Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  “Could you turn up the heat a bit?” Karen asked from the back.

  Jennifer nodded and made the adjustment, glad she’d asked. She wondered why she’d refused to admit she was freezing, too, before Karen brought it up. The macho syndrome, she concluded. All pilots had the same problem to deal with, knowing when to admit to being human, sometimes even when no one else was around.

  This flight was already demanding her undivided attention, and she could feel her concern rising in direct proportion to the rate the weather was deteriorating. The weather ahead at the intended landing zone was just above legal minimums for visibility and ceiling. The site was well into the Cascade Mountains, and she already had the location plotted on the GPS-driven moving-map display in front of her. The plan, as she’d briefed herself and the flight nurses, would be to intercept U.S. 2 near Monroe and follow it eastward into the landing zone, which was a pre-scouted meadow by the roadway a half mile from the accident scene.

  Gretchen had taken the left copilot’s seat and was watching her, unwilling to interrupt with questions, but Jennifer could tell she was apprehensive. There was very little visible outside other than a ribbon of taillights, and they were in and out of the snow flurries as Jennifer flew them through the turbulence of what was a relatively gentle wind. The snow was worrying her despite the ship’s anti-ice systems. It wasn’t severe enough yet to test the aircraft, but it demanded attention.

  The ceiling had remained at roughly two thousand feet above the highway, but suddenly the layer of clouds became increasingly ragged as she flew east, forcing her down to a thousand feet above ground level. She could see the bonfire of flashing red and blue lights of the State Patrol cars and ambulances in the darkness ahead, but they seemed to be floating in a vacuum, a pulsing, exploding convention of police lights adrift in a sea of black.

  They’ve stopped the traffic! she realized. That had been in the pre-departure information, but the significance hadn’t hit her until now. Miles of red tail lights from hundreds of cars stranded by the highway closure snaked ahead of the EC-135, then stopped cold. The accident site and landing zone were miles beyond, and almost invisible further up the pass was a long line of headlights marking the stopped oncoming traffic.

  Her mission, she thought, was to find the right patch of ground in the middle of that black hole without hitting trees, power lines, or the towering palisades of rock invisible on both sides of the narrowing valley.

  Jennifer toggled up the frequency for the state troopers and made contact.

  “We have two stabilized now and ready to transport,” was the response. “But we need you right here on the roadway, and we’ve stopped the traffic.”

  “Roger, I can see,” Jennifer replied, passing over the end of the uphill traffic queue and turning on the craft’s landing lights. A thousand feet below she could make out a few dark shapes, but the road itself was invisible and the looming collection of flashing visibars on top of the squad cars were guaranteed to create visual landing illusion problems.

  Flares had been lighted to mark the appropriate spot on the highway just short of the accident site and she slowed the 135, trying to set up her approach, acutely aware that she had nothing but black on either side of the mountain valley. Maybe, she thought, if I turn on the searchlight and slow to ten or fifteen knots, I can do this safely.

  But the ceiling had forced her down another two hundred feet and it was clearly even lower over the black highway ahead. With no reference points on either side and pitch blackness masking the mountains, the negatives were piling up.

  Judgment! she thought.

  The information that one of the victims barely clinging to life down on the highway was a child was not something routinely passed to an inbound medevac pilot. But she had overhead enough of another transmission to know the stakes were high.

  She was supposed to ignore such things. Safety first. No mission orientation.

  But she already knew too much, and there were lives leaking away below and forcing her into a corner.

  “No!” she said to herself out loud. Her reference points were already too murky and her emotional fatigue was pressing her to just go ahead and do it! Those were already the early links in a potential accident chain of causation.

  She announced the go around on the interphone and immediately increased power, using the standard go around procedure to nudge the EC-135 up and, when she had enough altitude, turn it around a hundred and eighty degrees to retrace the GPS course she’d followed in. She climbed to the base of the clouds and toggled the radio to ask for the only thing that was going to work.

  “Can you start the traffic moving in both directions?”

  The same trooper she’d talked to moments before came back, his voice skeptical.

  “Yes, but why? Don’t you need the road clear?”

  “I need reference lights. You’re in a sea of black out there. I need tail lights and headlights flowing by. As soon as I’m stable overhead, that’s when I’ll need you to stop them to give me enough room. But not before.”

  There was a brief silence before the radioed agreement, and Jennifer flew five miles west into a wider part of the valley before turning back and orbiting slowly at a safe altitude, wondering if the advanced night vision goggles Nightingale had just ordered would have made such a request unnecessary. She’d already tried them out, and they literally turned night into day.

  But tonight she had only the traditional tools, and her ability to back off. There was a little sparkle of pride that she’d broken the momentum of the approach, as well as rising apprehension that even the lifeline of the moving traffic might not be enough to allow a safe landing.

  It took nearly ten minutes for the taillights to start flowing again, but this time the river of red flowed directly to the accident scene, marking the safe route of her approach as Jennifer descended, pausing in a hover some fifty feet over the roadway as the troopers once again stopped the traffic. The resulting landing zone was only a few hundred yards wide as she descended straight down at a ninety degree angle to the traffic flow, aware of the slight slope of the roadway in both directions. The Eurocopter’s lights picked up the tree tops along either side of the highway. She settled the EC-135’s wheels firmly on the blacktop just as a snow flurry began to get serious.

  Gretchen and Karen opened the rear clamshell doors of the helicopter as one of the paramedics rushed up to brief them. The lone driver in the eastbound car had somehow escaped serious injury, but the family in the other vehicle had not been so fortunate. The parents were dead, their ten-year-old son and six-year-old daughter had been briefly trapped in the wreckage, and the boy had expired just before Jennifer touched down.

  The paramedic was blood-soaked and was working hard to stabilize the little girl for transport.

  “How long?” Jennifer heard Gretchen ask him.

  “Five minutes.”

  The snowfall was increasing and Jennifer had the anti-ice system working to keep the blades and engine inlets free of ice, but it was beginning to worry her. Too often they’d sat down at a landing zone and had had to wait for what seemed an interminable period for the paramedics to stabilize a patient enough for the transport, but this couldn’t be allowed to drag on for long.

  “Gretchen, tell them we’ve got ten minutes maximum,” Jennifer said, aware of the surprised look she got in response. Only twice before could she recall issuing a deadline to the paramedics.

  Within three minutes, the stretcher bearing the little girl was loaded aboard, and the clamshell doors closed within seconds as Gretchen relayed the clearance to depart.

  There was a light breeze blowing down the highway from the east, frigid air flowing down from Stevens Pass, and she had pivoted on landing to face that direction. Picking up the EC-135 now was a simple matter, but she carefully followed the same procedure used on rooftop heliports, lifting the twin engine helicopter straight up for a power check before committing to forward flight.

  She could se
e the tree tops descending in her peripheral vision, but she added another fifty feet before pivoting the helicopter toward the west and nudging it forward, accelerating into the snow flurries as she gained altitude and calculated the course back to the rooftop of Olympic Hospital.

  That landing would be the easy part.

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SEISMOLOGY LAB, 10:55 P.M.

  The plan to make a few calculations and race back to Jennifer had begun to evaporate the moment Doug’s computer located the source of the tremors that had sounded the alarm.

  My God, they’re coming from the Quilieute Quiet Zone!

  Doug sat back in his chair, trying to calm himself, glad he’d called Sanjay to come in as he drove to the lab. The young postdoc was just coming through the door, a puzzled expression on his face as he passed the wall of seismic recording drums to reach the small desk where Doug was sitting.

  “What’s going on?” Sanjay asked.

  “You’re going to want to see this!”

  Doug tapped the appropriate part of the computer display.

  “And what will I be looking at?”

  “We’re getting microquakes right next to the Quilieute Quiet Zone. It could be coming awake.”

  Sanjay pulled up a rolling office chair next to Doug and scooted closer to the computer.

  “That’s quite a conclusion.”

  “You check my math and tell me.”

  “By the way,” Sanjay said as he put on reading glasses and squinted at the figures on the flat-screen display, “Sondra was very appreciative that you would not let me bring you home for dinner tonight unannounced.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Until you called me to come in and… more or less broke the mood. Now she is no longer so appreciative.”

  Doug smiled. “You’re saying my call was badly timed?”

  “You have no idea.” Sanjay pointed to the screen. “Is this what you’re so excited about?”

  “You see the distribution of those tiny temblors?”

  “I see something slightly above the level of background noise. And I recall that you were supposed to be having a wonderful evening with Jennifer while permitting me a similar delight with my lady.”

  “Blame these microtremors.”

  Sanjay nodded toward the tracings. “These set the program off?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must have set the sensitivity threshold to near zero. Doug, these vibrations barely register.”

  “But this is how it can start, Sanjay. If I’ve been right all along and no one should have been sending even the smallest seismic impacts down from Cascadia Island, and if they’ve now pulled the trigger on three hundred years of unrelieved tectonic pressure, this sort of microquake is exactly what I’d expect to see as the seismic bomb starts to arm itself.”

  Sanjay looked troubled. “That would be one point of view. That would also be a very hyperbolic way to state it.”

  “Okay, you tell me where those tremors are occurring, Sanjay.” Doug said, coming forward in his chair, hovering on the ragged edge of irritation. “Go ahead. Where are they coming from? Please check my math.”

  Singh worked the keyboard to call up the raw data and flew through some calculations before pushing back from the screen and turning to his leader.

  “Well, I do see a distribution of tiny hypocenters about twenty-six kilometers down, laterally along a fifty-mile front, approximately eight micro-quakes within a ten-minute period, each less than 1.5 magnitude, distanced about forty miles on average west of the coastline.”

  “And that would be?”

  “The vibrations, in magnitude terms, would be the rough equivalent of mice mating in Australia. In other words, next to nothing.”

  “No. They’re next to what zone? Maybe even in it.”

  “Perhaps the twilight zone. Doug, there’s really nothing here. I can’t believe my exalted leader pulled the panic button for something that small.”

  “You push a panic button.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You… pull an emergency brake, and push a panic button.”

  Sanjay studied Doug’s face for a few seconds. “Doug, forgive me, but you’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “Why?”

  “I know you believe firmly in your theory, and you may be right, but this isn’t validation of anything yet. Do you have corroborating seismographs from other seismic networks yet?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then, with all due respect, this fails to alarm me.”

  Doug cocked his head slightly. “Remind me again,” he laughed. “Whom do you work for?”

  “You, your majesty, and your eternal charge to me on being hired as a postdoctoral fellow was that I should at all times maintain my scientific integrity, which includes telling you the unvarnished truth, which is what I am doing.”

  “Come on and say the words, Sanjay. What zone are these microquakes occurring in, or next to?”

  “What zone?”

  “You know what I’m asking. And use my terminology.”

  He sighed. “You want me to say they’re coming from what you labeled the ‘Quilieute Quiet Zone,’ correct?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Very well, they appear on very cursory examination to be in or adjacent to the Quiet Zone, but they may not be real, and they may not be a precursor.”

  “Ever see anything in that zone before? A microquake? A shadow of something? Even an indication someone unwrapped a candy bar and threw the wrapper down hard on the shore?”

  “No.”

  “Then I rest my case. For the first time in recorded history we have microquakes along the Quilieute Quiet Zone. And this is after Walker gets through whacking the earth’s surface for two straight years because no one’s listening to a lone seismologist with a nutty theory trying to say you shouldn’t pull on a seismic hair trigger.”

  “You really think these tiny rumblings could be the start sequence of the big one? The 9.5?”

  “Yes. Damnit, yes.”

  Sanjay turned toward him with a troubled expression. “But, if that’s true, why do I detect that you’re enjoying this?”

  The smile faded from Doug’s face as he realized that was exactly what he’d been doing, enjoying the “I told you so” possibilities. “God, Sanjay, you’re right. I’m ashamed.” He looked back at the screen with a sigh. “That’s really embarrassing. I just get through telling you earlier this afternoon how much I wanted to be wrong about my entire thesis, but the second I saw these, I started gloating.”

  “I understand. You’ve been the lone voice of warning for several years.”

  “Well… with this, naturally I’m now waiting for the other shoe to drop, although I take it you think it’s premature to sound any public alarms, right?”

  “Absolutely, it’s too soon. These may not even be real quakes.”

  Doug shook his head and lofted a wadded-up scrap of paper across the room to a perfect landing in a trash can. “The hell of training and hiring smart people, Sanjay, is you have to listen to them occasionally.”

  “Thank you, I think.”

  “It’s just that I know I’m right and I feel like the little kid confronting a naked emperor.”

  “That e-mail is really bugging you, right?”

  Doug nodded energetically. “Like a burr under my saddle. The guy claims he’s got the proof I need but his return e-mail was garbled, as I told you. I checked when I came in a bit ago and he’s finally written back with a good return address, so I can finally answer, but I’m really frustrated. In fact, his timing was spooky. It’s almost as if he’s watching these same micro-quakes unfold.”

  “Maybe he is. Maybe he’s at USGS headquarters in Menlo Park trying to prove to a room full of detractors that you’ll snap at anything.”

  “Come on. We don’t act like that. Nevertheless, I’m being careful in my replies.”

  “I’d bet it’s a hoax. But what did he say this time?”

&nb
sp; “That he has a collection of seismic refraction data for Cascadia Island that proves the place is extremely dangerous, but that he’s got to be very careful getting it to me because there are people who don’t want that known. Walker, for one, I’ll bet.”

  “So this mystery source has read your paper?”

  Doug shrugged. “Who knows? I’m not sure what he’s got. But, if there is real data out there which validates any significant part of my theory, we’ve got to sound the alarms. Especially now.”

  “But if they’ve finished construction… stopped banging around on the surface and creating seismic waves… and nothing has happened, then the risk on Cascadia Island won’t be any greater than anywhere else along the Washington coast, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And right now there is really nothing indicating the zone is coming active. Right?”

  “Technically, right.”

  “So, even if you tell everyone it’s dangerous and they believe you, most of the people assembling for the resort’s opening weekend will still go.”

  “They’re taking one helluva chance!”

  “Yes, but it’s the doctrine of assumed risk, Doug. People always assume the risk doesn’t apply to them. You can’t protect everyone.”

  “It’s not everyone I’m worried about, Sanjay. This is personal. Jennifer refuses to listen to me. She’ll be there the entire weekend.”

  PLEASANTON, CALIFORNIA

  Senator Ralph Lacombe drummed his fingers on the kitchen counter, waiting for someone to answer the ringing at the other end of his call. The house was quiet now that the police had folded their tent and departed, severely consternated over having to defer to the word of a powerful state politician that his daughter was not kidnapped nor the victim of any other crime. Clearly dissatisfied with the sudden end of what had become a major manhunt, they had released Diane’s cretinous boyfriend and left a half dozen business cards with numbers to contact in case there were some reversal of the case and Senator Lacombe’s daughter turned out to be in trouble after all.