Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  He opened the door and grabbed his heavy KelLite flashlight, starting the tire inspection with the right front.

  Nothing. Did I throw a weight or something and go out of balance? he wondered. No. Far too severe for that.

  It had still been shaking as he slowed through thirty.

  A distant noise caught his ear and he looked to the south, aware of the occasional star overhead through a break in the low-hanging fog. But only the soft sound of the wind answered his glance, with no hint of the gale he knew they were predicting for Saturday.

  Okay, let’s try it again, he sighed, reinserting himself in the car and starting south.

  Once more the car began shaking, this time less severely, and he braked to a halt again.

  And again he could find nothing wrong. If it happened a third time, he decided, he would just live with it until the damned wheel came off.

  Damnit. This car is possessed, I’ve got a broken engine mount, or I really need some time off!

  Once more he got behind the wheel and accelerated to the south. Other than a few irregular bumps in the road, this time the ride remained smooth, and Gavin gradually let himself relax, letting his mind drift to the lore of his Northwest native heritage, the product of a Puyallup mother and a father from the Makah tribe in Neah Bay. He didn’t put much faith in the old beliefs and superstitions, but on moonless nights like these it was as if the forests were trying to talk to him and he didn’t know the language. Instead, he reverted to what he did know: the police work that sustained him when it helped others, and depressed him beyond words when he couldn’t make a difference.

  He knew this section of highway all too well, since his worst professional memory had happened just ahead. A migrant family of nine—six children, parents, and a grandmother—driving all night to their next job in Sequim had pulled their old station wagon over along this deserted stretch of road to sleep.

  The same evening a disgruntled twenty-eight-year-old trucker making less than he thought he had a right to be paid spent a couple of hours drowning his sorrows in a Port Angeles tavern before getting back behind the wheel. An hour later he fell asleep at seventy with his boot on the throttle. He never saw the disabled car.

  Gavin shook his head to expunge the memory and concentrate on the road. There was a tight and dangerous left-hand curve a few miles ahead where the western shoulder had washed out many times over the years, and he made a mental note of it as the car reached sixty again. He always slowed there instinctively to check it in his headlights, especially when the rains had been heavier than normal. It was an all but unconscious gesture, carried out less than thirty miles from the Hoh Rain Forest, a patch of Olympic National Park known as the second wettest spot on earth.

  Suddenly his foot was dynamiting the brakes even before his conscious mind caught up with the image. The police cruiser came to a skidding halt, the headlights stabbing the night and disappearing into a void. Gavin threw open the door and snapped on his side-mounted searchlight, then leapt behind the wheel and snapped the car into reverse, pulling it back thirty or forty feet as he activated every flashing light the cruiser had and grabbed for the radio microphone.

  “Dispatch, Seventy-Three.”

  “Go Seventy-Three.”

  “We have a major washout on Highway 101 approximately 19 miles south of Forks! I’m going to need emergency road crews and a complete shutdown of the highway in both directions, and a trooper or sheriff from the south.”

  “Copy Seventy-Three. How big a washout? Is it impassable?”

  Gavin worked to keep his voice calm. He could see the lights of a heavy truck approaching from the south and would have to figure out how to slow him down in time.

  “Dispatch, there’s a twenty-foot section of the entire roadway missing! It’s caved in somehow. Somebody’s going to get killed out here if we don’t barricade it quick!”

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SEISMOLOGY LAB

  “Okay, now I’m worried!” Sanjay Singh said as he turned from a keyboard to find Doug Lam nodding in agreement. Fewer than five minutes had elapsed since the lab had stopped shaking.

  “Are we still calculating a 5.1?” Doug asked.

  Sanjay nodded. “For the first one, yes. The second was four-seven. And both are dead center in the Quilieute Quiet Zone, with new microtremors spreading north and south.”

  “I really did not want to be right, you know,” Doug said, his expression hard and serious.

  Jennifer had moved to his side, watching quietly, and Doug turned to her, explaining quickly what they were tracking as phones began ringing in the background. One of two graduate students who had been summoned just past 2 A.M. swept up a receiver, punched up two lines in succession, and motioned for Doug’s attention.

  “It’s Channel 4 on line one wanting to talk to you and send out a crew.”

  “Just a second.”

  “And… another channel’s holding on line two. I think it’s Channel 7.”

  The remaining line had begun ringing and Doug’s cell phone chimed in as well.

  “And now it begins,” Doug said, grimacing to Jennifer.

  “The media drill?”

  He nodded as she smiled, recalling the irony of how effective he was in TV interviews at calming people down, even when trying to suggest a seismic Armageddon was at hand.

  “No one handles it better, Sweetie,” she told him.

  5 MILES SOUTH OF QUAALATCH, WASHINGTON

  Dr. Terry Griswold awoke with his heart pounding like a pile driver as he vibrated unceremoniously off the bed and tumbled onto the cold, pine floor. There were no lights burning in the rustic beachfront cabin, and for a few seconds he imagined his belly flop had been a product of some strange nightmare featuring huge vibrators or giant paint mixers, or whatever the crazy dream sequence had been.

  He lay there, feeling silly and disoriented and very, very cold, the aroma of cold wood smoke from an exhausted fire perfuming the frigid air.

  Another shudder shook the pine boards and with it his unclothed posterior. Terry stood quickly, patting the end of the bed in the dark for a robe before starting the hunt for a light switch.

  That, he thought, was clearly a seismic tremor of some sort.

  He’d experienced winter waves crashing onto the beach with enough force to tweak his seismometers, but no wave would wiggle things for that long.

  Terry padded over to a table filled with laptops and began toggling the screens back to life one by one. His feet were blocks of ice rapidly losing nerve contact with his brain and he suspected the pilot light had gone out again on the single propane heater in the one-room cabin. If he could survive long enough to reach the stove, he could light the oven for warmth. At least he still had electrical power for the important equipment.

  The full seismic array he’d installed was designed to be always on, and a series of keystrokes brought up the record of the various channels covering the past three hours. He stood in shock looking at the voluminous record of the first tremors and the small but continuous events that had followed.

  Where the hell have I been? he wondered, recalling at the same moment his misgivings about the sleeping medication. He’d been exhausted from weeks of field work that had him pioneering new frontiers in sleeplessness. The prescription had made sense, but he couldn’t have picked a worse evening to take it and go to bed early.

  He entered more keystrokes, the freezing cold of the frigid cabin all but forgotten as he pulled in a broader array of reports to form a three-dimensional map with tiny red dots pinpointing the hypocenters generated over the previous ten hours. The picture was emerging slowly, rotating in 3-D in the middle of the screen, and he sat back in utter shock.

  Under twenty kilometers depth, thirty to fifty kilometers offshore, aligned along the Cascadia Subduction North-South Axis. Jesus H. Christ!

  Three long months of fine-tuning an array of seismographs to catch and catalogue tiny tremors just above the Quilieute Quiet Zone and now he had the zone i
tself waking up and growling at his seismic “camera.” The implications were cascading in his head. The locked sections were coming unlocked, and with the massive energy stored beneath his feet, anything could happen.

  This cabin had been built on the beach before such acts became federal and state violations, and sitting as it did within a few feet of the high-tide line, the floor was no more than eight feet above sea level. A fifty-foot-high tsunami would kill him where he stood, and the only thing needed to create a fifty-foot wave would be a major break at any one of the same hypocenters his screens were now showing. He was, in other words, in severe and immediate danger—for that matter, so was the entire Pacific Coast from Eureka, California, to northern Vancouver Island in Canada.

  “God, why didn’t someone call me?” he mumbled, well aware of the answer. His cell phone was turned off, and had spent the last few hours as dead to the world as he’d been.

  Terry scrambled back to his bedside table to find the phone. With no landlines nearby, the cellular connection was the only reliable voice link with Seattle—other than a roadside phone booth five miles distant. His seismic array used a satellite connection to send its data, but he hadn’t been authorized to use grant money for the extra price of voice transmission. It was cell phones or nothing.

  Fumbling for the right number, he punched it in, stamping his numb feet with impatience and hugging himself for warmth as he waited for it to ring.

  Another shudder, this one almost too tiny to be felt, wiggled the floorboards as Sanjay Singh came on the line to brief him.

  “We’ve been trying to call you, Terry,” he said. “Doug needs a download of your array immediately.”

  “It should have been transmitting already. Damnit! Okay, I’ll recheck it and retransmit in just a minute. I don’t know what you’re seeing there, but this is incredible. Are they evacuating the coast yet? I haven’t heard sirens.”

  “No one’s evacuating anything,” Sanjay replied.

  “What? Jeez, this could be the so-called ‘big one’ announcing its presence! Doug was right. Does the governor know?”

  “I think that contact is in progress.”

  “Well, I could be wrong, but this looks ominous to me.”

  Terry hurriedly inspected the satellite data connections and ordered another download of the previous hour’s tracings before rushing around to pull on his clothes. His core temperature was down and he was beginning to shiver uncontrollably, but there was too much to do to just stand in front of the oven or try to relight the heater. The Land Rover was right outside, and he planned to have it loaded and ready to go in fifteen minutes.

  And a tsunami could hit within five minutes of a major break, he reminded himself. The fact that the very place where he was standing was below sea level three hundred years ago impressed itself into his consciousness like never before. He fully expected the coast to drop five to seven feet as soon as the seismic waves came lashing in.

  A loud beep announced the end of the download and Terry terminated the circuit and started pulling wires and plugs and throwing things in suitcases. He’d been with the U.S. Geological Survey for twenty-six years, but never had he felt such a panicked need to escape.

  Chapter 10

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SEISMOLOGY LAB 3:30 A.M.

  The silent blinking of a light on the telephone console reminded Doug of the call he’d momentarily forgotten and he scooped up the receiver.

  “Dr. Lam here.”

  “Doug, Bill Harper in Olympia.”

  “Bill. I was just getting ready to call you.”

  “I felt the shaking. What’s going on?” The voice of the state’s emergency services director was instantly recognizable, the gravelly rumble distinct but not unfriendly. Prematurely gray and excessively dedicated, he was almost a friend.

  “I wish I could say for certain, Bill.” Doug ticked off a quick rundown of the situation. “In my opinion this is vastly more serious than anything I’ve ever witnessed up here. The quakes are continuing, they’re all in the same area, every single one is unprecedented in modern seismic history, yet it could be anywhere from ten seconds to ten years before the real bomb goes off.”

  “Doug, I’ve got to ask you this. Are we talking real seismic reality now, or is what you just said related to your theory of… what was that, amplified resonant motion?”

  “Vibration. No, this is based on real data, Bill. Look, I know you think my theory is BS.”

  “That’s too harsh. I just think you’re wrong about the coast being too dangerous to build on. The tiny waves produced by a drilling rig or pile driver aren’t even in the same galaxy with the kind of force needed to trigger a major quake. In fact, the difference is around three orders of magnitude.”

  “Without any amplification, yes, that’s absolutely true. If the miles of rock below have the inherent ability to amplify tiny waves into big, focused waves that can move rock and break lynchpins, then wrong.”

  “You’ve got to admit the idea that a little construction work could cause a 9.5-magnitude earthquake seems very far-fetched, especially now when all the construction on Cascadia Island is finished, even if you consider some sort of natural amplifier.”

  “Is it finished?”

  “Well, they open tomorrow.”

  “And isn’t it chilling that here, one day ahead of the opening, two years of construction may have finally pulled the trigger?”

  “If that’s really what’s going on, yes.”

  “Bill, there was never any justification for drilling and pounding on that island just to pave over a bird sanctuary. You’d think the fact that I just might be right would be enough justification for cancelling the project. You know, err on the side of caution? Play it safe?”

  There was momentary silence on the other end before Harper sighed.

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “What?”

  “That if we had any quakes during construction, you’d use them to validate your theory. You’re getting ready to take credit for this, aren’t you? If any aspect of the big quake comes, you’re going to say you told us so, regardless of the truth.”

  “Well, aside from the fact that I’m hurt you would think such a thing, what I’m reporting to you now has nothing to do with my work, my so-called theory, or the past. We’ve got hypocenters we can’t explain, and they may well be a precursor. Look, man, the number of lives at stake, if I’m right, is so great that I think we’ve got to get ready to act.”

  “What do you mean ‘act,’ Doug?”

  “Well, you realize that however it starts, when the big subduction zone quake finally comes, it could trigger a series of shallow, crustal quakes all over the Puget Sound area, and that could put a host of major surface faults in motion.”

  “And one of them runs right underneath downtown Seattle. Yes, Doug, we’re all aware of that. And you know I hate showboaters.”

  “I’m not showboating, Bill. I’m pointing to a naked emperor. If we get a few more minutes of this pattern, I’d start thinking about evacuation of the entire coast.”

  “What? Doug, get real! Even if I totally believed you—and I’m trying to—I can’t ask the governor to order an evacuation of the entire coast unless we’ve got a genuine official prediction. I mean, do you have any remote idea how complex and difficult a total evacuation would be? God! If it was only up to me, I’d really consider it, but I don’t have that kind of power…. Even though the governor knows about this as of a few hours ago, he’s…”

  “Unimpressed?”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “As unimpressed as I am with him?”

  “What can I say? The people elected the man, and I answer to him.”

  “I know. I’ll refrain from using the word moron this time.”

  “Thank you. My point is that he’s going to be a hard case to convince, and he’s going to insist on literal application of the guidelines we all wrote for when to evacuate. And whatever else, if I put your name on it
, I’m sure he’ll say no.”

  Doug sighed. “It’s always nice to have such credibility. Bill, our state guidelines weren’t written for this situation. We’re into virgin territory here. Did you feel that opening tremor down there?”

  “Yes. I heard that it rattled the capitol building. Even my cat is terrified. She’s sitting here digging her claws into me… which I—Muff, stop it!—hate. I’m calling from my house.”

  “We should err on the side of caution and at least stand by to evacuate.”

  “Well, it is a judgment call, isn’t it?”

  “Damnit, no! It’s the sort of thing politicians get fried for later on when the whole world asks, ‘Why didn’t you do something when the scientific community was warning you in such strong terms?’ ”

  “Doug…”

  “You want justification? Let me tell you what’s almost certainly going to happen, okay?”

  “Doug, you don’t have to bellow at me.”

  “I’m not bellowing. But I am trying to kick some recognition of urgency into you. Here’s the timetable. First we get microquakes right smack dab in the middle of a place we have never in the history of seismology experienced or even imagined microquakes. That so-called place is a zone eight hundred frigging miles long from north to south, twenty-five kilometers down, and it is, as you well know, the lynchpin holding back enough force to shake the entire Pacific Northwest with as much energy as a month’s worth of hurricane-force winds, all released in five minutes as an earthquake of at least Moment Magnitude 9. So, first the microquakes, then we start unlocking the surface faults and we bring down half of downtown Seattle or Portland with massive shallow temblors perhaps as high as an M7.5… a Moment Magnitude 7.5… although those faults may wait for the main quake. Meanwhile, the Quilieute Quiet Zone gets noisier, and as the second or third day dawns, we start getting sympathetic volcano activity as magma begins roiling around under Mount Rainier and maybe Mount Hood or Mount Baker as well. Now the quakes in the Quiet Zone begin to hit a magnitude of 4, and they become almost constant, triggering some major deep-focus quakes like the 2001 Olympia temblor that almost leveled the state capitol building. And finally, for just a few heartbeats or a few hours, it all goes completely quiet, the calm before the storm. We’ll sit here holding our collective breaths in frozen horror watching the drums and the flat tracings and wondering, is it over, or is it coming?’ and suddenly, Bill, with your disbelieving boss sitting out on that rock in his last few minutes of life, it will all give way, just like in the year 1700. The lynchpin disintegrates over an eight-hundred-mile front all at the same time, and all the energy comes roaring out with far greater force than all the nuclear arsenals we’ve ever built. The whole region begins to undulate, slowly at first, then back and forth with huge, mammoth seismic surface waves 1.5 seconds in period, the coastal areas suddenly yanked downward five to eight feet, the seismic waves vibrating buildings between five and fifteen stories until they resonate and begin to shake themselves apart. With landslides all over the place, bridges along I-5 begin to drop, some on occupied cars, each collapse cutting our north-south lifeline. Stadiums collapse. Gas lines are shut down, power goes down, reservoirs break and spill, runways split and fragment, chimneys and masonry buildings collapse, and all the cranes and facilities in Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and all the smaller coastal ports begin to sink as the saturated land below undergoes liquefaction and becomes quicksand. When the shaking finally stops some five minutes later, fifty miles out at sea the backwash tsunami begins charging eastward, building as it approaches the coast, until the monster rises over thirty feet high, roaring in and over all the coastal land areas that were less than eight feet above sea level and are now at sea level. The wave, hundreds of miles long, blasts all buildings and cars and people away, leaving no survivors as it flows inward on a wave of debris and bodies and sand, leaving the detritus as far as ten miles inland. And when it’s over, my friend, we will be not only without a governor and his family, we’ll be without an economy, ports, and perhaps as many as two thousand of our citizens in Washington alone. And you want to wait to notify that fool?”