Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “You… don’t think it’s a danger?”

  “I don’t like scientists trying to scare the hell out of us to get more research money.”

  She closed her eyes, her palm to her forehead. “Oh, shit!”

  “What?”

  “I mean, damn. I… forgot something I need for this evening.”

  “What is it?”

  Your birthday present, Dad, she thought. Stop being so nosy.

  “Just a thing.”

  “So, where’d you leave whatever it is?”

  She shook her head in dismissal as she calculated the distance to Doug’s floating home. He’d helped her design the custom-made bronze plaque commemorating Sven Lindstrom’s pioneering development of Pacific Northwest Emergency Medical Service helicopters and together they had arm-twisted the directors of the Seattle-based Museum of Flight to hang it there permanently. Tonight’s gala was the perfect showcase to present it.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll get it later.”

  With a monthly company meeting scheduled, a steady stream of Nightingale personnel had been flowing through the door and waving to Sven and Jennifer. Now, as father and daughter pushed into the conference room, a total of twenty-one employees from both the medevac and charter operations were arrayed around the table as last-minute tweaks were made to the charter battle plan glowing on the large liquid crystal flat screen covering most of the wall at one end of the room.

  Six ground crew, four flight nurses, five control room dispatchers, secretaries, and coordinators, plus the six pilots assigned to the Cascadia charter missions and four others standing medevac alert were present. On the ramp outside, more than 41 million dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art helicopters sat fueled and ready, with sixteen more scattered around the four-state area served by Nightingale.

  In the early days of Sven’s fledgling helicopter operation, he had tried to incorporate a military-style operational briefing each morning, but his pilots had hooted the idea down. Too many of them were military veterans whose memories of the real thing generated no desire for a civilian version. Worse, other EMS helicopter company owners were aghast at his attempt to reignite the “mission-oriented” mindset, and Sven was forced to back off.

  The architecture, though, was another matter.

  As a Marine Corps aviator, Sven had flown F-4 Phantoms off carriers during Vietnam long before discovering helicopters, and according to his squadron mates, the endless months aboard ship had apparently warped his sense of reality. Now that he was running his own company, Sven insisted on calling his conference room a “ready room,” and only at the last minute—faced with another pilot revolt—could he be talked out of bolting rows of surplus Navy bucket seats to the floor to make it even more authentic.

  The podium, blackboard, and squadron patches around the walls remained, however, giving the old man the desired flashbacks whenever he swept in to watch his brainchild in action.

  “This will be our most important revenue-producing day of the year, thanks to the opening of Cascadia Resort,” Jennifer began. “Everyone has last month’s operations results, I hope. This morning we’re just going to focus on the next forty-eight hours. I know you have no tolerance for OPs briefings, but I’m worried about what we’re obligated to do this weekend. So, bear with me. The earthquake activity could vastly complicate things. You know we’re all flying a heavy schedule with very tight turnarounds. Any significant maintenance problem or other disruption could have a cascade effect.”

  “No pun intended,” Gail Grisham chuckled from the front row. Gail was also a former Navy pilot and one of Jennifer’s favorites, principally due to a rapier-sharp wit she rarely sheathed.

  Jennifer motioned Norm Bryarly, their chief dispatcher, over to brief the weather, which was anything but ideal. He triggered a series of PowerPoint graphics on the screen, moving around in front of the map like a TV weatherman, which, indeed, he’d been very briefly many years ago when TV weathermen had to write in the L’s and H’s manually across the map with a grease pencil.

  The fog would be lifting within a few hours, Norm briefed, and a significant winter storm was marching across the last few hundred miles of the eastern Pacific with Seattle in its crosshairs. The prospect for uninterrupted late-night operations was not good.

  “The overture will be this afternoon and evening with rising winds due to a very sharp pressure differential because of the oncoming low. Around midnight, the chorus of rising winds should herald the second movement until they’re out of limits for our operation—above thirty-five to forty knots—with a coda of high overcast as a counterpoint.”

  “You just can’t resist the symphonic metaphor, can you Norm?” Joe Clarkson, one of the newer pilots, needled.

  “Life is a symphony, my son,” Bryarly said, lifting his bushy eyebrows for emphasis. “Now, if there are no more gratuitous and incredibly rude interruptions, the general will continue.”

  “You wish! General, indeed,” Clarkson muttered with a grin.

  “All right. The real storm begins after midnight, and there’s a lot of moisture in this system, so expect high winds and torrential rains along the coast… and no more flying until past noon on Sunday, at the earliest.”

  “You sure of those times, Norm?” another of the pilots asked.

  “I’m never sure of those times. Stay sharp on the radios for any updates I transmit, and do not assume the winds are within limits unless you’re personally certain the windsock over there doesn’t look like a horizontal metal cone. I understand we’ll have two choppers on the ground overnight, Jennifer?” he said, turning to her.

  “Yes. That was the plan.”

  “You might want to rethink that plan, boss lady. You’re going to have to lash those birds down for a gale, and we’re going to get salt spray all over them.”

  Bryarly returned to the sidelines and Jennifer stood to continue the briefing.

  “Look, one more thing, and it’s important. Is everyone fully aware of the earthquake threat we’re under right now?”

  There were nods around the room but serious expressions on no more than half. A bad sign, Jennifer thought.

  “I felt something shaking this morning, but I didn’t turn on the TV,” one of the mechanics said, looking around to see if he’d failed some implicit test of current knowledge.

  There was no time to repeat the myriad seismology lessons she’d absorbed from Doug in order to convince the unconvinced of the seriousness of the threat, but she did her best with a miniature version.

  Gail raised her hand. “Wait, Jennifer, you’re saying that at any minute we could get hit as bad as Anchorage got mauled in ’64?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  Gail Grisham was silent for a few beats. “My mother slid halfway to Turnigan Arm in the wreckage of her house in that quake. She was four months pregnant with me, and she said she thought it was the end of the world because the shaking went on for almost five minutes.”

  “Really?”

  Gail nodded. “Five minutes! That’s forever in an earthquake. My dad was in Seward,” she said quietly. “He didn’t make it.”

  Jennifer felt the uncomfortable silence in the room. The words on her lips were “That’s how serious this could be,” but the message was obvious and she squelched the impulse to say it, opting only for a soft “I’m very sorry to hear that,” to Gail.

  There was an accusatory clock on the back wall reminding her they were already running late. Jennifer marshaled them through the remaining items and was in the process of dismissing everyone when the room shuddered. Worried glances were exchanged as the surface waves arrived seconds later and the building began to sway, gently but distinctly.

  Chapter 11

  BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON 7:34 A.M.

  For a thousand years a massive, unrecorded fault line had lain buried below several miles of sediment in northwestern Washington.

  No one knew that it r
an from west to east and was an integral flaw in the rocky foundation of the port town of Bellingham, nor that it was associated somehow with the Darrington-Devil’s Mountain fault zone to the south.

  The tortured twisting and turning of the rocks, pushed and shoved by the inexorable movement of the entire North American tectonic plate, had long used the ancient shear zone as a kind of geologic battery, storing an impressive amount of seismic energy dangerously close to the surface. The fault line was a hundred miles inland from the Pacific coast and far above the Benioff Zone, and potentially deadly if sustained seismic shaking from a major Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake ever rattled it enough to pull its trigger.

  The first waves from the multiple small quakes along the subduction zone had passed through the trigger point Friday night without harm, but hour by hour the additional seismic waves had jiggled and nudged and excited the same area, slowly working loose whatever lynchpin had been keeping the fault locked and quiet for so long.

  And at thirty minutes past 7 on Saturday morning, one surface wave too many shuddered through the rocks and pulled the pin.

  A cold predawn darkness laced with low clouds and ground fog enfolded the port city of Bellingham as the residents were jolted awake by the massive upthrust. The compression wave from the sudden break four miles below moved straight up, pushing their homes and bedrooms and highways—along with the stately buildings of Western Washington University—essentially into the air with a so-called “acceleration” of just over one gravity.

  The homes of Bellingham, built like most northwestern houses on wood frames, slammed back down precisely where they started, but brittle structures of brick and unreinforced masonry reacted very differently. Chimneys, stucco, brick facades, and concrete slabs cascaded from hundreds of structures as the S waves arrived seconds later to shake the city back and forth. Early morning drivers yanked their cars to the side of the road fearing that their wheels were coming off, and unstable structures that had come through relatively intact from the compression wave now began to disassemble themselves in the side-to-side motion. On the waterfront, wet, saturated soil began to liquify as concrete foundations sitting on them literally began to capsize and sink, accompanied by the bizarre sight of giant cargo cranes rocking back and forth and threatening to topple.

  And on the university campus, fifty-year-old buildings constructed to withstand much smaller quakes began to fail, the walls of Old Main bulging outward seconds before the floors began crashing down in pancake fashion, instantly crushing the six people inside. Hundreds of students crossing the campus on their way to morning classes hit the deck, watching the disaster with disbelieving eyes.

  A tenth of a mile from the geology department, the dean of geophysics sank to the ground to ride it out, recognizing the waves as a major, shallow earthquake, watching the very thing he had long taught could never occur: visible earthquake waves moving across the ground shaking trees and poles and buildings as they wobbled the foundation of the campus.

  Thirty-eight seconds later it was over. Power was out, clouds of dust were rising from wrecked structures, and an eerie silence prevailed. Minutes passed before sirens began wailing and shaken emergency crews ran on wobbly legs to vehicles that had not been damaged or crushed. Slowly, like an injured animal rising shakily and regaining control of its muscles, the community began to come alive in the rubble, as those who were unhurt put aside their stunned reactions and disbelief to come to the rescue of the hundreds of trapped and injured.

  The first broadcast reports were aired in Denver, a thousand miles distant, when the key USGS monitoring station in nearby Golden recorded the seismic signature of what would be measured as a 6.4-magnitude event. Within minutes the telephone computers routing calls to and from Bellingham were overwhelmed and cellular phone towers reached saturation levels with the number of frantic calls flashing back and forth.

  In Olympia, all lines on the bedside phone of Governor Frank O’Brien lit up simultaneously.

  NIGHTINGALE AVIATION OPERATIONS, BOEING FIELD

  Disorientation, Jennifer Lindstrom decided, could be a good thing at times. It was working now like an anesthetic, dulling her senses to the severity of the problems they were dealing with. With two TVs blasting the latest news emerging from the shattered community of Bellingham and the medevac side suddenly called to action, her head was swimming.

  She poured a third cup of coffee and stood back for a few moments, watching her people with admiration. Dan Zalinsky had padded in from the break room where he’d gone for a ten-minute micronap. He looked exhausted after his all-night shift, but he was refusing her order to go home as long as there was a crisis in progress.

  “What’s our medevac status?” he asked.

  She patted him on the shoulder and leaned down slightly to engage him eye to eye.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. How are we?”

  “Well, I just checked with our medevac operations. Emery and Jackson are both orbiting the Bellingham airport, but the visibility up there is almost zero-zero,” she said. “Emery made two approaches without seeing anything. He’s sitting on a hillside right now above the fog, waiting it out. Jackson should be setting down there, too. We’ll probably send the ambulances up the hill to them unless the fog lifts.”

  “Are we the only airborne responders?” Dan asked.

  Jennifer shook her head no as she nibbled on her lower lip, a habit she’d tried to break since childhood. She nibbled when nervous, but internalized pure panic.

  “Are you aware Interstate 5 is cut in three places south of Bellingham?” she asked Dan, who was busy rubbing his eyes.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Two major bridges are down south of Bellingham and a lot of emergency equipment is coming south from Vancouver, and Army helicopters from Fort Lewis are orbiting around up there with us in three Chinooks and two Black Hawks, but they can’t find a safe way down either. The fog’s much thicker there than here.”

  “Wonderful. Say, aren’t you supposed to launch for a Sea-Tac pickup?” he asked.

  “I shuffled the schedule. Dan, what makes you think they’re going to go ahead with the Cascadia inaugural?”

  “I talked with Walker’s assistant about a half hour ago. He knows about Bellingham and the weekend plans are still full speed ahead.”

  “Well, guaranteed the governor won’t be there,” she said.

  “Frank O’Brien? Are you kidding? Jennifer, if there’s a party and money involved for his next campaign, not to mention TV cameras, O’Brien would ignore a nuclear blast and an outbreak of smallpox to be there.” Norm Bryarly, the medevac dispatcher, materialized at their side, a clipboard in hand.

  “Jackson made it on the ground at Bellingham Airport, Emery is on approach now. The ceiling is too low to let them fly underneath it anywhere, so the ambulances are coming to them from the university.”

  “How bad is it up there, Norm?” Jennifer asked.

  “What, the weather?”

  “No, the human damage. And how is this going to affect us?”

  Norm hesitated. Jennifer had inherited him as a senior employee when Sven had suffered his stroke, and he’d known her for years, but there were times for Norm when standing before Jennifer with Sven anywhere in the building was uncomfortable, like having two bosses and being unsure at any moment who was giving the orders.

  But she was expecting a response.

  “It’s nowhere near what we all feared, Jennifer. Maybe a few deaths on the campus where they lost Old Main, their oldest structure. But other than a mess of minor injuries, several fires, and one or two unaccounteds, it may turn out to be a lot less disastrous than we first thought. One Army Chinook is going to follow our birds in, but the others are already headed back to Fort Lewis.”

  Norm returned to the desk as Jennifer nodded with relief. If they could keep everything on the medevac side flying and avoid any charter cancellations, there would be no loss of money, and less
of a chance that her golden opportunity for dazzling her father with a stellar financial year would be screwed up. It wasn’t her first priority, but it was vying for second place. If the figures on the bottom line worked out the way she’d predicted, he would be forced to congratulate her, not just growl that the year had been okay.

  Jennifer walked after Norm, catching his attention as he sat down again behind the charter desk.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got an urgent errand to run. Be back in twenty minutes.”

  He looked startled. “Sure. Okay.”

  “Hold the fort. There’s something I have to have with me tonight.”

  “You want me to find someone else to get… whatever it is?” he asked.

  She shook her head as she scooped up her purse, being careful to maintain the facade of business as usual, as if she always dashed across town thirty minutes prior to every mission. Better that, she thought, than admit to the embarrassment of poor planning.

  ON APPROACH, BELLINGHAM INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  Knowing the other Nightingale EC-135 Eurocopter had broken out of the fog was reassuring. Jenny Jackson had been on the instrument landing sys tem approach—the ILS—before reaching legal minimums, but as chief pilot Eric Emery reached the same decision height in his EC-135 two hundred feet above the surface, there was absolutely nothing but gray fog ahead of him.

  Eric increased his blade pitch and engine speed of the twin-engine helicopter and began the go-around, his suspicions blooming into anger as he thought about Jenny’s apparent success minutes before. Jackson’s tendency to press the limits had raised his concerns before. This time she’d pushed too far for anyone’s good and obviously brought her helicopter down in almost zero-zero conditions.

  She probably didn’t see the runway until she bounced on it, he thought, aware his teeth were grinding. Worse, she had enticed him to try it as if it was completely clear below 250 feet. The possibility he might have to fire her was already distracting his mind.