by John Dvorak
EARTHQUAKE STORMS
the fascinating history and volatile future of the san andreas fault
John Dvorak
Dedicated to my father,
who always has a story to tell,
and to my mother,
who has always had the patience to listen to my father’s stories.
Contents
Prologue: The Swimmer
Chapter 1: A Noble Earthquake
Chapter 2: No Occasion for Alarm
Chapter 3: A Tumult of Motions and Noises
Chapter 4: Bridging “the Golden Gate”
Chapter 5: Blue Cut and the Mormon Rocks
Chapter 6: The Troubled World of Charles Richter
Chapter 7: Of Petrol and Pinnacles
Chapter 8: A Transformative Idea
Chapter 9: To Quake or Not to Quake
Chapter 10: Ancient Tremors
Chapter 11: Disassembling California
Chapter 12: Earthquake Storms
Epilogue: Bodega Bay
Image Gallery
Acknowledgments
Index
The whole world quaked …
—Homer, Iliad
Prologue
The Swimmer
Every earthquake is a surprise.
—Anonymous
I have often wondered—and envied—at the peculiar way Clarence Judson contributed to the study of earthquakes. A 36-year-old mechanic for United Railroads in San Francisco, he was following a daily routine of rising during the darkness of early morning and, after donning a robe, shoes, and a hat, careful not to wake his wife or two-year-old son or twin infant daughters, setting out for a brisk swim in the nearby waters of the frigid Pacific Ocean.
It was mid-April and the walk to the shore was a short one. The Judsons had lived for two years in a modest clapboard house two blocks from the ocean in what was a sparsely settled development known then and today as Ocean Beach.
On his way, Clarence Judson crossed a recently paved road that city planners had designated “The Great Highway”—a moniker that it still has today—then climbed over a short ridge of sand dunes and continued down to the beach.
He disrobed at the edge of the water and watched the waves before he entered. They were coming in sideways, in broken sets, the larger ones running up high, then pulling back. Judson later described them as “clawing at the beach.”
He waded into the water up to his armpits and was ready to swim when a roller, larger than most, lifted him up, then set him down on his feet. A few moments passed and he prepared himself again to swim when, without warning and without any visible disturbance on the water surface, a great slap hit him across his entire body.
The slap stunned him and he started to go under. He struggled and somehow reached the surface just in time to suffer a second slap, then a third.
Now tumbling and his lungs filling with seawater, he fought desperately, able to summon enough energy to drag himself up onto the beach. Then the bizarre and most memorable part of his ordeal began.
Frightened by what had already happened, he tried to run to where his shoes and hat and robe lay, but discovered his legs refused to work. They shuddered uncontrollably—and he thought he must be paralyzed.
Surprised when he could move his legs again, he looked down and saw that the sand directly beneath his feet was filled with a phosphorous glow. Afraid his feet might be burned, he took off running, noticing that each step produced another incandescent strike.
When he reached his clothes, he tried to dress but was thrown down as the ground started to shake violently. This time he realized it was a terrible earthquake. His thoughts shifted to his family and he knew he had to get back to them.
The ground shook for almost a minute. As soon as it ended, Judson rose and dressed and raced back over the ridge of sand dunes and across the new paved road, which he noticed was badly cracked. He ran at top speed, past houses that were now tilted, some having shifted off their foundations.
When he arrived home, he found his wife frantic and his children crying. He tried to calm them, but a rumor soon came from a neighbor that said a giant sea wave might follow the quake. So the Judsons gathered what they could in blankets and, carrying these few possessions, joined other neighbors in an exodus, moving a few dozen blocks inland where they would camp for the next two nights.
As Clarence Judson and his family and their neighbors made their way, they could see dark clouds billowing up a few miles to the east. Later that afternoon, they would learn, as the rest of the world did, that San Francisco had been crippled that morning by a major earthquake—and that, because gas lines had been disrupted and chimneys had collapsed and the pipes that were to feed water to the city had broken, fires were now raging out of control, and the great city, home of nearly half a million, was burning to the ground.
Even today, much that Judson experienced that April morning in 1906—the wave slaps, the phosphorescent sand—has not been explained by science, an indication that our understanding of earthquakes is still in its infancy. And yet much has been learned since the infamous San Francisco earthquake, much of that knowledge gained by studying the San Andreas Fault, the same fault that ruptured that morning more than 100 years ago and caused roadways to crumble and houses to lean.
It was only after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that most scientists finally realized that earthquakes were caused by the sliding of great crustal blocks against each other and not, as many had favored, by subterranean volcanic explosions. Four years after the San Francisco disaster, after a detailed study of the effects of the earthquake had been published, scientists also realized that earthquakes were powered by the release of elastic energy stored within the Earth, though how the energy had accumulated would remain a mystery for another half century. Not until the advent of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s would this and many other major mysteries about the Earth be solved.
Plate tectonics—the idea that the Earth’s outer shell consists of a dozen or so mobile plates that collide or spread apart or slide horizontally past each other—would explain why earthquakes are so prevalent in California. In short, the tectonic plate that includes most of the continent of North America is moving, ever so slowly though constantly, westward, while the one that comprises most of the Pacific basin is moving, also at an excruciatingly slow pace, to the northwest. This difference in direction has caused a great fracture to form—the San Andreas Fault. It was movement along a segment of this fault that caused the 1906 earthquake.
Running for 800 miles from the redwood forests of Cape Mendocino southward to the rugged Sonoran Desert on the east edge of the Salton Sea near the border with Mexico, the San Andreas Fault passes beneath dozens of communities and close to two of the nation’s largest cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It lies under major highways, pipelines, and crucial aqueducts. Scores of housing developments have been platted directly over it.
The fault is most readily apparent as an unusual alignment of river systems and valleys. In northern California, the Gualala and Garcia Rivers lie along it. In central California, the fault runs through narrow Bear Valley east of Point Reyes and through the fault’s namesake, the San Andreas Valley. In the southern part of the state, picturesque Cuddy Valley and Leona Valley and arid Lone Pine Canyon mark its trend. The fault is responsible for the formation of both Cajon Pass and San Gregorio Pass, two vital corridors that link Los Angeles with the rest of North America. It is responsible for several desert oases and its trace can be seen, with a trained eye, from Palm Springs.
The words “San Andreas” are so well known that they have become
synonymous with the stereotypical fast lifestyle that is California—and with seismic destruction—though many perceptions about the fault are in error.
Technically, the San Andreas Fault is not the plate boundary between the North American and Pacific plates; instead, it is a major component of that boundary. The plate boundary actually reaches across a vast region that stretches from the Pacific coast to Colorado, New Mexico, and west Texas.
The San Andreas Fault is also a relatively young geological feature—as well as a transient one—when compared to other major geologic features, such as the Black Hills of South Dakota, which began to rise about 50 million years ago, or the basins filled by the Great Lakes, which began to sag hundreds of millions of years ago. By comparison, the current strand of the fault is a few million years old. The oldest segments of it are only 25 million years old and can be found in the mountains north and east of Los Angeles.
And, contrary to popular opinion, a major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault will not cause California to fall into the ocean. Instead, the San Andreas Fault and its many subsidiary faults are slowly tearing California apart, so that much of what is California today will be transformed into a collection of islands that are destined to be rafted northward across the Pacific.
Of obvious interest and concern is what will happen along the fault in the near future. On this question, scientists are in agreement: The last few hundred years have been a period of relative seismic calm in California. The calm cannot last, because the elastic energy that is building up as the Pacific and the North American plates grind against each other must be released. And that release can occur in only one way—as large earthquakes.
We also know from a study of the San Andreas Fault and its many subsidiary faults—the Hayward Fault, the Hollywood Fault, the Newport-Inglewood Fault, the San Jacinto Fault—that earthquakes do not occur randomly, nor do they reoccur like clockwork. Instead, large earthquakes can occur as clusters. And when a cluster of large earthquakes strikes over a period of, say, 100 years or so, there is an “earthquake storm.”
Admittedly, such prolonged, intense periods of seismic activity in a single region are rare. A recent storm struck northern Turkey between 1939 and 1999 when 13 major earthquakes hit. One is probably going on now in central Asia where ten major earthquakes have hit the Szechuan region since 1893. In both cases—in Turkey along the North Anatolian Fault and in China along the Xianshuihe and Longmenchan Faults—the tectonic setting is similar to the San Andreas system of faults. And so an earthquake storm in California is a real possibility.
But how did we get to this realization? How did we arrive at our current understanding of the San Andreas Fault—and of earthquakes in general?
For the San Andreas Fault, it began decades before Clarence Judson made his fateful swim in the Pacific Ocean in 1906. In fact, it began, as much of the modern history of California does, with a quest for gold.
Chapter 1
A Noble Earthquake
We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
On Wednesday morning, November 14, 1860, the Golden Age, a steamer from Panama, arrived in San Francisco. On the dock was a phalanx of city and state officials anxious to greet the ship’s most anticipated passenger, Josiah Dwight Whitney of Northampton, Massachusetts.
Whitney, now 40, strong and stout with a ring of whiskers and a head of thinning hair, arrived with his wife of six years, the former Louisa Goddard of Manchester, England, their four-year-old daughter, Eleanor, and a long-time family maid, who, for the convenience of Mrs. Whitney’s parrot, had agreed to be called “Mary.”
Also traveling with Whitney were four young men who would be his assistants. There was Michael Eagan, who could do anything from camp cooking to laboratory chores. There were two recent college graduates, William Brewer and William Ashburner, who would serve as Whitney’s scientific staff. The fourth man, only 19 and extremely near-sighted, was Chester Averill, whose family had sent him to California with Whitney as punishment for a student prank he had committed at Yale. Whitney would use him in a variety of ways—as a clerk, a mule driver, a barometrical reader, and a general factotum. Averill, for all his early misbehavior, would prove himself to be a most efficient and useful man.
At dockside, after the exchange of pleasantries and much fanfare, Whitney’s wife, their daughter, and the maid were ushered to a private residence that had been prepared for them and where the Whitney family would reside for the next four years. Meanwhile, Josiah Whitney and his four assistants were taken to their new offices on the Montgomery block in the financial district of San Francisco so that they could begin work immediately—to compiling and completing a geological survey of the entire state of California.
The need for such a survey was self-evident among those who charged themselves with ensuring California’s—and their own—financial future. The discovery of gold in 1848 had set off a race for riches, but gold production peaked quickly, so that by the end of the first decade it was barely half what it had been at the maximum. This worried the economic and political leaders of California who knew that new gold strikes were being made elsewhere—at the Comstock Lode in Nevada and near Pike’s Peak in Colorado, both in 1858, and at Bodie, California, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in 1859—discoveries that convinced them that additional mineral riches must also still lie within their state. It was just a matter of finding them. But because it seemed that every sand bank of every stream had already been sluiced and every stone that lay in every outwash plain had been overturned and examined, it was agreed that a more concerted, less haphazard approach had to be taken. And so it was decided that the state of California would hire a bona fide rock expert. But how to find one?
Though several California miners clamored for the job, no less a political figure than the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, Stephen Johnson Field, decided he would search outside the state for the right man. Justice Field wrote to the presidents of several major colleges on the East Coast, asking who was the country’s foremost authority on mineral ores. The responses were unanimous: Josiah Whitney, author of the widely acclaimed The Metallic Wealth of the United States.
Originally educated as a chemist at Yale College, after his graduation Whitney was taken aside by his father, who told his son that it was time he chose a profession, one that would insure sufficient income to support himself and a family. The law, his father said, would be an appropriate one. At first, Whitney dutifully followed his father’s advice—until he met and had a private conversation with the man who was regarded as the greatest geologist of the age, Charles Lyell of King’s College in London.
It was 1841 and Whitney was headed to Cambridge and preparing to enter Harvard Law School when he heard that Lyell, author of the influential and highly popular Principles of Geology, first published in 1830, was giving a lecture at the Odeon Theater in Boston. Whitney attended, as did more than a thousand other people. Lyell, unfortunately, had a cold that night and he spoke hesitantly and slowly. Yet despite these faults, Lyell displayed a clarity of thought that carried his audience, including Whitney. Afterwards, Whitney sought out the great man and spent an hour with him. Whitney left convinced that he should forgo a study of the law and pursue the more adventurous—though obviously less financially rewarding—science of geology. Perhaps, Lyell suggested, Whitney might make a living if he focused on the search for ore deposits.
Whitney took the advice and, though his father objected, spent the next five years in Europe, traveling through England, France, Germany, and Italy. He developed a special interest in mountains, crossing the Alps five times in five different places. He spent time in Russia, traveling as far east as Moscow. In all of these countries, he sought out authorities and discussed with them theories about the growth of mountains, the development of canyons, and the causes of eruptions and earthquakes. In 1847, six years
after meeting Lyell, Whitney completed his tour of Europe and returned to the United States, where he found work searching for copper deposits on the upper peninsula of Michigan. That led him to compile all that was known of the mineral wealth of the United States, which he published in book form in 1854.
In 1855, he began working for the state of Iowa, looking for mineral wealth. In 1859, the state of Wisconsin hired him to search for iron and lead deposits. He spent winter months preparing reports at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts. In the spring of 1860, a letter arrived from Chief Justice Field offering him the newly created position of California’s state geologist. Seeing an opportunity to work in the most mineral-rich state in the union, Whitney accepted immediately.
Just five days after his arrival in San Francisco, Whitney traveled by a special buggy to Sacramento for a private meeting with Governor John Downey, a Los Angeles man. During the meeting, the governor assured Whitney that he and his assistants could go anywhere—on public or private lands—request anyone’s assistance, use any conveyance—they were given free passage on any train that ran within the state and on any ship that sailed along the coast or the inland waters—and could call upon any resource to complete their geologic survey and to prepare their reports.
The governor also had a personal request. Reports had recently arrived in Sacramento that a deposit of tin ore of “fabulous wealth” had been discovered in the southern part of the state near modern-day Riverside. Could Whitney keep the governor personally advised as to the potential of this discovery?
Whitney said he could not; he told the governor that whatever he learned about California’s geology would be available to everyone equally and at the same time. His refusal—so William Brewer, one of the assistants, would write later—was the beginning of what, over the years, would develop into a full-blown antagonism between the governor and the men of California’s Geological Survey.
