by Peter Hernon
Holleran wanted to go over Prable’s data again and examine it carefully with all the critical skepticism she could muster. She wanted to do her best to find the holes that would quickly disprove it. There was bound to be a miscalculation or false assumption on his part, but it might take her days of hard work to ferret it out and she didn’t have any time to spare.
She needed to call Jim Dietz. She’d meant to do that yesterday, but had completely forgotten once she started looking at Prable’s data. Their plan had been to work the trench at Point Arguello for another two or three days, depending on the weather.
Holleran turned on the radio and got out some breakfast dishes. By then it was past 8:00. Time for the news. She caught something about a strong quake with damage and injuries near Memphis. Holleran dropped her cereal dish in her haste to turn up the volume. Milk and cornflakes splashed onto the tile floor.
The quake had occurred four hours earlier. It measured a magnitude 7.1 on the Richter scale.
Stunned, Holleran hurried to her bedroom where she kept her laptop. Within seconds she was hooked into the Internet site for the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center. Based in Boulder, the center continually updated seismic episodes around the world.
There were already several entries for the New Madrid quake. The epicenter was approximately 120 miles north of Memphis in extreme southwestern Kentucky. The earthquake had hit at 12:22 Universal Time. Some buildings in Memphis had collapsed, and there were early reports of loss of life.
Holleran nervously tapped in the homepage for the USGS Center for Earthquake Research at the University of Memphis. It was the main clearinghouse for the New Madrid Seismic Zone. She watched as a profile of the quake’s seismic pattern slowly scrolled down on the screen. It was striking.
The east-west ground motion was exceptionally violent. The P and S waves looked like saw-toothed mountain peaks interspersed with plunging valleys. P stood for the primary wave. It arrived first. The S, or secondary, wave was slower-moving but harder-hitting. Both were body waves, originating in the body of the rock. The amplitude—represented by the height of the wave—was pronounced. The shaking had lasted forty seconds. So the quake was of fairly long duration.
Holleran punched a couple of computer keys and got a model of the P and S waves.
The S waves had continued for nearly fifteen seconds. Their elastic vibrations sheared or twisted rock sideways and moved the earth with an up-and-down, side-to-side motion. The quake’s surface waves, the Love and Rayleigh waves, had also been of long duration.
The quake had been felt five hundred miles away in Chicago, where the skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue had swayed slightly. The buildings hadn’t suffered any damage, but the oscillations had continued for a full minute. Moderate damages—mainly collapsed chimneys and broken gas lines—were reported in St. Louis about 170 miles away. There were similar reports from Little Rock and Louisville. The quake had been felt in Pittsburgh and Charleston, South Carolina.
Those distances were a little short of incredible to a California-trained seismologist like Holleran.
The radio had an update about injuries in Memphis. Eleven people were dead, crushed in their cars when a section of a highway overpass had fallen. Hospital ERs were jammed and the death toll was expected to rise. An old, river city like Memphis had an abundance of unreinforced brick buildings. Holleran would bet some of them had crumbled like card castles when the first strong waves hit.
Her pulse racing, Holleran took some breaths to try to settle down. Her hands were trembling when she picked up the telephone to call Jim Dietz.
Holleran pressed the auto dialer for the dig site at Point Arguello. Dietz picked up the phone. He’d already been at work for an hour and had gone back to the trailer to fill his water jug.
“Did you hear about the quake in New Madrid?” she asked.
“I just checked out the Internet site at Boulder,” he said. “Pretty nice magnitude.”
“Jim, I’m not going to make it out there today.”
“You finally got that big date, right?” Dietz, as ever, his charming self.
“I’m going to Memphis.”
The line went quiet. She began to tell him about Otto Prable.
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 10
1:15 P.M.
PILLARS OF THICK BLACK SMOKE FRAMED THE TALL buildings downtown, the Midwest Bank and Raldo Towers, as well as the two bridges over the Mississippi. There was more smoke than Atkins had expected. More fires. He figured most of them had probably started after the earthquake shattered gas lines. Entering Memphis on Route 61, he’d just gotten his first good look at the city’s skyline.
He picked up Interstate 40 just after it crossed into the city from West Memphis, six lanes of stalled traffic going in either direction. The Pyramid, the city’s distinctive riverfront auditorium, was right behind him. A five-story brick warehouse was burning fiercely a couple blocks off the highway. The dancing flames were giving everyone a hell of a show.
Atkins had a perfect vantage point. He could look right down Thomas Street from the elevated highway. Fire trucks—pumpers, snorkels, and other pieces of heavy equipment—encircled the building. It looked solid, thick-walled, old. Watching from the driver’s seat. Atkins worried that the firefighters were much too close. There was no telling how much the walls had been weakened or what would happen in a good aftershock.
Atkins rolled down a window. The wail of sirens seemed to be coming from a dozen directions at once. The Memphis fire department was probably stretched pretty thin by now. Fire was often the big killer in an earthquake. A lot of people didn’t realize that. Even those who should have known better like building engineers who routinely forgot to turn off gas and electrical power after a quake.
Listening to the sirens—the sound seemed to wrap around the entire city—Atkins wondered how many people had been hit by falling masonry or glass. Rushing into the street during an earthquake was another common, often fatal mistake. A natural reaction, Atkins had done it himself. But it could be deadly around tall buildings.
None of the city’s new skyscrapers had collapsed, but the ground waves had made them sway like trees in a strong wind. Some of the windows had exploded, raining glass on the streets.
As he listened to the radio, Atkins knew that the worst damage was centered just south of Beale Street, the famous blues mecca, where many of the homes and low-rise buildings had shifted on their foundations. That’s where some of the biggest fires had broken out.
Damage in the city was spotty but widespread. Even Walter Jacobs’ office at the University of Memphis had taken a hit. The Center for Earthquake Studies was located in a converted two-story home on the edge of the campus. The chimney and part of the cornice had crashed through the roof into one of the bathrooms. A grad student who showed up early to crunch numbers on a computer in an adjoining room had a close call.
Atkins had gotten a rough description from Jacobs by cell phone. They decided to meet at the scene of a building collapse. Some bricklayers had been salvaging their work on the walls of a discount shopping center. Two twelve-foot-high sections of solid brick had fallen over in one of the aftershocks, crushing the men. Rescuers were frantically trying to dig out any survivors.
All told, a pretty bad quake, but nothing like a big one. You had to experience a magnitude 7.5 quake or greater to appreciate what could happen. Live through one; lose a good friend. Or maybe the woman you wanted to marry. That’s how Atkins tended to grade earthquakes. It was his own personal scale of magnitude. Memphis had been rocked, but its 7.1 hadn’t been a real killer. It wasn’t like Luzon in 1990, or Kobe, or Mexico City.
Still, this one had been something. The image of the ground rolling like an ocean wave stuck in his memory. He’d never seen anything like that firsthand.
It hadn’t happened for a while, but as Atkins made his way off the interstate and headed south on Martin Luther King Boulevard, the old memories came
back. He remembered the evening before the quake had hit Mexico City. He was powerless to stop the images from coming, or even slow them down. How Sara and he had made love on the small bed in their hotel room.
Atkins had had the feeling then that Sara wanted all of him, and for the first time in his life, he was ready to give it, to surrender to someone entirely. That night he decided he would share his life with her. He would hold nothing back. She understood and responded with her body in a way she never had.
Driving in the slow-moving traffic, Atkins experienced a moment of intense pain. He knew what had happened. It had happened to him before. Seeing the damage, the shattered buildings, and the body bags after a bad quake made the images of Mexico City come sweeping back. The memory of his last night with Sara in that hotel hit even harder. He would never get over it.
He pushed the memory away. There wasn’t time for that now.
AS Atkins continued south, many of the intersections were blocked by police cars, fire trucks, and clusters of ambulances. He drove by the main entrance to Graceland. The white-columned mansion of Elvis Presley was on a low hill and partly hidden by trees. Two of his private airplanes, a jet and a turbo-prop, were parked on a small plaza across the street. Even after an earthquake, a line of visitors had already formed, waiting for the landmark to open, mainly elderly, silver-haired women who’d descended from a tour bus. They weren’t going to let an earthquake keep them from paying homage to the King.
The collapsed shopping center was near the intersection of Presley Boulevard and Raines Avenue. Atkins parked a few blocks away. Police had strung yellow crime-scene tape around the perimeter of the building. Red and blue lights flashed along streets jammed with emergency vehicles.
Rescue workers were digging furiously around the edges of the wall, searching for survivors, probing the ground with sticks and their hands. A couple of heavyset cops were using dogs.
One look was enough to tell Atkins they were probably wasting their time. The entire west wall, about forty yards of brick, had fallen on the workers.
Atkins spotted Jacobs in the crowd. He was hunched over with a cell phone screwed into his right ear. He wore a battered yellow hard hat, a muddy overcoat, and high-topped rubber boots. An ID badge hung from a chain around his neck.
Jacobs waved him over. “Another reporter,” he said, putting the cell in his coat pocket. “It’s been nonstop since I got up. I’ve already called Reston and asked them to send us some media people. We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”
“How many dead?” Atkins asked.
“So far, twenty-six. There could be seven or eight more buried right here. No one seems to know exactly how many were up on the scaffold when the wall fell over.”
Atkins wanted to know about aftershocks. These were often more deadly than the initial earthquake, bringing down already weakened buildings with astounding suddenness. He’d seen it happen often enough. The first time was in Mexico City.
Jacobs shook his head. “I’ve got five people out setting up a PADS network. So far we’ve had nothing significant.”
PADS stood for “portable autonomous digital seismographs.” The suitcase-sized devices were used to record aftershocks and track strong ground motion. Some of the instruments were being shipped in from the USGS research center in Boulder. They didn’t have enough on hand in Memphis, one of Jacobs’ chronic complaints even though he was no longer with the agency. The lion’s share of USGS funds and equipment invariably went to California. The New Madrid Seismic Zone had always been a poor sister to the San Andreas Fault. Jacobs didn’t dispute that the earthquake risks were greater in California, where they happened far more often. He just wanted to make sure the very real danger in the heartland was also adequately studied. So far, the risk here had not been recognized. The shortages of equipment and staff were glaring.
He handed Atkins a printout from a seismometer.
“The epicenter was right on the Tennessee-Kentucky line. Nearest town is a place called Mayfield. I’ve been there. It’s up by Kentucky Lake. Right smack in the middle of the New Madrid Seismic Zone.”
One of the rescuers raised a hand, motioning for the other diggers to stop. They were all firemen. Despite the cold, some of them had taken off their heavy yellow coats and were working in shirtsleeves. They’d just pulled a man from beneath the wall. He was completely covered with mud. Atkins watched as a big, red-faced fireman with a thick beard wiped mud from the man’s mouth and nose and, kneeling next to him, began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Another man hurried over with a canister of oxygen. They put the mask over the bricklayer’s mouth.
The big man got up, picked up a shovel, and went back to work along the wall. He already knew the outcome. After a few more minutes, an EMS technician covered the bricklayer with a green poncho and helped carry the body to an ambulance.
Spectators had gathered, hundreds of them. They were watching the show in hushed silence, pushing in as close as they could. The cops tried to keep them back, but it wasn’t easy. There weren’t enough of them, nowhere near enough.
That never changed, Atkins thought. Gawkers always turned out in force after an earthquake. So did looters. In Mexico City he’d seen a man break a dead woman’s fingers to get her rings off.
“Well, it looks like all your observations were right on target,” Atkins said. “Even down to the animals.”
Jacobs had actually anticipated the quake. True, it wasn’t an exact prediction—he didn’t give a time or a precise location or a probability, all key ingredients. And yet Atkins thought his friend still had reason to be proud. So much of their science remained highly intuitive. Jacobs thought conditions were ripe for a quake and had been proven right. That was about as good as the science currently allowed.
“I’d say so,” Jacobs said. “We haven’t had a temblor that strong since the one I was telling you about back in the 1890s. We were sure overdue.”
MEMPHIS
JANUARY. 10
4:50 P.M.
THE TWA 737 BANKED LOW. THEY WERE approaching the Memphis airport from the south at twilight, for Elizabeth Holleran always a beautiful time of the day when the light was strange and soft. Staring out the window, she saw the Mississippi curving south in a wide, caramel-colored crescent. Large parts of the city were dark, still without electricity twelve hours after the earthquake. Then the plane banked again, and she noticed the fires. She counted at least ten of them.
Holleran had flown from Los Angeles to St. Louis, then caught a connecting flight to Memphis after a three-hour layover. She’d traveled light, with a few pairs of slacks, shirts, and sweaters in her garment bag, and her laptop. Several times during the forty-minute trip, the captain had provided updates about the earthquake. More than thirty people were dead. Traffic was a mess. Hospital ERs filled to capacity.
They were lucky, the captain told them in a drawling accent. The quake hadn’t knocked out the airport’s runway lights; otherwise they would have had to shut down Memphis International.
Holleran remembered his comment about the snarled traffic an hour later after she got a rental car and slowly merged onto Airways Boulevard. The woman at the rental counter had warned that driving anywhere would be difficult—especially at night. They were issuing radio reports every ten minutes, telling people to stay at home. She advised Holleran to check into one of the motels near the airport and wait until morning. But Holleran was eager to get to the University of Memphis and try to track down the head of their earthquake center, Walt Jacobs.
She’d finally remembered his name and where she’d met him. It was in San Francisco for a seminar on the Northridge quake of 1994. She doubted he’d remember her. He’d presented a paper on the New Madrid Seismic Zone, and she’d asked a few questions. She’d spent the better part of the day trying without luck to reach him by telephone. She figured this was one night he’d be working late and hoped to find him at the university. She’d brought Otto Prable’s data. It was loaded on her laptop.
/>
Ever since she’d heard about the quake, she’d been wondering if he’d made an incredibly lucky guess. Or, more troubling, was there something potentially valid in his data that needed to be examined?
Prable had predicted a major quake a few days either side of January 20. He’d missed it by about a week.
Holleran was inclined to think her old mentor had made a remarkably good guess partly based on a few scientifically solid details, including the rate of ground deformation. That’s what she wanted to talk over with Jacobs. If he’d even see her. She wasn’t so sure he’d have time to talk about Prable and his admittedly bizarre theories. She still remained highly skeptical, but at the very least, the quake had made her less inclined to write his work off quite as easily as before. She was willing to let someone else examine his data. She owed him that much.
She quickly regretted not taking the advice of the woman at the airport. She hadn’t gone six blocks before she hit her first detour. The facade of an old building had collapsed, spilling a deep pile of bricks into the street. Following a single lane of traffic around the obstructions, Holleran had to make a right turn and immediately ran into another detour. Most of the streetlights were out.
Holleran hunched over the steering wheel, straining to see the street signs. She had no idea where she was or in what direction she was going. Fewer cars were on the road. She suddenly realized she was in an inner-city neighborhood, block after block of single-story, low-rise apartment buildings, many with boarded windows. Dozens of people were walking in the street or milling on corners, mostly young men. A few had flashlights or ghetto blasters with the volume cranked up.
The car in front of her lurched to a stop and tried to turn around. Men swarmed around it, rocking the front end up and down.
Stunned, Holleran cut the wheel in a tight circle and floored the gas pedal. Something slammed against the roof. A hard metallic sound. They were throwing rocks at the car.