastic radio, one that had sat on the family refrigerator, and one to which he had listened many a morning before school. Obviously the ground beneath his feet had become the final resting place for the broken pieces of his family home, but for some reason he wasn’t compelled to keep digging.

  The erosion of the “new” shoreline had been exposing more and more wreckage during the past decade. Hines had seen an article in the Anchorage paper about that—accompanied by a picture of cinder blocks and bricks and other rubble appearing at low tide. But somehow Warren had never expected the erosion to come back this far; their home had glided only halfway to the water when it disintegrated. These bits and pieces were now on the waterline.

  Warren Hines replaced the objects at first. They belonged to another time placing, and they belonged to the beach. It was only to appease his wife that he finally, reluctantly, bent down and scooped up the familiar little radio, brushing off the sand and silt, placing it unceremoniously in the basket of his bike. Even then, it seemed almost a sacrilege. What was past, was past, and best forgotten.

  Or was it?

  Warren had followed his father into the land development business, learning to live with seismic engineering statistics. But this land, this beach, this graveyard for scores of homes (and two little boys—the Mead children)—had never been made into a park or a greenbelt as the Corps of Engineers and the Alaska State Housing Authority and many others had intended. And now, as Warren knew well, debates and lawsuits were raging over a new subdivision plan laid out by those who wanted to build new houses and apartments between the new bluff and the beach, on the rubble of the old Turnagain Heights, where he had grown up.

  “Part of the reason for this, is that the state never demanded title to those ruined lots!” Dr. Lidia Selkregg sat in the coffee shop of the Anchorage Westward—now the Anchorage Hilton—and gestured toward the western wall with infectious enthusiasm.

  “They gave the people new land free in a place called the Zodiac Manor, but they never demanded title to the Turnagain lots in return. For ten years Anchorage keeps the ruined land off the tax roles. Suddenly they decide to assign a value and tax it, and these people say, ‘Hey, if this land has value, I want to sell.’

  “Then, the people whose houses didn’t go over the edge, you see, those people never had view property, but after the earthquake and the Turnagain slide, now they do—and they don’t want someone building new houses below their new bluff and blocking their view. So when the lot owners start to sell and builders begin trying for building permits, the people on the new bluff start suing.

  “But when the next big quake comes, Turnagain will slip again, especially the area below the bluff that collapsed in 1964.”

  In the months after the quake the Corps of Engineers had tried in vain to find ways of stabilizing Turnagain, and as Lidia Selkregg herself had reported in later publications, the engineers agreed that the only thing that would keep Turnagain usable above the bluff was the presence of the approximately thousand feet of ruined ground between the bluff and the waterline—“provided the [natural] buttress is protected against beach erosion. The buttress itself, however, will be subject to substantial differential movements for some time to come, and may experience large distortions in future earthquakes. Therefore, construction upon [the ruined area] should not be permitted.”1

  Nothing, however, had been done by the city in the following years to forever prohibit new construction in the very ruined area of Turnagain Heights that the engineers had warned about. (In fact, by 1985, one new house had been built in the slide area below the bluff before the city suspended further construction.)

  And the reemerging bits and pieces of a former life which Warren Hines had found bore mute evidence to another major failure: Nothing had been done to prevent the erosion of the very material which was to stabilize the hundreds of houses which now sat on the edge of the new bluff, and which, in the absence of that “natural buttress,” would likely suffer the same fate in the next great quake.

  “It is amazing, but they don’t want to think about it. It will never happen again in their lifetimes, they say.” Dr. Selkregg sipped her coffee for a second, oblivious to the restaurant sounds around her, concentrating on twenty-three years of postearthquake history with the intensity of a university professor—which she had been for as many seasons at the University of Alaska’s Anchorage campus.

  Lidia Selkregg had become a part of municipal planning in Anchorage before the quake, and before she had joined the Alaska State Housing Authority (ASHA). Her training as a geologist, her deep love for Alaska (she had come to the state in the 1950’s with her husband, Fred), and her boundless energy mixed with a distinctive accent from her native Italy, had made her a dynamic and memorable part of the equation in the hours and days following the 1964 convulsion. She had immediately organized a large team of local geologists and engineers into the volunteer Engineeri
ng Geology Evaluation Group, which in two weeks had mapped most of the cracks and fissures and landslides in the Anchorage area in great and precise detail—work that was of immeasurable help to other groups ranging from the USGS to the Corps of Engineers. Selkregg had also done much of the tremendous volume of work of getting the population of Valdez prepared to abandon the old townsite completely and move to a new location along the bay—a project partially controlled by the ASHA.

  She had known of the studies by Ernest Dobrovolny and Robert Miller in 1959, when they predicted future problems for anything built on the Bootlegger Cove Clay and identified the Turnagain and L Street areas as having suffered major landslides at least several times in the past. And it had been Dr. Selkregg, working in the Anchorage City Planning Department, who had overheard Wally Hickel five years before the Good Friday quake when he brought in his plans for a hotel to be constructed on a plot of ground to the north of Third Avenue—a section of earth which would subside and buckle when the earth began to shake in 1964. It had, in fact, been Lidia Selkregg’s recommendation that the site be tested (based on Dobrovolny and Miller’s study), a test sequence that found sufficient dangers to change even Hickel’s mind—and the hotel’s eventual location.

  “When the [Captain] Cook eventually opened in 1965 at the west end of downtown, he even invited me to the opening ceremonies—me, one of those damn scientists that tried to stand in his way! That was nice. I congratulated him.” Lidia smiled broadly, the remembrance of that and many other civilized clashes with the established movers and shakers of Anchorage intertwined with years of service on the Municipal Assembly (city council).

  “There was this editorial cartoon in Bob Atwood’s paper [the Anchorage Daily Times],” she said, smiling again, “… which ran in regard to my constant involvement with earthquake safety issues and building locations. Here I am as a chicken running down the street yelling, ‘The ground is falling, the ground is falling!’ I thought that was wonderful, good satire, and the cartoonist sent me the original, which I framed.