by Peter Hernon
Saying nothing, the trooper led her outside and told one of his men to escort her off the dam. Immediately.
As she walked to her pickup, a trooper was in lockstep right at her elbow. He looked nervous and didn’t say a word. More police cars were driving onto the dam, blocking both ends. They were closing it to traffic.
Lauren opened the door to the pickup and slid behind the wheel. She started to say something, to try one last time to make the trooper understand what Tom was telling them. Then she paused and listened. At first she didn’t realize what she was hearing.
Silence. The roar of the water going through the gates had stopped.
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 11
10:15 A.M.
IT WASN’T MUCH, A GENTLE CREST ON HIGHLAND Avenue about thirty feet high and three hundred yards long, but crucial ground in analyzing what happened during the earthquake. Culp’s Nursery was located there—a couple of glass greenhouses and a small lot for seedlings and other plants. The earthquake had shaken them so badly that the walls had disintegrated. The small store that had sold gardening tools and other supplies looked like it had imploded.
Atkins and Walter Jacobs had gone there to take a look. Sensors at the University of Memphis about two miles away showed some of the strongest vertical shaking ever recorded during an earthquake at that small hill. The results were so unexpected that they’d rechecked the instruments to see if they were properly calibrated. Slow S-wave velocities and soft soil conditions were a deadly combination. The ground had shaken like a bowl of jelly. Fortunately, no one was there when the quake hit. The only casualty was a dog, a big Rottweiler the owner kept on the premises for security. A stone planter had toppled from a shelf and split the animal’s skull.
The velocity of the secondary or S waves as measured in meters per second astounded Atkins. He’d never seen anything like it—even at the scene of far bigger quakes. The hill had experienced severe vertical shaking for nearly thirty seconds with an S-wave velocity of 150 meters per second. More typical readings were anywhere from 250 to 800 meters per second with shaking of a much shorter duration. In soft ground, the slower velocities triggered more severe shaking.
S waves, as Atkins well knew, were tricky and far more damaging than P or primary waves. Distortional, the S waves moved with a side-to-side shearing motion that could make the ground move either vertically or horizontally. P waves, by contrast, traveled faster, but moved in only one direction. Both were “body waves,” meaning they moved upward from the earthquake focus underground, the hypocenter, to the surface.
“Can you imagine what would have happened if a hotel had been up here instead of a nursery?” Jacobs said as they picked their way through the rubble.
The hill was at the southeastern end of Memphis. Atkins and Jacobs had set up three portable seismographs there to record the aftershocks, which were occurring with increasing frequency after a slow start. They’d already had a magnitude 4.1 and two in the 3.6 range. The biggest, a magnitude 5.1, had hit earlier that morning near Kentucky Lake.
The Culp’s Hill seismographs were among thirty instruments the Center for Earthquake Studies and USGS were installing around Memphis. Another forty had been shipped in from California and were being added to the network that already existed on the New Madrid Fault. These would be scattered over a huge area that included Little Rock, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Memphis. The instruments were linked to a central computer that funneled the seismic data straight to computers at the University of Memphis.
Several teams of scientists had been dispatched from the agency’s offices in Menlo Park and Golden to help with the setup. Several of Atkins’ colleagues from the Earthquake Risk Assessment unit at Reston, Virginia, had also been sent to the quake zone.
With heavy support from the University of Memphis, which had the most scientists in the field, and the USGS, the show was being coordinated by the Seismic Safety Commission. The group was composed of scientists and structural engineers from the five states most directly involved—Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Walt Jacobs and several on his staff were members. The person in charge, a geophysicist named Paul Weston, had been appointed by the governor of Kentucky.
Atkins had never met Weston, but he’d heard a lot about him the last few days, primarily from Jacobs, who didn’t like the man.
“He’s smooth as silk, but he can be an arrogant bastard,” Jacobs said. “And that’s just for starters. It gets worse the longer you know him.”
Weston had solid academic credentials, a doctorate in geophysics from Stanford and post-doctorate work at MIT. He’d taught at the University of Kentucky. Jacobs explained that he was politically well-connected, especially with Tad Parker, the governor of Kentucky. Many considered Parker a top contender for the presidency. He’d already set up a campaign committee and was starting to get some national publicity. Parker had lobbied to get Weston put in charge of the Seismic Safety Commission.
Weston had insisted that the commission—and not the Center for Earthquake Studies or the USGS—was handling the earthquake investigation. The group’s first meeting was scheduled to start within the hour at the USGS offices at the University of Memphis.
Atkins and Jacobs had stayed longer than they’d planned on the hill and were running late. Absorbed by his thoughts on the S-wave velocities, Atkins barely spoke during the drive to the university. The extraordinary S-wave velocities could only have been caused by some unusual ground structure, say, a layer of soft sediment that made the waves diffuse and expand. Atkins wanted to run a computer simulation of the seismic data they’d already harvested. He didn’t like those S-wave velocities at all. They were way too low, way too destructive.
When they got back to the Center for Earthquake Studies, they had trouble finding a parking place. Television sound trucks were lined up four deep along Cottage Avenue, the main campus thoroughfare. Security police had kept the reporters a block from the center’s complex located in a pair of run-down, two-story brick homes that faced Cottage. Once private residences, the homes were in bad need of repair—everything from painting and recaulking the windows to fixing the furnaces. The USGS shared space with the earthquake center in a cluttered warren of rooms and hallways that had been partitioned and converted to offices.
As Atkins and Jacobs cut across the front lawn, a television reporter, who’d managed to slip past police, intercepted them.
“Do you think any more big ones are coming?” the young, heavily made-up woman shouted, jabbing a microphone in Atkins’ face.
He tried to ignore her and kept walking, but she pushed the mike closer.
“Are you expecting some more aftershocks?” She must have been wearing a thousand bucks’ worth of clothing. A designer suit, short skirt, and red pumps, despite the cold.
“We’ll have a news conference soon to try to answer some of those questions,” Atkins said, trying not to snap at her. The reporters had a job to do, but they could be totally irresponsible. He despised ambush TV interviews.
“Right,” the woman said, a surly edge to her voice. “You aren’t going to tell us shit.”
Atkins shrugged and pushed past her cameraman.
“Nice lady,” Jacobs said as they entered the earthquake center’s building through the front door.
“Charming,” Atkins said. He saw Guy Thompson approaching. Just the man he wanted to see. Thompson was from the agency’s hazards evaluation office in Reston. Thompson was wearing his usual Western shirt, faded jeans, and lizard cowboy boots. A CD player was clipped to a belt with a huge silver buckle shaped like a bucking horse. Thompson spoke with an Oklahoma drawl. He’d received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma and could name every Sooner running back since the days of Bud Wilkinson. He was expert in using computer programs to simulate the ground motions of quakes. There was none better.
“John, you old vagabond. How long you been here?”
Atkins shook Thompson’s hand and told
him he’d arrived a day earlier.
“You got your imaging program up and running yet?” he asked.
“Even as we speak,” Thompson said, running his hands through his thick, black hair that he wore to his shoulders. He was a pure-blooded Cherokee and proud of it. He and Atkins had stepped into an alcove to get out of the flow of traffic. The narrow hallways were jammed with filing cabinets, bookshelves, and storage boxes. The offices were crowded, the atmosphere electric as old friends greeted each other and caught up on news and gossip.
It always struck Atkins at such moments how small the world of professional seismology was. Everyone knew everyone else. What they were working on, the hot research, the rising stars. It was a small, closed society with no more than 125 real players, names that counted.
Thompson led Atkins to a large office, a former family room that had been converted into mission control for the Memphis earthquake. A half-dozen high-powered computers had been set up there. Thompson was in charge of all database programs, graphic presentations, and fault analysis.
“We’re just starting to plug in the S- and P-wave data,” he said. “We’ll have some pretty pictures real soon. Another twenty, thirty minutes.”
The “pictures” were computer images or simulations of what had happened along portions of the New Madrid Fault during the quake. Using techniques similar to medical CT scans, Thompson and his team of scientists were able to analyze sound and other waves generated by the earthquake and harvested by the seismometers. Seismic waves passing through a fault commonly slowed down. Their motion patterns could be used to map out the zones surrounding the fault. Thompson’s computer programs were able to draw three-dimensional pictures of what was happening deep underground. He mapped the fault’s outline by piecing together the faint echoes of seismic waves as they were reflected from buried rock layers. This provided a picture of the structures that produced the echoes. In some cases, you could actually see the fault itself.
Atkins told Thompson he wanted him to feed in the seismic data from Culp’s Hill. He thought they’d have enough for him to work with by early morning.
“Sure, no problem,” Thompson said. “It’s gonna get interesting around here real soon.”
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 11
11:15 A.M.
ELIZABETH HOLLERAN PEERED INTO THE BATHROOM mirror. Her light gray eyes looked red and puffy and she dabbed them with cold water. She’d had less than four hours’ sleep and looked as bad as she felt. It was nearly 3:00 before she’d found a motel, a Best Western five miles south of Memphis. Motel space was at a premium.
She turned on the television and caught the end of the news. With all the closed highways and detours, the morning commute was a disaster. Gridlock gripped the city and by 7:00 A.M. the mayor had gone on the radio asking people to stay home. A helicopter beamed back live video of the fires that were still burning.
The bathroom had a small hotplate for making coffee. After drinking a cup, Elizabeth called Walter Jacobs’ office. He wasn’t in so she left a voice mail message. By late morning, after getting good directions from the motel manager, she set out for the university. Instead of trying to drive through the city this time, she looped around the outskirts on I-240 and came up Perkins Road, which got her to within a couple blocks of the campus.
Police were keeping the news media away from the earthquake center. Elizabeth tried to explain who she was to one of the campus cops. She showed him her faculty ID from Cal Tech, but got nowhere.
Without proper identification, no one was allowed in the building. Period.
A wave of anxiety hit her. It had happened several times already, ever since she’d arrived in Memphis and seen the damage up close. The thought kept hammering at her that they were still approaching Prable’s date of maximum seismic stress. She knew that it was highly unlikely anything else would happen, that there’d be another earthquake. Prable’s methodology remained highly suspect and questionable in her opinion. But the fact remained he’d come eerily close with his prediction for a major quake on or about January 20. At the very least, she wanted to show Prable’s data to Jacobs.
If he’d let her.
She had her doubts about that. With a crisis on his hands, he wasn’t likely to be too open to hearing what she had to say.
Deep in thought, she barely felt the tap on her shoulder.
“Are you Elizabeth Holleran?” It was a slender young woman with freckles and braided hair. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder. She held out her hand sheepishly.
“I’m Amy Price. I heard you give your name to that cop. I’m a grad student here in the geology department. I just finished reading your paper in my earth seismology class. The one about the trenching you’re doing on the San Andreas Fault. It really sounds cool.”
Her words came out in an excited, self-conscious rush. Elizabeth was genuinely flattered that Amy was so obviously happy to meet her. The kid was even blushing. Then Elizabeth had a thought. She told her that she needed to get into the earthquake center’s building to see Walter Jacobs. That it was very important. She wanted to know if there was another entrance.
“No problem,” Amy said, happy to be of service. “Follow me.”
She led Elizabeth behind the two homes that served as offices for the earthquake center and the university’s geology department. The center occupied one house, which it shared with the USGS. The geology department the other. A driveway and narrow expanse of lawn separated them.
The geology building wasn’t guarded. Amy took Elizabeth through the back door and led her into the basement.
“I think half the department is already down here,” she said.
“Doing what?” Elizabeth asked, puzzled by the trip through the basement.
Amy smiled and said, “Trying to listen.”
The two homes, she explained, had once been the university’s student health center and were connected by a tunnel. As many as ten grad students were sitting on the narrow flight of steps that led up to a door that opened directly inside the earthquake center’s building. The door was closed, but not locked.
“They’re having a big meeting up there about the earthquake,” Amy said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “We’re trying to hear what they’re saying.”
“It just got started,” one of the students said, a heavyset kid with shoulder-length hair tied back. “They’re all in Walt Jacobs’ office.”
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 11
1:10 P.M.
THE SEISMOLOGISTS SAT IN WHAT HAD ONCE BEEN a front room. Plywood boards covered the windows that had broken during the earthquake. The atmosphere was tense, expectant. The eleven people in attendance included some of the biggest names in earthquake research. Four, including Atkins and Guy Thompson, were with the USGS. Walt Jacobs represented the Center for Earthquake Studies.
As chairman of the five-state Seismic Safety Commission, Paul Weston led the group. His first order of business was to swear all the participants to secrecy.
“I don’t have to tell any of you how important that is,” said Weston.
He turned the meeting over to Guy Thompson. Atkins noticed he’d tied his long, black hair in a ponytail. He’d also changed shirts. He was wearing another Western number that was a bright blue satin. He still had his CD player clipped to his leather belt and a pair of headphones looped around his neck.
Thompson apologized to the group in advance. He was making the final adjustments on his projector. “This might be a little rough,” he said. “We haven’t had time to smooth any of these images out, to enhance them. I’m seeing this for the first time myself.”
The seismic P- and S-wave patterns recorded during the quake and fed into his battery of computers produced an image none of the participants had anticipated. As it was projected on a large screen on the wall, there were audible gasps.
The two-dimensional image—a dark line overlaid on a topographical map—showed that the New Madrid Fault, or at least a majo
r branch of it, extended much farther south than anyone had imagined. It looked like the southwest arm of the fault extended nearly twenty miles south of Memphis. Originally, that segment was thought to have ended roughly forty miles to the north of the city. Nearly sixty miles long, this weak spot deep in the earth had been there all along, hidden and unnoticed, waiting to come to life.
Atkins and the others were shocked. The New Madrid Fault had nearly doubled in size.
One of Thompson’s computer-enhanced graphics showed a cross section of the earth’s crust.
“You can see how the velocity and direction of the waves changed as they neared the surface,” he said, studying the computer images on the screen. The lights were dimmed. The seismic waves had changed direction and picked up speed and power when they hit different rock layers. There appeared to be an unusually thick layer of soft sediments deep below Culp’s Hill.
“That’s the kind of focusing effect that can double, sometimes triple the velocity of the surface waves,” Thompson went on. “That’s why the shaking was so severe in that part of the city.”
“Can you delineate the fault any better?” asked one of the geologists from the University of Memphis.
Shaking his head, Thompson said it was too far down in the crust, nearly thirty kilometers. His imaging techniques were a lot like CT scans and sonograms. The images were created by piecing together faint echoes as the seismic waves were reflected from buried rock layers and faults. The images were rarely sharply defined; at best the fault could be seen only indirectly.
“About all we can say for sure is that the major pulse of seismic energy traveled in a southerly direction along a previously unknown fault. The epicenter near Mayfield, Kentucky, was the likely trigger.” He projected a map of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri on the screen.
“The seismic waves really picked up velocity when they hit faulting deep below the Memphis area. It was like ringing a bell.”