by Peter Hernon
Atkins had the radio on. There was heavy static. Most of the local stations had been knocked off the air. Occasionally, they were able to pick up big stations in Philadelphia and Chicago, which were broadcasting one appalling bulletin after another. Heavy damage on an unprecedented scale was reported throughout the Mississippi Valley.
Riverfront Stadium had partly collapsed in Cincinnati. The city’s Delhi Hills section had been hit hard. The Columbia Parkway was in shambles.
The Muddy Fork district in Louisville was on fire. The Interstate 64 and Interstate 65 bridges over the Ohio River were down.
In Lexington, Kentucky, the Civic Center and many of the buildings along Broadway Avenue were badly damaged. Fires were spreading across the downtown business district.
The worst news was from St. Louis. The city had taken a huge hit. A major hospital in the West End, Bernard-Parks, had collapsed. There was live radio coverage from a young woman who broke down on the air as she struggled to describe the devastation.
“Eight floors have collapsed, the entire west wing,” the woman said. “The emergency room was crushed. It’s just gone. At least forty people were in there, mainly mothers with sick children.” The reporter was losing it. “I can hear people trapped in the rubble screaming. There’s absolutely no one to help. No ambulances. No police. It’s almost impossible to get anywhere in the city. So many buildings are down.”
One horrifying bulletin followed another.
Little Rock’s Cammack Village and the Allsopp Park District were burning. Buildings were down on both sides of the Arkansas River.
In Chicago, glass from shattered high-rise windows had rained down on Michigan Avenue. Some buildings had collapsed in the Loop. The Shedd Aquarium on Lake Shore Drive was damaged.
Atkins turned off the radio. He was supposed to be a professional. He knew what to expect—or thought he did. This was far worse than anything he’d ever dreamed possible.
“With damage as far north as Chicago, we’ve got more than one fault in play here,” he said. “This thing has spread a lot farther than the New Madrid Seismic Zone. It’s triggering other faults.”
“There’s plenty of precedent,” Elizabeth said. “Remember Landers-Big Bear?”
The 1992 quake in Landers, California—and its unusual consequences—had come as a complete surprise to seismologists. At magnitude 7.5, it was the biggest quake in the state in four decades. A series of faults in the remote Mojave Desert suddenly came to life, causing strong shaking over much of southern California. The main event in Landers was followed three hours later by a second big quake, a magnitude 6.5 near the town of Big Bear thirty miles away and located on another fault.
“I was with a team that examined the sequence,” Elizabeth said. “There was no question that the Landers quake touched off Big Bear. There was a whole string of surface ruptures. The slippage just kept moving from fault segment to fault segment. If that had been central Los Angeles instead of the sparsely populated Mojave, it would have been catastrophic.”
But nothing like this, Atkins thought. Los Angeles and southern California had never seen anything like this. And likely never would.
“If this one is triggering other faults, we’ve got a big problem,” he said. It was his personal nightmare, one shared by most seismologists. That a big quake could set off others like a seismic blasting cap.
Hundreds of buried faults were scattered throughout the Mississippi Valley and the Midwest. Only a few were still considered active, including the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which wasn’t even the largest. Any of them could suddenly “switch on.” And no one knew how many faults remained undiscovered.
That was seismology’s dirty little secret. A big one could strike virtually anywhere, anytime in the heartland, near any large city. Any fault could suddenly come to life.
If that happened, there was no telling where it might stop. Potential disaster lurked everywhere. A series of faults ran all the way from the Mississippi Valley up the Eastern seaboard. Few people realized that, or understood how vulnerable large sections of the country were to earthquakes.
“We’re going to need some good GPS data,” Elizabeth said. The Global Positioning System was the fastest way to see how much the earth had moved up or down—how much the crust had deformed. Measurements obtained by GPS satellites could show how far the seismic energy had spread or, more important, if it was still spreading.
The degree of deformation would also indicate how much seismic energy remained in the ground, a major clue in determining whether another big quake was likely.
Atkins also wanted to get some SAR data off the satellites. Synthetic Aperture Radar interferometry was a satellite technique that produced highly detailed, high-resolution radar maps of the earth’s surface. Not as precise as GPS data, SAR had the advantage of mapping a much larger geographic area, producing images that covered a sixty-mile-wide sector on each pass. It was the quickest way of determining how much the earth had deformed over broad areas.
Getting good seismic data in the next few days would be crucial. That’s why Atkins wanted to do everything possible to get his portable seismograph set up near Blytheville. Their best bet remained those geologists at Arkansas State University. Jacobs had mentioned them during their brief radio transmission. They were closer to the epicenter than anyone. Atkins hoped they’d gotten some instruments set up. It would be a big load off his mind to know they were up and running. They needed to be operational over there as soon as possible.
He was driving on Tennessee Route 51. They’d skirted Dyersburg, passing within six miles of the largest town in extreme northwestern Tennessee. The sky in that direction had a strange orange glow.
Atkins knew what it meant. So did Elizabeth.
Dyersburg was on fire.
They picked up Route 412. They were about ten miles from the Mississippi and the bridge. The rolling, wooded countryside was slowly flattening out, becoming delta bottomland the closer they got to the river.
Elizabeth lowered her window to get a blast of cold air to help her stay awake.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Numb with fatigue, Atkins was concentrating on keeping the Explorer on the twisting, two-lane road. He hadn’t heard a thing.
He rolled down his window. The air had a strong sulfurous smell. He suddenly had to grip the wheel hard as the vehicle pulled sharply to the right. They almost swerved into a ditch.
Another aftershock.
“Listen!” Elizabeth said.
Slowing down, Atkins heard it. Loud cracks that sounded like cannon shots.
He realized what it was. Trees were snapping.
The ground shook harder. The odor of sulfur was stronger. There was a strange whistling sound, loud and piercing, almost like a steam kettle.
“The ground’s liquefying!” Atkins shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here.” As far as they could see in the darkness, the fields on both sides of the highway looked like they were boiling. Jets of black water shot up from holes that had opened in the ground, some with a distinctive cone shape.
Monster sand blows, the larger ones were fifty yards across and were spouting off like geysers, blowing clouds of muck and hot vapor into the sky.
A gaping sand blow opened directly ahead of them, swallowing a section of the highway. Braking hard, Atkins tried to get around it. The Explorer’s rear tires sunk into oozing mud and spun.
Atkins slipped into four-wheel drive and punched the gas pedal. The tires pulled free.
He floored it.
They risked getting stuck repeatedly in the heaving earth. The ground kept erupting. Heavy, carbonized fragments of long-buried trees blasted into the air. Some shot out like missiles. Chunks of hardened peat flew up, peppering the roof of the Explorer. A piece of wood the size of a suitcase cracked the windshield.
They had to keep going. Atkins barreled down the road. The Explorer bounced hard, slamming into a dip. The ground was shaking and bursting open. Muddy wate
r kept shooting up from the sand blows. Trees continued to splinter.
Atkins didn’t think they were going to make it. Then, suddenly, they were out of the worst of it. The road was firmer. Despite the open window and cold air, Atkins was sweating heavily.
A few miles later they came to a sign for Interstate 155 and the bridge. The approach was just up ahead. A sign showed the turnoff for a ferry. Two cars with flashing blue lights blocked the road. Tennessee state police.
“The bridge is out,” one of the troopers said. His voice was subdued, strained. He stepped up to the mud-splattered Explorer and Atkins got a better look at his face. A young man, maybe mid-twenties. He looked scared. “The center span fell into the river.”
Atkins saw where the main span had collapsed. It looked like a half-mile section was missing. Most of the superstructure had fallen into the river. Incredible. Severed suspension cables dangled from one of the support towers that remained standing.
The wind changed and Elizabeth heard something, a strange new sound.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“That’s a waterfall, lady,” one of the troopers said.
NEAR PADUCAH, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 13
3:12 A.M.
LAUREN CLENCHED THE STEERING WHEEL WITH both hands, the siren of Lou Hessel’s patrol car blasting as they approached the outskirts of Paducah. They had to cross the Route 60 bridge over the Tennessee River. Lauren dreaded the passage. The old, narrow two-lane bridge with a dogleg halfway across was nearly a mile long. She’d never liked driving on it, especially at night.
Bobby sat in the rear seat, trying to catch a glimpse of the flood heading toward them. So far, they’d managed to stay in front of it. Paducah was the end of the line.
Lauren thought the crest was a couple miles behind them and coming fast. She was focused on a single thought. She didn’t want to be out on the bridge when the water hit it.
“Bobby, can you see anything?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He blinked and stared into the darkness, looking upstream for what he knew was coming.
The bridge was just up ahead, the black superstructure outlined against a smoky haze. As they roared up the elevated approach ramp, Lauren got her first good look at Paducah, a city of twenty thousand residents, the largest in western Kentucky.
Fires had broken out in the central business district. But the real inferno was raging on the Illinois shore, just below where the Tennessee flowed into the Ohio. It was a solid sheet of fire. An oil storage depot had gone up in flames. The tanks were burning fiercely.
Lauren’s mind raced. Her plan was to skirt the downtown district, cut over to Interstate 24, and take the Hinkeville Road exit, going west. Her parents lived ten miles out in Heath. All she wanted to do was find them and get away.
They were almost up on the bridge. The span was separated into three sections supported by concrete pilings driven deep into the riverbed. The car’s high beams bored down the middle of the two-lane deck.
“I see it!” Bobby cried out.
Lauren glanced to the right, looking upriver.
It’s huge, she thought.
The leading edge of the flood had swept around a bend in the Tennessee. It was going to hit the bridge broadside. The surging water had covered the last ten miles downstream a lot faster than she’d expected.
Lauren was doing fifty miles an hour when she reached the sharp bend where the deck made a jog to the right. She was going too fast and clipped a guardrail, smashing out a headlight before she got the car back under control.
She took another glancing look at the flood and froze. The wall of water was nearly as high as the deck of the bridge and no more than fifty yards away. It looked like it was going to wash right over them.
Lauren punched the gas pedal. They’d passed the halfway point.
There’s no way we’ll make it, she thought.
The roar of the water resonated in her ears.
The bridge shook sideways as the flood smashed into the concrete supports. Amazingly, it withstood the initial shock. Water poured across the roadway, causing the car’s tires to lose traction. The rear fender banged against a railing.
Another heavy blow rocked the bridge’s superstructure. This time the supports buckled.
“Roll the windows down!” Lauren screamed to her grandson. “If we go into the river, try to get out of the car.”
Give me another twenty seconds, Lauren prayed. Please. Just twenty seconds.
There was another sharp vibration. Something heavy had slammed into one of the supports like a battering ram.
The roadway sagged and started to pull apart. A gap opened in front of them. Lauren hit the brakes, the tires spinning on the wet steel surface. She steered the car into the guardrail, hoping to slow it down. The heavy patrol car bounced off. She turned into the railing again, shearing away a fender. The car spun around a full 180 degrees and stopped.
“Get out!” Lauren yelled to her grandson, who scrambled out of the back scat. She opened the glove compartment and snatched the pistol Sheriff Hessel had told her about, slipping it into a coat pocket.
The car had stopped within yards of the gap that had opened in the roadway. The bridge had pulled apart at one of the places where the steel sections that comprised the roadway were bolted together. The opening was about five yards wide.
Lauren saw that they were no more than thirty yards from the end of the bridge. The only way to get there was a narrow catwalk that ran along the side of the superstructure. Used for maintenance, it extended over the river. They’d have to climb over the outer railing and step down to it.
“I can’t do this!” Bobby cried.
“Sure you can,” Lauren said. She climbed over the railing and, with her back to the water, lowered herself a few feet onto the slippery catwalk. She helped her grandson down. The catwalk was open to the water. A single handrail was bolted to the side of the superstructure.
Lauren looked up at the patrol car. The lights were still on. Then the bridge lurched and the car started sliding toward the gap in the roadway.
Gripping the railing with one hand and her grandson with the other, Lauren watched as the car fell through the opening and disappeared in the churning water below them.
“Keep going!” she told Bobby. “Don’t look down!”
With their backs to the river and holding on to the wet handrail, they slowly sidestepped their way down the catwalk.
Something large hit one of the supports, which shuddered at the impact. Lauren saw what had caused it—part of an electric tower swept downstream by the flood. At least fifty feet long, it was dragging its tangled wires behind it.
The jolt of the collision almost knocked them into the river. One of Bobby’s feet slipped off the catwalk, and he fell down on his knees. Lauren grabbed him by his belt and pulled him back up.
After they inched their way past the gap in the roadway, they climbed back up on the bridge and started running toward the end. Lauren felt the pilings move under them.
“Hurry, boy!” she shouted to her grandson.
They had another ten yards to go.
Another five.
They’d almost reached the end when the roadway started to pull away from the approach ramp.
“Jump!” Lauren screamed. Her lungs ready to burst, she put an arm around her grandson, who’d started to lag behind. She shoved him hard just as the deck gave way beneath them. Their momentum carried them forward. She landed on top of Bobby on the approach ramp, skinning her knee.
She lay next to him, gasping for breath, staring at the sky. She reached over and squeezed her grandson’s hand. She’d come so close to losing him. A matter of inches. They’d been so lucky. She closed her eyes and started to cry, the tears stinging her cheeks in the cold air. She loved and needed Bobby so much. She’d lost her husband and survived. If she lost her grandson, she wouldn’t want to go on living. She realized she and the boy were in the
fight of their lives. As she lay there, still holding his hand, afraid to let go, she swore to herself that no matter what happened he was going to come out of this alive.
Bobby sat up.
“It’s going!”
Lauren pulled herself to her feet just as the bridge broke into three sections and started to lean toward the water. The surging flood knocked it over. A single concrete support at the middle was all that remained standing. Part of the superstructure lay on its side, still visible. A mobile home washed downstream was impaled on one of the steel girders. So was the smashed wall of a frame home.
“Look over there!” Bobby said, pointing toward downtown Paducah and the Ohio River. Just below Owen’s Island, where the river narrowed slightly before it swung by the city, the fire had spread from shore to shore.
More fires had broken out in the Lowertown district.
Lauren had little time to worry about Paducah. They needed to get off the elevated approach ramp, which was supported by steel trusses. She wanted to be clear of it before the next aftershock hit.
She started down the sloping incline with her grandson when a car pulled onto the ramp and started in their direction.
“Stop!” Lauren screamed, waving her hands over her head. “The bridge is out! Go back.”
The car kept coming. It had its high beams on and was headed straight toward them.
NEAR CARUTHERSVILLE, MISSOURI
JANUARY 13
4:55 A.M.
ATKINS PARKED THE EXPLORER ON A GRAVEL landing that overlooked the Mississippi. It had been a little over two and a half hours since the earthquake. The aftershocks had been frequent, some of the jolts very strong. Most were in the magnitude 6 range, Atkins figured. He and Elizabeth got out of the vehicle and took their first look at the river. It was a good two miles wide. And, incredibly, running backward.
The spectacle was beyond anything in his experience. He was reminded again of the immense power of a natural force strong enough to breach one of the biggest rivers in the world. Cut right across it!