Cascadia's Fault

by Jerry Thompson

  When he turned out to be right—the quake struck two weeks later—Gu’s report would retroactively be proclaimed the official “short-term” prediction of the Haicheng earthquake.

  At the time of the mid-January conference in Beijing, though, higher-ups were not so sure. They decided to soften Gu’s warning with a significant fudge factor. The final statement changed his prediction from a magnitude 6 within six months—possibly even two months—to a more vague magnitude 5 to 6 some time “in this year.” After the late December false alarms, the sense of urgency had started to fade. Rumors had spread that the filling of a nearby reservoir was the likely cause of the swarm of smaller tremors in December, so life in northeastern China started to return to a semblance of normalcy. The seismic threat momentarily fell off the radar for some public officials.

  Oddly enough, the number of reports of bizarre animal behaviors increased during mid- to late January. In the month before the quake more than a hundred snake sightings were recorded. What did modern-day scientists think of the snake stories? Kelin Wang and his coauthors commented that “although they must represent a tiny fraction of the total snake population in southern Liaoning, such suicidal behavior is extremely difficult to explain. What the snakes and other animals sensed is not known. It could be as simple as vibrations caused by earthquake tremors that were not detected by the then very sparse seismic network.”

  Along with the snakes, frogs were now coming out of their hibernation dens and freezing to death. Horses, chickens, and cows were making a racket that was duly noted by the cadre of amateur observers. Rats and mice were running around, seemingly disoriented, oblivious to cats and unafraid of people.

  According to ancient Chinese lore, all of these animal anomalies were considered portents of a coming shock and people took them seriously, reporting the incidents to various observatories and government offices where men like Cao Xianqing jotted them down in logbooks. In the month before the quake he cranked out sixteen issues of his “Briefing Notes” to the county government. Cao had taken to heart a book about the Ningxia event of January 3, 1739. The book spelled out a series of circumstances and events that Cao could see unfolding before him every day of January 1975.

  One significant passage apparently convinced him the time was near. “Earthquakes occur mostly in winter or spring. If well water suddenly turns muddy, there is lasting cannonlike sound from the ground, gangs of dogs bark furiously, one should be mindful of earthquakes. Excessive autumn rain will surely be followed by a winter earthquake.” Cao knew it had rained a lot in the fall of 1974. In 1975, according to the Chinese calendar, February 4 would be the last day of winter and thus Cao decided there was no time to waste.

  In late January, with disaster fever on the wane in some circles, Cao ramped up his own activities. While others were breathing a sigh of relief about the false alarms, he used his position as head of the Yingkou County Earthquake Office to accelerate preparations for the coming disaster. According to an entry in his logbook on January 28, Cao had already organized a twenty-one-person rescue team, a sixteen-person transportation team, twenty-five thousand kilograms of baked foods, a thousand winter jackets, ten thousand pairs of winter shoes, a thousand winter hats, and a thousand cotton quilts in anticipation of a large wintertime earthquake.

  From his office in Dashiqiao, Cao maintained frequent telephone contact with the nearby Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory, where a seismograph and a tiltmeter were being monitored day and night. On the first two days of February, several small tremors—too small to be felt by people living in the area—were detected by the team at Shipengyu and while these minor tremors did not cause any alarm at first, the amplitude of the shockwaves seemed to increase with each new event. They were briefly noted in the station’s logbook and Cao kept track of the rumbling as well.

  Then a sudden surge of tectonic vibration began on the evening of February 3 and from that moment on things began to happen in rapid succession. A series of small rumbles bloomed into a rash of tremors. This burst of seismicity truly did alarm the workers at Shipengyu, who began a flurry of phone calls to notify the Party Committee, the army, city and county officials, and the Liaoning provincial Earthquake Office to “enhance preparation” for a larger quake.

  At the same time they fielded a steady stream of incoming reports from communes and amateur observers with details of tumbled chimneys, fallen gables, and broken windows. Cao himself called Shipengyu to report that water in a dozen wells had dropped twelve to twenty inches (30–50 cm) during the evening, that several other wells that had contained water during the day were now completely dry, and that horses and chickens were making a lot of noise and trying to escape.

  By eight o’clock the next morning—February 4, 1975—there had been two hundred tremors, culminating in a magnitude 5.1 event at 7:51 a.m. At 8:15 a.m., seven members of the Party Committee of Yingkou County held an extended emergency meeting at Cao’s urging. When he summarized the overnight flurry of tremors and damage reports and announced that a large earthquake “may occur today during the day or in the evening,” he must have made a convincing case. Immediately after the meeting the committee—without waiting for approval or instructions from higher authority—issued its own sternly worded statement canceling all business and production work, all public meetings, all entertainment, and all sporting activities immediately.

  Miles away at the Liaoning provincial Earthquake Office a simultaneous 8:00 a.m. meeting was taking place in which head scientist Zhu Fengming explained the worrisome overnight data to higher-up Party officials. In a bulletin issued just after midnight, Zhu had cautioned them that “the magnitudes are still increasing” and “a relatively large earthquake is very likely to follow.” Nothing quite this urgent had ever been written in previous reports at the provincial level. But the tone was still several notches below the intensity of alarm that Cao Xianqing was raising with local county officials in Dashiqiao.

  When Kelin Wang interviewed Zhu and his colleagues in 2004, the senior scientist and his fellow workers in the provincial office confided that none of them had attempted—or felt they were able—to predict a rupture on a given day. By “very likely to follow,” Zhu told Wang he meant “a timeframe of one to two weeks.” Basically, Zhu was the cautious scientist and Cao was more the gambler. Cao turned out to be right, but he never could explain how his prediction was made. Despite the contrast between Zhu’s conservative warning and Cao’s bold campaign to evacuate, Chinese officials would later credit Zhu and his provincial colleagues with having made the “imminent prediction” of the Haicheng earthquake.

  The Revolutionary Committee of Liaoning province organized a ninety-minute meeting for two o’clock that afternoon in the Haicheng guesthouse, to be attended by a dozen government officials from Haicheng and Yingkou Counties—Cao Xianqing among them—along with an army officer from the People’s Liberation Army troop that was deployed in the area. During the meeting Li Fuxiang from the provincial Earthquake Office estimated a magnitude 6 or greater “may occur within the next few days.” Again, not quite the strong message that Cao was delivering in his hometown. While he attended the somewhat inconclusive two o’clock meeting, the evacuation of buildings in Dashiqiao and Yingkou County was already well underway.

  Throughout the afternoon Cao continued to announce that a large shockwave would occur that day. Word was spread by telephone calls to communes and production brigades and by loudspeaker broadcasts in the streets. When the swarm of small tremors recorded at Shipengyu hit 501—and then went quiet—late in the afternoon, Cao’s intuition told him this was the calm before the storm, the final energy build-up before the big rupture. He was heard to say that the later the quake occurred the larger it would be, a magnitude “seven at seven o’clock and eight at eight o’clock.” Hearing this, some of the more senior scientists smirked at Cao’s homespun certainty.

  Meanwhile, Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory workers had been spreading the word as well. They convinced
the movie operator of the nearby Shipengyu Production Brigade that a jolt was coming that night, so word went out that there would be movies that evening. Movies in the village were always projected outdoors. The hope was that people would be attracted away from their houses—another spontaneous, local decision that definitely saved lives.

  Cao and his colleagues faced another, more daunting challenge that evening. With the Chinese New Year approaching on February 11, the city of Anshan had dispatched a leading cadre and a greeting delegation to Cao’s hometown of Dashiqiao to express good wishes and to give a stage performance to entertain a headquarters delegation from the 39th Army stationed there.

  Because of the prediction, army officials had to decide whether or not to go ahead with the evening’s festivities, scheduled for 7:00 p.m. Simply canceling was not an option since the Anshan delegation was already in town. The ranking army commander was said to be furious about the situation. He decided to cancel the stage performance, but he did insist that the greeting ceremony proceed as planned—a sign of respect for the high-level delegates who had traveled all the way to Dashiqiao. Just to be on the safe side, all seven doors of the assembly hall were kept wide open on a cold winter’s night.

  Come seven o’clock, Anshan’s leading cadre delivered a mercifully brief speech, the army brass expressed their gratitude, and the whole affair was wrapped up by 7:20 p.m. In keeping with protocol, high-ranking officers and the cadre who sat on stage left the building first. Nearly a thousand in the audience patiently followed in an orderly fashion, the last few walking out the door at exactly 7:36 p.m.—just as the magnitude 7.3 Haicheng earthquake began. The assembly hall collapsed in a heap of rubble.

  The rupture occurred near the boundary line between Haicheng and Yingkou Counties, a left-lateral slip on a northwest-trending “blind” fault (one that did not show at the surface) that was not known to exist before the earthquake. It did not occur on the southern peninsula along the segment of the Jinzhou fracture zone they’d been watching so closely. The epicenter turned out to be 125 miles (200 km) northeast of there—between Dashiqiao and Haicheng—only twelve miles (20 km) away from the Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory. The shockwaves caused extensive ground failure and liquefaction in both counties, with widespread destruction to buildings and infrastructure in dozens of villages and towns in a rural–urban region with a population of roughly a million.

  Early casualty and damage reports were both convoluted and classified. For some reason it was customary in China to record living space in rural communities by the number of individual rooms but in urban centers by square area (including schools, offices, and factories). So rather than count the total number of buildings wrecked, a secret document on the Haicheng incident reported 17,497,342 square yards (14,630,000 m2) of urban living space and 1,840,000 rural rooms had been damaged or destroyed. More than 6.5 million feet (2 million meters) of various transportation lines and pipelines were damaged, more than seven hundred hydraulic facilities and two thousand bridges were damaged, and seventy square miles (180 km2) of farmland were wrecked by liquefaction and sand fountains. The total economic loss was estimated to be at least a billion yuan.

  The reported death toll, a number both political and vague, was also kept secret until after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the immediate aftermath phrases like “a few fatalities” in a population of a million people appeared in press releases from the official Chinese news agency. In 1988, when a Chinese researcher with better access to original documents reported a death toll of 1,328, skeptics in the West immediately pounced on the so-called discrepancy as evidence that the whole story of the Haicheng prediction was a gross exaggeration.

  One skeptic in particular, Robert J. Geller, an American seismologist on the faculty at the University of Tokyo and a vehement doubter of the value and practicality of seismic forecasting worldwide, commented that “the large disparity between the reports of 1975 and 1988 casts doubt on claims for the Haicheng prediction.” Kelin Wang and his colleagues in 2004 pointed out that there was no real discrepancy. It was simply a case of China not releasing the early details to foreigners in the 1970s.

  In March, a month after the rupture, Party officials launched a publicity campaign with a news release that said, “The earthquake-work team of our country predicted this earthquake; under the unified leadership of the Liaoning Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the Party [members], government, army, and masses in the epicentral area took timely and effective preventative measures, so that losses caused by the earthquake in this densely populated area were greatly reduced. This is a vivid demonstration of the superiority of our country’s socialist system. This is a great victory of Chairman Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line!”

  In other words the exact number of deaths didn’t really matter. What counted, in the minds of Chairman Mao’s publicity machine, was that China’s ability to mobilize the masses to tackle a complex scientific challenge had paid off. A natural disaster that could have killed many more did not.

  When Kelin Wang and company were allowed to see previously secret documents in 2004, a new and presumably more accurate set of numbers could be compiled for the first time. Combining “direct” and “indirect” causes—many died from fires and as many as 372 died from hypothermia, freezing to death outside just like the snakes—the total death toll for the Haicheng earthquake became 2,041 and the total number of people injured was 24,538.

  To make the evacuation story look even more impressive, some news releases described the total region affected as having more than eight million people. Even if the population in the epicentral area was really closer to a million—the original figure cited by most authorities—at 2,041, the number of deaths is still quite small given the collapse of so many houses. A report by the U.S. delegation of scientists who visited the disaster zone in 1977 estimated that “casualties in excess of 100,000 would have ordinarily been anticipated.”

  It’s safe to say the Chinese government had a success story worthy of bragging about even without fudging the numbers. The political turmoil of the late 1970s, however, affected the publicity machine that took over in the wake of Haicheng. The context, as Kelin Wang explained it, was that “with Chairman Mao’s health deteriorating, friction between the Gang of Four and other Party leaders, including Mao’s would-be successor, Hua Guofeng, intensified.” Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and her three allies in the Gang of Four were running the publicity campaign, but Hua Guofeng had his own agenda and an element of the truth may have been the first casualty.

  As vice-premier, Hua was among the first to heap praise on the workers based at the Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory for their stellar efforts to warn the community about the rash of foreshocks—now known to have been true precursors of the big jolt. Followers of the Gang of Four, on the other hand, issued news releases that stressed the leadership role of provincial Party officials with little or no mention of Shipengyu, much less of Cao Xianqing. To make the most of this singular propaganda opportunity, it was evidently better to avoid the devilish details.

  The prediction was real yet the results of the evacuation were uneven. Yingkou County’s warning was spread far and wide from early that morning, thanks to the single-mindedness of Cao and his team. In Haicheng County the warnings began later in the day, many decisions to evacuate were made spur of the moment by local committees or individuals at the work brigade or commune level, and some parts of the province—including the town of Haicheng itself—were not evacuated at all. The death toll in Haicheng County was substantially higher than in Yingkou. Thus it became a question of who got the greater credit, or who deserved the blame.

  Three months after the disaster, when Vice-Premier Hua delivered a speech at the next national quake prediction conference, he told the famous story of the evacuation of delegates from the meeting hall that night in Dashiqiao just as the ground started to shake. “An officer who was directing people to exit was injured,” said Hua, “but the
rest of the one thousand people were all safe.” And who made the prediction the army commanders took so seriously, the prediction that saved so many lives? Hua Guofeng said it was the Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory. The Gang of Four, had they attended the conference, would no doubt have touted Party bureaucrats.

  Cao Xianqing insisted it was his Earthquake Office that provided the vital first warning. No doubt the army brass heard about it from several sources, but Cao’s prediction turned out to be the most specific and timely. Perhaps because he was not a trained scientist and could not provide a detailed technical explanation for his decisions—how much was science and how much was instinct?—or perhaps because he was a lowly county official rather than a provincial bigwig, he did not get anointed as a hero of the Haicheng saga. In the feuding between Hua and the Gang of Four, Cao received no official recognition, no meritorious service awards. When China bragged about the world’s first successful seismic prediction and evacuation, the story of Cao Xianqing and his Yingkou County Earthquake Office was not told to the outside world.

  The lingering question was and still is whether the prediction had any scientific merit. When Kelin Wang and his colleagues published their findings in 2006, they found that “the most important precursor was a foreshock sequence, but other anomalies such as geodetic deformation, changes in groundwater level, color, and chemistry, and peculiar animal behavior also played a role.” In essence, they wrote, “None of these predictions can be scientifically explained.”