“But”—she held up an index finger, wagging it in remonstrance—“but there are still buildings in the wrong place!”
“The point Wally was making,” Bob Atwood had said, “… was that this is valuable land, and until another quake comes, why shouldn’t we use it? Use it safely, of course, but use it.” Atwood, the newspaper publisher whose memories of losing his elegant home (and his trumpet) at Turnagain were still fresh, described the way the business community and civic leaders had rebelled at the initial ideas of the scientists and municipal planners who had identified most of downtown Anchorage as high-risk and even recommended relocating the business district. As geologic and soil studies continued into May and into summer, the area labeled “high-risk” shrank, until the downtown section included the Forth Avenue area (adjacent to the surviving Anchorage Westward Hotel, of which Atwood had been a part owner), and the west end of the downtown area, the L Street slide—on the eastern edge of which Wally Hickel was determined to place the Captain Cook.
“He had some method of removing enough soil to equal the weight of the building, and used other methods to anchor it, but he couldn’t get [the federal government] to take the lot out of the high-risk classification.”
Bob Atwood had alternated between stories of worrisome overdevelopment of high-risk zones and his concerns over the quality of contemporary Anchorage building inspection and compliance standards, to prideful remembrances of his fellow business friends who had pushed ahead against all odds—and against much advice.
“There were many of us around here who felt, a year after the quake, that the plague of scientists had been harder to deal with than the quake itself.”2
That line had been used many times around Anchorage in the years after 1964, along with the rather common attitude that the task force and the invading scientists had overstayed their welcome the moment they began to close their checkbooks and open their mouths.
As another Anchorage earthquake veteran put it, “We wanted their [federal dollars], but we didn’t want their goddamn dictatorial advice. We’ll rebuild where we want to rebuild, and take the risks ourselves.”
But, with hundreds of millions of federal money spent after such a disaster—our tax money—there is a legitimate question whether the rest of us who pay the bill have the right to say to any community: “If you want our help, you need to be more careful how much risk you take.” Americans will always provide federal aid, no matter how negligent a community has been in permitting dangerous building practices. And in 1964, Alaskans welcomed federal aid. Coalinga—at least the city government—welcomed federal aid. San Fernando wanted low-cost loans and federal highway funds and disaster relief. But there is good reason for the argument that such help should not become a substitute for careful hazard reduction efforts.
There is also a substantial difference between one homeowner’s accepting a major risk for himself and his family, and a developer’s “accepting a risk” for the future occupants of a condominium, or the unknowing, transient occupants of a hotel, or the workers in an office building. And in the case of the so-called L Street slide, that was precisely the issue.
The block Wally Hickel chose for his new Captain Cook Hotel sat just to the east of the graben—the trench—which had opened between the rest of the downtown area and a crescent-shaped, thirty-square-block chunk of the city’s western edge when that chunk moved as a unit up to fourteen feet toward the water. In 1964 there were mostly houses among the single high-rise apartment buildings and the few businesses, and the majority had not been extensively damaged—merely relocated involuntarily. The governmental task force of engineers and geologists (called Task Force 9) quickly classified the area as high-risk, blocking all federal assistance to property owners for repair or reconstruction. Nevertheless, disaster relief funds were spent immediately to restore water, sewer, electrical, and natural gas services as well as streets, and that restoration of utilities to expensive buildings on view property which were more or less structurally intact gave the owners the unforeseen ability to hold out against any attempt to condemn, relocate, or rezone. Several geologists were convinced that the L Street slide was incomplete, and that with the slightest seismic provocation the movement would start again as the upper blocks of building-laden ground rolled toward the bluffs on the tiny waterlogged “ball bearings” of the Bootlegger Cove Clay. The result would be measurable in smashed buildings and perhaps smashed occupants on the beach below, with buildings to the rear of the leading edge treated much the same as the houses in Turnagain Heights.
The political pressure on the municipality of Anchorage was instantly at a fever pitch to leave the L Street slide out of any apocalyptic land use planning. The idea had been floated—and just as quickly sunk—that the entire area should be razed and made into a daytime-only park or greenbelt. But in a city which had already lost far too many buildings and far too much business, the idea of tearing down more—especially with government compensation based on postearthquake values—was unacceptable. In addition, there was no support for any extensive economic or engineering study of how the L Street blocks might be stabilized, and the task force, as a result, sidestepped the issue. In fact, within a year the Municipal Assembly had gone entirely in the opposite direction, and amazingly enough voted to approve rezoning to increase the residential densities in the slide area. By 1987 the L Street slide district had been adorned with many new high-rise office buildings, condominiums, businesses, and a few houses, and had progressed from merely an area of accelerated risk to its present-day position as a potential major disaster waiting for the pull of a seismic trigger.
And below the bluff of the L Street slide area—in a location where some attempt at stabilization might have been attempted—nothing but the restored rails of the Alaska Railroad are anchored. As the authors of the National Science Foundation—sponsored study Land Use Planning After Earthquakes pointed out, “No restrictions on development have been imposed in the area to reduce seismic risk, and the zoning changes have certainly increased the potential for casualties and property damage in future earthquakes.”3
In Seward, the recommendations of scientists and geologists and municipal planners had been followed primarily because the ruined economy had never recovered, and there was never the financial pressure on the city to relent to new and dangerous waterfront development in areas where the San Juan dock and the Standard Oil docks had been.4
In Valdez, however, the recommendations had been followed to the letter because the solution was wrenchingly simple: Since the site of the pre—Good Friday Valdez was patently unsafe and now many feet lower than before (the lower streets washed by seawater at high tide), the entire site had to be abandoned.5
Even so, with the prosperity which the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline brought to Valdez, there has been considerable pressure on the city to relent and permit some new development at the old site—attempts largely by newcomers who look at unused land and ache, ignoring the deeper human aching of twenty-three years before when twenty-eight Valdezians died at the end of John Kelsey’s dock.6
But in Anchorage, the momentum of the business community and the financial interests of the citizenry in the impassioned rush to rebuild and return to normal had shrunk the well-intentioned seismic planning of various agencies to a small section of the Fourth Avenue slide area, and in the opinion of many downtown merchants and city leaders, even that was too much governmental involvement.
“We gave [the scientists and bureaucrats] a little area around Fourth Avenue to play with, so they could play their renewal games, justify their jobs, and leave the rest of us the hell alone!” one former city official explained.
With the scope of federal redevelopment massively curtailed under the boot of political pressure and economic protest—with the map of high-risk and provisional high-risk areas shrunk to the smallest possible size—and with the scientific community’s being made to feel like a roadblock in Anchorage’s highway to pros
perity, the bright hope of making the city a seismically safe, model community evaporated. Worse, the redevelopment failure left the huge chunk of L Street and the ruined landscape at Turnagain wholly vulnerable to forgetfulness, rationalization, and the profit motive.
The problem wasn’t an absence of codes or standards in Anchorage. In fact, the city had a strict seismic building code which was carefully updated to even more stringent levels in the years after 1964. Requirements for careful design of foundations and structures, plus requirements for appropriate grades and quantities of structural steel to make buildings truly earthquake-resistant, insured that whatever was built in Anchorage would be far better prepared for major earthquakes than buildings in most American cities. The quality of such buildings was seldom in question—the location, on the other hand, often was.
In addition, the survival of the Anchorage Westward Hotel—and all the slide-prone ground beneath and behind it—proved that not only the buildings could be designed to stay together, but in certain cases even an otherwise unusable location could be sufficiently anchored to withstand the combined effects of the Bootlegger Cove Clay and a magnitude 9.3 earthquake. But to use that capability and knowledge properly, strict control of building standards and development location had to go hand in hand. That was the aim of the starry-eyed government municipal planners. And that, ultimately, was the area in which Anchorage’s eagerness to recover and forge ahead would push the lessons of 1964 aside.
By 1976, when the newly combined city-county Municipality of Anchorage finally adopted a Comprehensive Development Plan, Dr. Selkregg and others who knew what was needed and what was not being done in terms of seismic safety were shocked to find that several telling changes had been made in the language of the preliminary draft. Language which sought to bind the Municipality to follow the no-development recommendations of Task Force 9 concerning Turnagain and L Street had been removed. But more amazingly, so had literally all use of, or references to, the word “earthquake” itself! Just as the city of Mammoth Lakes, California, would later do with their cynical labeling of their emergency escape road as the “Mammoth Scenic Loop,” Anchorage seemed determined to chase the seismic devil away by refusing to speak its name. It was a tawdry and essentially stupid deletion, to say the least, but it tacitly reflected the will of a community which had—as newsman Larry Makinson wrote—“largely forgotten the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, except as history.”7
Also forgotten, apparently, was the oft-repeated and increasingly profound warning to mankind written by philosopher George Santayana many years ago:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
With precise earthquake prediction still an unrealized goal, the fact of Alaska’s vulnerability should be all the stimulus required, because as Anchorage continues to build—devoid of a seismic safety commission or an earthquake hazard mitigation agency—so do the tectonic pressures below.
Chapter 24
Parkfield, California—1987
It was amazingly hot, the merciless sun blasting through a clear blue sky to assault the small group of sweating scientists where they stood around a three-foot-tall rack of electronics in ninety-degree temperature. With a two-way radio microphone in one hand (its cord disappearing into the cab of a U.S. Geological Survey pickup truck), and a small screwdriver in the other, one of the seismologists labored to adjust a relay hidden in the electronic maze, carrying out the vocal instructions of another scientist who had designed the new instrument—instructions coming in live through a patched satellite phone call originating in Australia.
Donalee Thomason shaded her eyes against the sunlight and watched the seismologists intently, standing next to the plaque which proclaimed the small, fenced-off enclosure of seismographs, strainmeters, and creepmeters the “Donalee Site”—part of the survey’s Parkfield network. True, it was on her land, a few miles from the main trace of the San Andreas Fault, but she enjoyed being a part of a bold experiment in her own community—an experiment which, if successful, might give seismologists new tools for short-term prediction of earthquakes.
The summer months can be brutal halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. For the tiny collection of farms and ranches known as Parkfield—nestled between ridgelines and rolling hills and grassy meadows amidst terrain shaped for thousands of years by the periodic upheavals of the two great tectonic plates—life was often hardscrabble and tough. Even with the sudden infusion of scientists in 1984 along with the steady stream of writers, television journalists, and newsmen who followed them, the end of the month too often came long after the end of the money for families dependent on agriculture or seasonal incomes. Yet there was a peacefulness to the valley which helped to keep life tranquil for the locals—even as the newcomers became more excited over what was about to happen.
An earthquake was due in Parkfield, according to the survey. Sometime before 1993 (and most likely in 1988), the San Andreas Fault was expected to break just northwest of the tiny community, sending the seismic waves from a Richter magnitude ML6.0 quake through the region. The forecast was the first one approved by the USGS and validated by both the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council. In some respects, however, the prediction wasn’t much of a risk. For over a century Parkfield had been no stranger to magnitude 6 earthquakes, each of which seemed to occur on something resembling a regular schedule.
And as a lifelong resident of Parkfield, Donalee Thomason knew the propensities of the fault very well. Not that she and the other one hundred seventy-five residents of the community spent their days watching the main trace of the boundary between the North American and Pacific plates, but the presence of that great boundary had been no secret.
She had been only nine years old on June 7, 1934, standing in the darkened hallway behind the small “stage” of the Parkfield Community Hall when the ground began to shake around 8:00 P.M. White gas lanterns began swinging overhead in the nonelectrified wooden building, and the progress of a year-end school program froze in mid-sentence as a small segment of the San Andreas northwest of the town lurched slightly—an initial break along a one-mile stretch of the fault that seismologists would later call the preparation zone which sent shivers through Parkfield.
The first jolt, however, was merely the feeling of the seismic trigger being pulled. Seventeen minutes later the charge went off, stored energy in the form of seismic strain causing the west side of the fault to lurch northwestward as the almost simultaneously arriving P and S waves shook the Community Hall, sending the residents fleeing outside into the night—scaring people profoundly, but doing very little damage to the sturdy wooden buildings in town.
It had been young Donalee’s first close encounter with such seismic energy, though her parents and many of her neighbors were far less startled. The Parkfield section, they knew well, had been shaking like that at intervals for 130 years.1
By the time the Parkfield segment broke again in 1966, Donalee Thomason was a wife and mother standing in her wooden frame home north of town, recalling instantly the one most intriguing fact about the small lurch which had startled her so at the back of the Community Hall: The big one had followed seventeen minutes later.
Suspecting it would happen again the same way, Donalee began pulling breakables from her shelves and wrapping them in towels, securing her Hummel figurines, and trying to anticipate what could be saved from impact with the floor—before taking up a position in the doorway of her home to wait.
Exactly on schedule the seismic waves slammed in from four miles away to the northwest, pushing the house into unbelievable contortions for half a minute, cascading the contents of her kitchen cabinets onto the floor, but doing no serious structural damage.
Now, twenty-one years had passed since the 1966 episode, and in the intervening period—as the seismological community had become aware of plate tectonics and the steady slip rate between the two great pla
tes—it had also become aware that Parkfield’s quakes seemed to occur with clockworklike regularity.
The local historical record was clear: Jolts of approximately ML 6.0 had occurred in 1857, 1881, 1901, 1922, as well as 1934 and 1966. Those were, therefore, separated by 24, 20, 21, 12, and 32 years. But if they considered the rate of slippage of the plates to be constant many miles below (where the temperatures were high enough to make the rocks almost plastic), and if they took into account the fact that the 1922 quake was considered significantly weaker than all the others (and thus had not released all the built-up energy), the 1934 quake could be seen as having occurred ten years before the normal breaking point for that segment of the San Andreas, and the overall average would then be twenty-two years, plus or minus five years.
With the passage of the Earthquake Hazard Reduction Act of 1977 and the growing confidence in the geophysical community that earthquake prediction might be just around the corner (especially if seismologists knew what premonitory jolts, lurches, movements, or other phenomena to look for just before a quake), the crosshairs of USGS research began to center on Parkfield. With scientists such as Dr. William Bakun and Dr. Tom McEvilly, Dr. Alan Lindh, and Dr. Wayne Thatcher, and others of the USGS all signing on (and with a certain amount of financial participation from the state of California), the process of wiring Parkfield with an unprecedented network of instruments began in earnest. By 1987, the San Andreas Fault was incapable of stretching, creeping, lurching, or slipping without setting off a network of alarms and portable beepers back in Menlo Park through telemetrically monitored sensing equipment. If there was going to be another Parkfield quake (a probability rated at 95 percent), the USGS was determined to capture it alive.
On Shaky Ground Page 34