Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  Linda Bennett, one of the two flight nurses, was in the left seat. She looked puzzled at his stern expression. With the radio frequency back on Bellingham Approach, Eric declared the missed approach, listening carefully to the instructions at the same moment he lifted clear of the fog into sunshine, and noticed a thin patch of fog on the left.

  “Ah, Approach, helicopter Two Four Bravo, let me go VFR on top for right now… I think it may be lifting south of the field.”

  He noted the controller’s approval of his request as he banked the Eurocopter left toward what he knew was the mauled campus of Western Washington University, which sat on a hillside perhaps 150 feet above sea level.

  Sure enough, the fog had thinned sufficiently to clear a grassy area next to a parking lot on the south end of the campus, and he pointed it out to Linda with a bob of his head as he switched frequencies again and made contact with the State Patrol dispatcher, redirecting any ambulances which might otherwise be heading for the airport.

  “Okay, we can make this happen!” he said. “Tell Seattle.”

  Linda used the state EM Repeater System to call Nightingale dispatch as Eric turned into the wind, slowing and descending through the danger zone below two hundred feet, where an engine failure would leave them largely unable to recover. Linda had turned to get Eric’s attention as she triggered the interphone.

  “What?”

  “Norm wants you to go sit back down on the hillside and let them send the ambulances to us.”

  “Tell him I’ve got a perfectly good clearing ahead.”

  She leaned over in conversation as Eric resisted the urge to flick on that channel and listen.

  Linda was looking up again. “He says not to try for any sucker holes.”

  “This isn’t a sucker hole, Linda! The fog is moving away. We can do this.”

  If Jackson can make it into a zero-zero airport, he thought, the chief pilot can sure as hell land in a clear patch that big.

  The intended landing zone was clear now, the fog retreating as if a steady downdraft were widening the circle of visibility.

  Someone had run onto the parking lot and into the line of vision ahead, motioning where he wanted the oncoming chopper to set down. There were tall light poles at intervals in the parking lot with enough space between them for the rotors, but it would be tight. Eric checked his forward speed, now down to fifteen knots, the turbine engines at a rather high power setting as he made the subtle adjustments and watched his target get closer.

  Fifty feet, he thought to himself, the forward and vertical speeds now down to a fast walk. He slowed to a dead-stop hover and began descending, automatically adjusting for a sudden zephyr from the left, unaware that the breeze was bringing the fog back with it. The sudden influx caught him completely off guard until a gray curtain moved across his windscreen. Suddenly, at less than ten feet in the air, between metal light poles, everything was gone!

  He hadn’t been on his instruments but suddenly he had to transition to them without changing anything but vertical speed. There was a world of impenetrable gray enfolding them at the worst possible moment.

  Eric transitioned his eyes quickly to the attitude indicator and began smoothly increasing power, pitch, lift, and speed, but his inner ear was protesting that he had suddenly entered a left bank, an intense and urgent physical message. He fought to stay on course straight ahead, the unspoken words crackling back and forth, yet somewhat disconnected from the uncertain control inputs.

  Left rudder, NO… right… what’s my heading? Where the hell is the heading! Altitude… airspeed… pitch… oh God, I’m losing it!

  The proprioceptive “voice” of his inner ear was screaming at a level he couldn’t ignore, bypassing his conscious control and wiring itself directly to his feet and hands, which suddenly complied with an order to jerk the helicopter to the right and push forward to avoid the uncontrollable climb his middle ear was convinced it was tracking. A part of him “yelled” back that it was the wrong way and too much, but the resultant confusion froze his hands just long enough for the main rotor to find the top ten feet of a metal light pole, the impact snapping off the outer third of the blades in instant succession, the bone-shattering impacts leaving the massively unbalanced rotor shaking the fuselage and his eyeballs badly enough to obliterate further coherent vision. Nosed over and shaking itself apart, the Eurocopter struck the surface of the parking lot at less than twenty knots of airspeed, flipping over, the assaulted blades departing the helicopter’s mast and flying like missiles in two directions as the cabin split open.

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SEISMOLOGY LAB

  Rubbing his eyes against the residual image of the television lights, Doug loosened his tie and pushed his way back into the now-crowded seismograph room, spotting Sanjay, who was looking as fatigued as Doug felt. There were telephones ringing constantly in the background and an undercurrent of conversations raising the noise level in the room and only adding to the confusion following the Bellingham disaster. He needed some coffee and probably a couple of aspirin, but both would have to wait. There seemed to be a dozen people at once pulling at him for attention, most of them with cameras, microphones, and notebooks.

  It grabbed at his gut how serious this was. Clearly the stakes were getting higher by the minute as the periodic vibrations rattled more and more of the Pacific Northwest, even if the temblors damaged little more than nerves before the Bellingham break. But now, in addition to the emerging reports from Bellingham, rumors of injuries from weakened structures around the Seattle area were flooding in, boosting the public need for information and reassurance to unprecedented levels, a service Doug Lam had always been exceedingly good at providing.

  This time, however, reassurance was what he felt least equipped to give. If the Cascadia Subduction Zone was waking up, this was just the beginning, and getting the right message to as many people as possible to get away from the coast was both an awesome responsibility, and an urgent one. Yet whipping up a panic would help no one. He couldn’t let the unblinking eye of the cameras see just how convinced he was that Mick Walker’s project had set off a timer, and the big one was mere hours—or less—away.

  Usually he relished the opportunities to face the cameras—not so much for the fun of being an occasional local star as for the chance to walk a difficult tightrope and do it well. But even if his apprehension hadn’t been so high, the cacophony of the media attention alone was threatening to overwhelm him, putting to the test the very real duty of the seismic lab’s director to translate the science and put a calming human face on a complicated and dangerous subject.

  “What’s the latest?” Doug asked Sanjay. “Any aftershocks in Bellingham?”

  “Yes. Predictable ones near the surface. It’s probably the offshore tremors that have been triggering them, though that might be a scientific stretch. But the frequency and magnitudes in the Quilieute Quiet Zone are slowly increasing. It’s fitting the model you predicted, Boss.”

  “Thank you for acknowledging that. It is, almost exactly. I tried to tell Harper this was coming.”

  An exceedingly tall man wearing a heavy turtleneck and carrying a small notebook had followed Doug in from the last interview. He’d waited quietly a few steps away, previously unnoticed. Now he leaned almost over Doug Lam’s shoulder and spoke, causing Doug to jerk his head around in surprise.

  “Excuse me?”

  “May I ask, what are the ‘Benioff Zone’ and the ‘Quilieute Quiet Zone?’ You were talking about both in those interviews you just did.”

  “May I ask who you are?” Doug replied, a bit sharply.

  “Sorry to startle you, Dr. Lam.” The man held out his hand. “I’m George Landry with the Seattle Times. We met a few years ago.”

  Doug shook Landry’s hand.

  “I especially don’t know what the ‘Benioff Zone’ means,” Landry added apologetically.

  “All right. Look, George, give me a few minutes and then I’ll explain it to you.” />
  “Sure. Take your time.”

  Doug turned his attention back to the seismograph drums, concentrating on the vertical acceleration readings. The pen in his hand was gyrating back and forth between his index and middle fingers, as if at any second he would start twirling it like a miniature baton. The habit was a direct barometer of the level of his agitation, even when he succeeded in maintaining a glacial exterior. “Do we have the data piped into the computer?” he asked Sanjay, whose eyes were on the pen and gauging the frequency of its movements, knowing well Doug’s nervous habit and its meaning.

  “We do. And as I was saying, every one of the new hypocenters is in the Cascadia thrust zone, and I like the explanation you just gave on the camera.”

  “Which one?” Doug asked.

  “That the thrust zone is where the ocean floor is being thrust under the advancing continental tectonic plate.”

  Doug’s pen began moving even faster.

  Nearly a dozen people had pressed into the crowded seismograph room now with more coming, most of them geophysics students whose instincts were to gravitate to the lab at the first hint of serious seismic activity. Most were peering at the various recording drums, and all of them were puzzling over the meaning of what was happening. Doug knew they’d be expecting immediate answers from him, and the pressure was building, a human micro-version of the immense tectonic pressures beneath the coast now approaching the break point.

  Am I brave enough to go ahead and tell everyone what’s about to happen? he wondered. And for that matter, am I really, really sure? He thought back quickly over the broadcast statements he’d made during the previous hours. Even if he got it exactly right every time, there were trip wires and professional dangers in all directions, including the inevitable jealousy of other members of the scientific community who viewed the habit of speaking to the media as occupying a moral stratum only slightly above prostitution.

  Doug looked at his pen for a moment, then replaced it in his shirt pocket before turning to Landry. “Would you excuse us a moment? We need to consult, way off the record.”

  “You need to figure how much to tell me?” Landry asked with a knowing smile.

  Doug shook his head. “No. I need to make sure that I really know what I think I really know.”

  “I almost understood that,” Landry laughed, stepping back. He bent over and pretended to read the drums as Doug took Sanjay by the elbow and moved a few yards away between a rack of electronics.

  “Did you hear my last interview out there?”

  “Yes. Watched it in here live.”

  “Okay. I need your input. Am I going too far, or not far enough? I mean, I can’t let this get out of hand, but I’m so used to being… well…”

  “Reassuring?”

  “Yeah. You know, calm down, the world’s not ending. Earthquakes don’t kill people, collapsing buildings are the danger, et cetera.”

  “You’re the best at it, man.”

  “Yes, but shouldn’t I pull the emergency cord a little harder, Sanjay? You’ve been a good conscience for me on this, but you see it, too, don’t you? The zone coming alive?”

  Sanjay nodded gravely. “All kidding aside?”

  “I would hope.”

  “I’ve been wondering how to apologize to you, Doug, for not being a true believer.”

  “So… I should be more forceful about what’s going on and the possible need to evacuate?”

  “A little more. Not total. Not yet. You’ve been getting it right so far, Doug, as far as I can tell. You said we didn’t really know for certain this was the beginning of a major subduction zone break. But you might want to explain the zone a bit more. If people understand how loaded with pent-up energy it is…”

  “It makes the dangers more clear. Good point. I just don’t want to pander to my theory, or say I told you so.”

  Sanjay shook his head. “You haven’t been. You’re probably entitled to do so, but you shouldn’t. At least not yet.”

  Doug nodded thoughtfully.

  “Okay, let me make sure I understand your mind on this. You’re as convinced as I am that, while we can’t be certain, this looks for all the world like a windup to the main break?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, maybe yes, maybe no, about the role of Cascadia Island’s construction in triggering it?”

  “Maybe yes. More likely than not yes. When we’re talking hypocenters in the Quiet Zone, at a depth of twenty kilometers or less some forty miles west of the coastline, I’d say that’s a precursor to a major break, Doug, and all this began right under the island. Please tell me I’m wrong.”

  “I can’t. But I also can’t formally get ahead of the USGS.”

  “Have you seen the 3-D view I did?”

  Doug shook his head. “Show me.”

  They moved toward one of the computer terminals and two students got up wordlessly to clear the way. Sanjay slipped into one of the chairs, running his fingers over the keyboard in a series of commands that brought up a simulated three-dimensional picture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone and input in the first half hour of quakes.

  Doug felt his jaw drop as he took in the pattern.

  “Holy shit,” he muttered. “Look at the consistency north and south, right along the same plane, and less than twenty kilometers down.”

  “Right. That’s what convinced me.” Sanjay gestured to the door and to Landry, who was watching them closely from a few yards away while a new TV crew set up outside in the hallway. The pen was out of Doug’s pocket again and gyrating.

  “Okay. I’m going to follow the plan,” Doug said, as much to himself as to Sanjay. “We’re going to need to shove Menlo Park hard to issue the appropriate warning. Then, to get a full alert and evacuation going, we’ll need the recommendation of the Department of Emergency Services, the governor’s approval, and maybe even the Federal Emergency Management people.”

  “What else can I do for you, Doug?”

  “Let’s go to the precautionary mode and check data from the rest of the seismograph networks around the country, then put FEMA on standby and locate the state emergency director. He can brief the governor.”

  “I’m all over it,” Sanjay said, turning for the nearest phone.

  Doug walked quickly over to George Landry, who was watching but pretending to consult his notebook. Doug crossed his arms and leaned against an adjacent electronics rack and smiled as best he could at the reporter.

  “Okay, George, fire away.”

  “Thanks. Okay, I’ve been told that you’re seeing little earthquakes where there’s been no movement recorded since seismographic records were created, and I understand it involves the subduction zone where the North American continent is colliding with the Pacific oceanic plate and shoving it down.”

  “You mean the Juan de Fuca plate, not the Pacific plate. The Juan de Fuca plate probably isn’t being shoved down as such by the advancing North American plate as much as it’s sinking of its own accord. We call it ‘slab pull.’”

  “But what is the Benioff Zone, and what does all this mean?”

  “First, the place where no movement has ever been recorded in modern times is what you overheard us referring to as the ‘Quilieute Quiet Zone,’ which is an area within the overall Cascadia Subduction Zone. Second, the Wadati-Benioff Zone was named for seismologists Kiyoo Wadati and Hugo Benioff of Caltech,” Doug began, his mind running the explanation by rote. “It’s basically the zone of crushed rock which forms the sloping, horizontal plane along which two tectonic plates slide past each other.”

  “Okay. So why are you guys so wide-eyed?”

  Doug smiled as wryly as he could. It was a perfect opening for what he needed to get across. “We’re wide-eyed?”

  “Seriously spooked would be another phrase.”

  “Well,” Doug chuckled, “first, understand that while we can’t formally say that any of this is a precursor for a major subduction zone earthquake—”

  “Yeah, I unde
rstand. You can’t say it, but you’re very, very worried.”

  “That’s a fair interpretation.”

  “What do you think of the fact that Cascadia Island Resort is getting ready to open and here we go with unprecedented earthquake activity in the same area, just like you predicted?”

  “You mean, do I see hard evidence of a connection yet?”

  “Yes. You’re the guy who came out a couple of years ago and said that any deep drilling or heavy blasting activity along the coast could set off a major subduction zone earthquake.”

  “I sure did. And I appreciate your bringing that up. My paper of three years ago triggered a major controversy, and it happened again in the Cascadia Island hearings. Almost all my colleagues disagreed with me, but I firmly believe I’m correct. What we’re seeing right now is major, unprecedented activity that may be the overture to a major subduction zone quake. True, we don’t have any hard evidence yet that there’s a connection to the Cascadia Island construction, but that’s not the important question.”

  “But you’ve got tons of circumstantial evidence.”

  “Perhaps, but right now we need to just deal with the possibility of an impending great quake and what people need to do to protect themselves. Forget all the hooh-hah about whether my theory is right or wrong. That’s a sideshow.”

  “So, no ‘I told you so’s’?”

  “That would be completely self-serving and nonproductive right now.”

  “But, you did tell us so, right?”

  “George, again, we don’t know if there’s a connection. Until we do, any talk about my paper is inappropriate.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, off the record, yeah, I damn well told you so, but on the record, what’s important is that we’ve recorded plenty of earthquake hypocenters over the years in the Benioff Zone down around thirty to forty miles beneath Puget Sound and Seattle. What’s important is that we’ve never, ever confirmed a hypocenter along what I dubbed the Quilieute Quiet Zone located some twenty miles west of the coastline.”