Earthquake Storms

by John Dvorak

  His effort required several years, and he published his catalogue in several installments. In the fourth installment, published in 1858, he coined the word “seismology” to describe this and his other work on earthquakes.

  Mallet’s catalogue in its completed form contained 6,831 events, giving the date, the location, a brief description, and the source. The first entry in the catalogue is the earthquake noted by Moses when he received the Law on Mount Sinai and, according to Exodus 19:18, “… the whole mount quaked greatly.” The first nonbiblical earthquake comes from a source quoted by Aristotle, which Mallet lists as occurring in 1450 b.c. when in central Italy “a city was swallowed up, and a lake produced in its place.” The earliest event listed that occurred outside Europe was in China in 175 b.c.

  Notwithstanding the questionable reliability of some of the early entries, Mallet’s catalogue—and its many descendants—has proven to be a valuable resource for scholars working in other fields. For example, there has been a long-standing question as to when Shakespeare wrote one of his most famous plays, Romeo and Juliet. The answer, it seems, can be found in Mallet’s earthquake catalogue.

  In Act I, Scene 3, the Nurse makes the statement “Tis since the earthquake now eleven years.” Most scholars took this to be a reference to an earthquake felt throughout England, especially at London, Dover, and the whole of Kent, late on the afternoon of April 6, 1580. Shakespeare undoubtedly felt it. And so, it was reasoned, this was the earthquake that prompted the comment by the Nurse. If so, then Romeo and Juliet must have been written in 1591, but those who are expert on the bard’s changing style say this is at least a few years too early.

  Mallet’s catalogue suggests another possibility. An earthquake on the afternoon of March 1, 1584, was felt strongly throughout Switzerland, eastern France, and northern Italy, the last including Verona, where the play is staged—but not in England. William Covell, an English clergyman and critic who often praised Shakespeare’s works, was in northern Italy at the time of the earthquake, describing the event as “the terrible Earthquake” that “moved the lesser plants,” and it might have been he who described the event to Shakespeare, who then incorporated it into the play he was writing at the time. In this case, Romeo and Juliet must have been written in 1595, a year that does conform to the bard’s style of the time and is two years before the first publication of the play, which was in 1597.

  Mallet did not compile the first earthquake catalogue—that distinction belongs to Florentine humanist Giannozzo Manetti who, in 1457, published a catalogue of 70 earthquakes in Italy that occurred from antiquity to the mid-15th century—but at the time, Mallet’s work was by far the most extensive. And then he did something that no one had yet done—he used it to make a map of worldwide seismicity.

  Instead of plotting the location of individual earthquakes, which is the standard today, he applied three different shades of color to the map to distinguish the intensity of activity. The lightest shade showed where only minor shocks occurred that did not produce serious commotion or destruction; the darkest shade indicated where earthquakes were numerous and violent. Looking at the general pattern, Mallet got it exactly right.

  Mallet identified two great belts of seismicity. One, in his words, followed “a vast loop or band round the Pacific,” while the other was a broad zone that ran from the East Indies across southern Asia through the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The “loop” is today’s familiar Pacific Ring of Fire, where not only earthquakes but volcanic eruptions are common. The broad zone is where mountain masses are forming—the Himalayas, the Zagros of Iran, the Taurus of Turkey, the Apennines of Italy, and the Atlas of northern Morocco. Today we know that 90% of all the seismic energy released inside the Earth occurs along these two belts. It is the details that one quibbles with Mallet.

  Mallet’s map equates the level of seismic activity in California and in New England, identifying both as “minor.” It is an idea that did not last long. In the 1860s, the decade after Mallet published his map, two damaging earthquakes struck near San Francisco, and California was on its way to becoming known as earthquake country. But if one consults his catalogue—and the catalogues published later—one finds that the most intense seismic activity to strike the United States in the 19th century did not occur in California—or along either coast—but at midcontinent, close to where the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Tennessee Rivers come together.

  According to Mallet’s catalogue, on December 16, 1811, “the disturbance of this region now commenced.” The initial shock, which occurred early in the morning, was felt over most of the eastern United States. In Washington, D.C., Dolley Madison, the president’s wife, felt the shaking and wrote of it to her sister. In Pensacola, Florida, people were awakened when they heard their houses crack, then watched as doors and window shutters moved. In Springfield, Illinois, the shaking was strong enough to stop clocks. In Nashville, some chimneys were thrown down. And in the frontier town of New Madrid in southeast Missouri, trees shook so violently that branches snapped and fell to the ground.

  The activity persisted, the people of New Madrid feeling individual shocks daily, sometimes hourly, for months. The next violent shock came on January 6, 1812, when, according to Mallet, “the town of New Madrid was greatly injured.” This earthquake too was felt across the country.

  John James Audubon was riding a horse through west Kentucky when the earthquake hit. He heard a distant rumbling and thought it was a tornado. He tried to spur his horse, but the animal refused to move. He dismounted just at the time when all the shrubs and trees began to move and the ground rose and fell “like the ruffled waters of a lake.” He knew it was an earthquake from descriptions he had read but, as he would reflect, “What is a description compared with reality?” The shaking lasted about a minute. Then, everything calm, the horse responded again to his commands and he continued on his travels.

  The most severe event of the series, which quickly became known as the “hard shock” by the people of New Madrid, came early on the morning of February 7. A boatman named Matthias Speed had tied his boat to a willow bar on the Mississippi River near New Madrid the previous night. At about three o’clock, he was awakened by the violent agitation of the boat. To his shock, he came to realize that not only was the water rising, but the Mississippi River was flowing the wrong way!

  It took an entire day for the river to resume its normal course and for the water to drop to the level of the previous day. By then—and Matthias Speed was one of the few who witnessed its formation—a new lake, 15 miles long and 5 miles wide, known today as Reelfoot Lake, had formed on the east side of the Mississippi River at the base of the Chickasaw Bluffs in western Tennessee. The stumps and roots of trees killed by the sudden drowning can still be found projecting above the lake surface in shallower areas.

  Such stories—and they were many because, as Mallet knew, earthquakes are common in the United States—showed that the people of the United States had a knowledge of such events. But they did not consider their earthquakes to be destructive, unlike the ones that happened in places like Lisbon in 1755 or seemed to strike Japan repeatedly. That is, not until 1886, when the first major seismic disaster hit the country. And it did not occur in California, but in a place that few people today associate with earthquakes—South Carolina.

  At ten minutes to ten o’clock on the Sunday night of August 31, 1886, a gentle vibration was felt by many of those who were still awake in Charleston, South Carolina. A young boy who 20 years later would find himself in San Francisco to experience that city’s great earthquake, recalled that this initial vibration reminded him “of when a cat trots across the floor.” But the slightness of the disturbance was short-lived. Within seconds, the house he was inside was shaken by a sharp jolt. He watched out a window as people, frantic with terror, rushed into the streets, some of them crushed and later dying after chimneys and brick walls fell on them. Then, as the bo
y, now a man, recalled years later, there was “a final mighty wrench” and the shaking was over almost as suddenly as it had begun.

  The city was left with many of its wood-framed houses with a permanent tilt, a feature that became known as the “Charleston lean.” Some of these houses can still be seen today and can be found in the historic district of Charleston. Inside, new floors have been constructed over the old inclined ones.

  As expected, the city suffered a setback. Not a single building in Charleston escaped unscathed—and most were seriously damaged. The official number of fatalities was initially reported as 60, though later estimates put it at twice that number.

  It was the most destructive earthquake yet recorded in the eastern United States. More than half the population of the country felt the shaking, with reports coming from as far away as Davenport, Iowa; Green Bay, Wisconsin; and Burlington on Lake Champlain in Vermont.

  The distant shaking made it possible to make an important scientific measurement—the first of its kind for an earthquake. In 1883, just three years before the quake, to satisfy a need for train conductors to have synchronized watches so that they could avoid the collision of train engines—a deadly collision had already happened in New England—standardized time zones were established. And so, at the time of the Charleston earthquake, many households and businesses across the country and many men had their clocks and pocket watches set precisely. That meant that when the seismic wave spread across the country, stopping pendulum clocks and causing men to look at their watches, dozens of good time records were available. From this, it was an easy matter to compute the average speed the earthquake shock waves traveled, which was determined to be three and one-fourth miles per second, confirming Mallet’s early estimate.

  Neither the events at New Madrid nor the Charleston disaster led to any immediate interest in earthquakes, probably because neither area had persistent seismic activity. That was not true of California, where, since the mid-1860s, it was recognized that such activity was frequent—certainly higher than the “minor” designation given by Mallet when he published his map of global seismicity in 1862. If one delved into the early history of the region, one would find that the first person who traveled in what is today the state of California and wrote about it—that person felt not one, but several earthquakes.

  In the summer of 1769, perceiving a threat from the Russians to the north and the British to the east, the government in Spain sent out an expedition from Mexico to secure the land along the Pacific coast as far north as Monterey Bay. (San Francisco Bay was still not yet known to anyone except local Native Americans.) Accompanying the expedition was the Franciscan Fray Juan Crespí.

  On July 28, two weeks into the journey, the expedition was camped along the Santa Ana River near present-day Anaheim when, according to the journal kept by Fray Crespí, a sharp earthquake was felt that “lasted about half as long as an Ave Maria,” that is, about six seconds. Three more earthquakes were felt later the same day.

  The expedition continued north, Fray Crespí recording at least one earthquake each day. On one day, he recorded twelve events. The shaking of some of them, so he wrote, was violent.

  By August 3, the expedition was in the San Fernando Valley. And no more earthquakes are recorded in the Franciscan’s journal.

  What, then, might have been the reason for the flurry of earthquakes? The best guess is that this first-ever expedition to California happened to be traveling through an area where a moderate earthquake had struck recently, probably within a few days or weeks. So the earthquakes they experienced were probably aftershocks. A comparison with more recent events suggests the supposed moderate earthquake that preceded the flurry was an event similar in size and in location to the 1933 Long Beach and the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquakes. The fact that Fray Crespí was in the San Fernando Valley and that he recorded no earthquakes after August 3 suggests he was too far north to feel additional events.

  The first attempt to maintain a list of California earthquakes was made in 1856 by John Trask, one of the founders of the California Academy of Sciences, who had come west with John Woodhouse Audubon, son of the famous ornithologist (who had felt the shaking of at least one of the New Madrid earthquakes), via an overland trail through Texas and northern Mexico, arriving in San Diego on November 4, 1849. The two men went immediately to the gold diggings in the Sierra Nevada but, finding the work of mining exceptionally hard, their fellow miners violent and unsavory, and accumulating no immediate wealth, Audubon returned to the east and Trask settled in San Francisco, where he resumed his previous profession as a physician. From that, he met other learned men who had also come to California to search for gold, then in desperation had restarted their professional lives. This coterie of educated men, including Trask, began the academy in 1853. Trask took the title of “curator of geology.” His job was to collect fossils and uncover facts about California’s earthquakes.

  He compiled information about earthquakes from newspaper and telegraphic reports and by interviewing other residents of the state. His first catalogue of California earthquakes—Trask would publish annual addenda—included 59 events that had occurred since 1850. The first event listed was on March 12 of that year when “a light shock was felt in San Jose.” On May 15, 1851, there were “three severe shocks in San Francisco,” the shaking strong enough to break some windows and throw merchandise from shelves to the floor of a store on California Street.

  A reading of his catalogue shows that there was an earthquake felt somewhere in California almost every month. Furthermore, though more earthquakes were recorded in the northern half of the state, where most of the state’s population resided, it was in the southland that earthquakes seemed to be more severe. On November 26, 1852, an “earthquake was felt over the entire country east and south of San Luis Obispo, to San Diego and the Colorado river.” The idea that earthquakes were more severe in the southern half of California was reinforced when, on the morning of January 9, 1857, shaking was felt across almost the entire state. The tremor was centered in the mountains north of Los Angeles, where one, possibly two, people died.

  A significant amount of shaking of that earthquake was also felt in San Francisco, where, at a quarter past eight in the morning, three printers for the Daily Evening Bulletin were at work on the third story of a building on Merchant Street. As one of the printers would recount, the floor they were standing on started to tremble and move. He grabbed his coat and prepared to run. Another printer was “in such great tribulation” that he froze when he could not find his hat. The third, “the fat man,” resigned himself that there was no chance for escape. He held on to a printing case, perfectly resigned to his expected fate. But the shaking did stop after a few seconds, and the three men resumed work, noticing that the pendulum clock in their office had stopped.

  This story of the three printers illustrates that as far as most people in San Francisco were concerned, earthquakes near their city were a novelty. There was no record of major damage—nor a fatality—in the short history since the beginning of the Gold Rush in 1850. And Trask’s catalogue confirmed it. But that impression changed in the mid-1860s when two damaging earthquakes struck.

  One of the city’s newest residents, Samuel Clemens, who had recently begun to use the pen name “Mark Twain,” was walking down Third Street when the commotion started. It was the early afternoon of the Sabbath and the only two objects in motion anywhere in sight were a man in a buggy behind him and a streetcar making its way slowly up a cross street.

  Mr. Clemens heard a commotion and, thinking it was a fight and wishing to see it, broke into a run and turned a corner, around a framed house, just in time to hear a great rattle and feel a sudden jar. Then there came a terrific shock.

  “The ground seemed to roll under me in waves,” he wrote of the new experience, “interrupted by a violent joggling up and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing to
gether.”

  He reeled about on the pavement, trying to keep his footing. He pushed up against the framed house, hurting his elbow. And then the shaking intensified.

  He watched as the entire front of a tall four-story brick building sprang outward like a door and fell across the street, raising a great volume of dust. Then the buggy came by and the driver was thrown out and the buggy ended up distributed as small fragments for hundreds of yards along the street. The horses pulling the streetcar had stopped and were rearing. The passengers were pouring out of both ends, one man crashing through a glass window to escape.

  And then, from every door to every house as far as the eye could see, people streamed into the street. Never had he seen a solemn solitude turn into teeming life in so fast a fashion.

  It was October 8, 1865. From the many eyewitness accounts of shaking and destruction, the event originated north of Santa Cruz, either on or near the San Andreas Fault.

  Another destructive earthquake came soon after, again occurring in October, which led to speculation that earthquakes near San Francisco were influenced by the seasons or by a particular pattern of weather. As will be seen, both ideas were soon discounted.

  The earthquake of October 21, 1868, originated on the east side of San Francisco, and it left a ground rupture running for 20 miles southeast of San Leandro, along which the surface was shifted as much as three feet. Thirty people were killed during the shaking, five of them in San Francisco. All deaths were caused by the collapse of buildings.

  This should have been a wake-up call to Californians that powerful earthquakes could strike their state and do considerable damage—but the call was not heeded. In fact, the possible threat of future earthquakes was ignored.