Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  “You came up with the name?”

  “Yes. That’s where the plates are locked with over three hundred years of pressure. Now, it’s no hotter down there than about 350 degrees centigrade at a twenty-kilometer depth, and that’s not hot enough to melt the rocks or make them sufficiently elastic, so they can snag and lock the zone, as they have. But they can also break all at once. In other words, in that zone, the earth can store an amazing amount of energy before the inevitable break occurs, and we wouldn’t necessarily see that break coming. Think of the Quilieute Quiet Zone as a huge lynchpin which can be overwhelmed and shattered if enough force builds up. And someday, without question, enough force will build to break it.”

  “And that someday is now?”

  “Could be. Maybe. We should all prepare just in case it is.”

  “And you said three hundred years of pent-up, unrelieved energy?”

  “God, it’s hard to articulate how much energy that is. There’s a twelve-meter slip deficit out there. The tectonic plate that all of North America rides on and the remains of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate should have moved twelve meters laterally past each other in the last three hundred years since the last great earthquake, the oceanic plate sliding down at an angle beneath the North American plate. But they haven’t moved past each other at all. Meanwhile, the entire North American continent has been pushing harder and harder from the east to the west against that locked section along the coast, and the process has been warping the Washington and Oregon coastlines upward, maybe as much as six or seven feet, and storing the immense energy that way. The calculations of how much stored energy has built up aren’t terribly complex, but they’re very impressive.”

  “And… it could all be released at once in a gigantic quake? I want to make sure I’ve got that straight. Not little quakes, but one monster quake releasing all that stored pressure, or energy? Today or tomorrow?”

  “Well, we’re studying a phenomenon we call ‘silent earthquakes,’ which might relieve some stress every thirteen months or so, but we know how much energy is still there, and that it equals a monstruous, great earthquake. We know the precise date and even the time of the last gigantic quake, thanks to very good records kept by seventeenth-century Japanese scribes who recorded a strange tsunami with an unknown origin from the east. It was on January 26 of the year 1700 at about 9 P.M. We also know from recent, separate studies that the entire zone released all its energy at once, and that squares with an extensive record in the actual muds and layers along the coast which shows irrefutable evidence of periodic great tsunamis. It’s a heck of a detective story.”

  “And… that could be as large as the 7.1-magnitude quake in 1949?”

  “7… ?” Doug studied the reporter’s face for a few seconds, trying to decide how graphically to describe the monster that could be awakening off the coast.

  “George, try over a hundred times greater than that. Maybe as much as a 9.5 on the Moment Magnitude Scale, bigger than the great M9.2 Alaskan quake of 1964, which shook Alaska for nearly five minutes.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “It could also, in the extreme, mean that large sections of the northwestern seacoast could drop in altitude by as much as eight feet and then almost certainly be hit by a thirty-foot-high tsunami going up to ten miles inland.”

  “That’s possible?”

  “It’s all but a certainty. Now, again, we don’t know that the zone is really going to let go right now, but that’s why I look a bit spooked.”

  “Oh, by the way, are you going to go do more TV interviews?” Landry asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then… you’re very good at it, Doc, but could I make a recommendation, off the record?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Phrases like ‘9.5 magnitude’ and ‘five minutes of shaking’ all sound like Armageddon to the average person. I’d be a bit more gentle, or at least explain that it doesn’t mean the earth is going to collapse. Just that we’re going to shake horribly.”

  “Thanks. Good advice. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Landry shook his hand and turned to walk away. Doug stood rooted to the same spot for a moment before chasing after him.

  “Hey, Landry. George. One more thing.”

  The reporter turned back.

  “If I turn out to have been right all along, the only ‘I told you so’ I’d like to indulge in is a cautionary warning to the scientific and governmental community to be more open-minded in the future. I tried very hard to get people to understand there could be a real danger in thwacking the bejesus out of Cascadia Island for two years, but no one wanted to listen.”

  “I’ll do a big follow-up if it turns out that way,” Landry said. “But—forgive me—isn’t that also a big swipe at your employer, the USGS?”

  Doug cocked his head in thought for a second and smiled as he shrugged his shoulders. “If the shoe fits, I guess. Some of my colleagues are very quick to reject new ideas.”

  “Apparently.”

  “But, in fairness, that’s the essence of the scientific method.”

  Landry turned to leave again as Sanjay touched Doug’s arm.

  “Channel 5 needs you outside. I’ll keep watch in here. I’ve got the calls started to the state authorities. Oh, and should I send someone to Starbucks?”

  “Yes! I’d kill for a grande nonfat no-whip mocha.”

  “Really?” Sanjay asked, stepping back slightly for show. “In that case, it’s on me.”

  “No, no. Use my credit card,” Doug replied, handing over his American Express. “Take orders for all our people. Good morale is fueled by good caffeine.”

  Chapter 12

  GOVERNOR ’S MANSION, OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON 8:45 A.M.

  Frank O’Brien had really wanted to be president of the United States, but he knew it wasn’t going to happen. Too many compromises and barely concealed encounters with women who ended up talking. The governorship was the best he could hope for.

  But he’d had one hell of a great time in politics. A lot more so than if he’d remained in the banking business, which was boring as a grave and not much more profitable.

  The state patrol and his aides knew better than to disturb him on a weekend unless it was a genuine emergency. From the reports unfolding from Bellingham, he had decisions to make.

  “Okay, James,” he said, sitting at the dining room table, “fill me in on the latest.”

  The death toll was far less than he’d feared—four people, all victims of the campus building collapse. It was an instant political problem, of course, since Western was a state university. He made a mental note to check who had been governor when the building was built to unrealistic seismic standards. Eighteen were seriously injured, and a medevac helicopter accident had added two more to the injured list. Property damage in the Bellingham area would probably approach $2 billion or more, James was saying, but from experience the governor knew it would accelerate, and that, too, would be a political football bringing calls for reform of any aspect of state aid that didn’t work exactly right.

  Not that human disaster was only a political problem. He wasn’t without sympathy. But as governor he felt entitled to a clinical detachment. He could openly mourn and commiserate, but it was better to keep his real emotions securely walled off in order to make better decisions, both politically and personally.

  James droned on, consulting the pad in his hand, and the governor kept nodding at what seemed the right places as his mind appropriately pigeonholed the earthquake problem and drifted back to what he was most interested in, the big picture of the life of O’Brien.

  Fourteen years had gone by since he’d sold his stock and left the chairmanship of the Tacoma-area bank he’d started, leaving it to crash when the market turned bad and the legal but risky investments he’d encouraged over his junior executive’s signatures had failed. The lesser men and women he’d left in charge and holding the bag had been befuddled by the legacy of wheeling and dealin
g, and the woman who took over as chairman had made a myriad of bad decisions, almost putting herself and her senior executives in prison with a series of panicked, dishonest moves against loan customers as the bank tried to call in all the cash, cover their losses, and prepare to sell out—the very thing they’d promised Tacoma would never happen. By then, Frank O’Brien had been elected to Congress and discovered that he had an incredible talent for spin. It was Continental Puget Bank’s fault that they had to fire-sale themselves to an eastern megabank, he said, and the public bought the explanation, having little interest in the boring esoterica of the truth.

  Six feet four, square-shouldered, and dignified at fifty-one, his eyes were too blue and his smile too big for anyone to believe otherwise. And, as a Democrat in a state occasionally liberal enough to scare its Russian immigrants, he could get pretty much whatever he wanted as long as he stroked the teachers union and the AFL-CIO, made the right noises to the Teamsters, tendered to the longshoremen’s union, and took the right campaign endorsements. They all loved him for reasons that even few of his supporters could link to any definite achievements.

  “Sir, did you hear me?” James was asking.

  “Yeah,” the governor said, removing his fist from under his chin and sitting up a bit. He adopted a puzzled look his aide well recognized. “I was just evaluating something you said earlier. Repeat that, please.”

  “Ah, what part?”

  “The part about the recovery efforts. Wasn’t that what you just asked me?”

  James’s eyes had all but glazed over, which was precisely the response O’Brien had intended to trigger.

  “Aw, that’s okay,” he said, adopting a magnanimous tone. “We’ll get back to it when you can remember.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Hey, it’s understandable you’d forget where you were in an intense briefing like that. Good job, by the way.”

  The figures and facts began to flow again, and once more he drifted to the much more pleasant retrospective.

  Life as a congressman had been, quite simply, beneath his dignity. Nowhere near enough power or perks, and after one term he’d railroaded his way into the Senate, winning a second term before deciding to come home to Tacoma to plot a takeover of the statehouse.

  The years in the Senate had been good. Publicity, perks, and as many skirts as he wanted. Women were amazingly stupid, he thought, attracted like mosquitoes when someone with a little power blew past them. He’d cut a wide swath through the field of feminine charms, following in the tradition of John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and a former senator from Washington who was accused of using a date-rape drug on women otherwise unwilling. Frank O’Brien would never stoop so low, he thought. He didn’t need to. His campaign offices always featured at least one teary-eyed woman, the morning-after sexual conquest devastated because the senator suddenly couldn’t remember her name. But such women were always consenting adults, and he was proud of that.

  The other side of the table had grown quiet, and the governor realized the briefing was over.

  “So? Options?” he said with a smile, noting from the look on his aide’s face that options had been precisely what he’d been presenting. “I mean, which of the ones you covered should we attack first?” he continued without missing a beat.

  “Ah, there’s the matter of disaster declarations and—”

  “Wait a second. I need to decide about the Cascadia Resort opening tonight. I’m scheduled to chopper out there with the family in a few hours and ride over on their new ferry.”

  “I know. I wouldn’t advise it, sir.”

  “Aw, you just told me that Bellingham’s not that bad. And it’ll be a good party.”

  “Sir, our emergency services director has been relaying word to me that this Bellingham quake may just be the beginning. He says—”

  Frank waved him off. “Don’t start with that seismic nonsense again. It’s the same foolishness as the global warming mythology. Something vibrates down there and immediately we’re going to have Armageddon. You should see the last budget request Harper had the audacity to present to me.”

  “I did, sir.”

  “Well, forget his scare tactics.”

  “Governor—”

  “James, are you aware that I carefully studied this whole issue two years ago?”

  “I… no. I guess I didn’t recall that.”

  “Well, I did. My hostility to the Chicken Little voices doesn’t come from lack of interest or lack of understanding, it’s from lack of respect. I’m not being blasé—or cavalier is a better word—at all. There are a lot of scientists out there with too much time and grant money on their hands always looking for more research opportunities, and if they can scare us a little bit more, they can perpetuate their jobs. Sometimes it’s an honest enterprise, but all this hooh-hah about the Cascadia Subduction Zone flies in the face of the eminent seismologists who say it could well be another three hundred years before it corks off.”

  “There are competing opinions, I know…”

  “Well, they’re not competing for my attention and unless the USGS makes the flat-out statement that I need to worry, I’m not worrying.”

  “But, sir, if the naysayers are right, and they could be, you could be putting yourself and your family in harm’s way.”

  O’Brien was already on his feet. “James, let me make this really clear to you. When and only when the USGS issues a formal, no-foolin’, warning or prediction, I’ll cancel. Otherwise, I don’t want to be bothered about this again. It’s all a ploy for more funding.”

  Frank O’Brien swept around the corner, and James Bollinger sighed as he gathered his notebook and wondered how to duck Bill Harper the rest of the day. If O’Brien wouldn’t even consider his trip to Cascadia Island unsafe, the chances of a coastal evacuation were virtually nonexistent.

  QUAALATCH, WASHINGTON

  Marta Cartwright awoke with a start, surprised that she’d slept through dawn still sitting in her chair beneath the warmth of her favorite afghan. The fog had thickened now and she couldn’t see the island or the light. Small comfort.

  She glanced at the clock, reading a few minutes before 9, aware that part of her mind had been tracking continuous earth tremors as she slept. As she rubbed her eyes, another tiny shudder vibrated through her consciousness, too trivial in intensity to rattle the cups in her cabinet, but enough to reassure her.

  Something disturbing had been stalking her since just before she awoke from her dream time. A troubling feeling of pain and fright from somewhere distant, but not so distant. There were seldom any distinct images accompanying such moments of clairvoyance, but she was a modern shaman who knew well what to do when such feelings coalesced in her mind: turn on her TV.

  She reached for the remote, filling the screen with the images from Bellingham of fallen buildings and frantic rescues. It was at once settling to confirm the premonition, and disturbing to realize many innocent lives would be lost paying for Mick Walker’s sins against the planet. Cleansing at the hands of nature was something she well understood. It was the same balance as death being the ultimate affirmation of life.

  Gravel crunched in the small driveway behind the cottage. Too early for her circuit-riding postman, she thought, realizing with a small grin that she was resorting to logic instead of instinct to figure out who might be visiting.

  The voice and slamming car door erased the mystery. She waited in the entryway for Lester Brown, her grandson, to round the corner of the cottage with his two boisterous friends, young Quaalatch males and a pair of losers she knew all too well and thoroughly distrusted. Lester had a chance at life, but they were helping him destroy it.

  All three of them were very excited about something.

  “Grandmother!” Lester exclaimed, throwing open his arms to embrace her.

  “I see you’ve brought Bull and Jimmy,” she said without pleasure, hugging him back with some reserve as she eyed the other two.

  “Yeah. We’ve got s
omething we’ve got to go take care of, but we wanted to come by and pay our respects to our leader.”

  She shook her head. “I am just your grandmother now, Lester, and only that. Sara is your leader.”

  “No she’s not!” Bull barked, his fist jammed in the air. “We recognize only you! Right guys? Woo, woo, woo!”

  The intensity of his words and the utter absence of any phrase even remotely Quaalatch disgusted her. But the mindless nodding of Jimmy—the younger, simpler member of the trio—was just too much to take.

  Lester leaned forward, his hand out to the others as he looked her in the eyes.

  “You all right, Grandmother?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look upset.”

  She shook her head. “Worried, Lester. Not upset.” She took a quick breath and forced a smile.

  “Well, we hafta go, y’know?”

  “Where are you three going?”

  Bull smiled conspiratorially while Jimmy started to speak. Lester cuffed him, ignored the resulting curse, and answered for all of them.

  “Just a little mission we gotta do. Bye, Grandmother.”

  They rounded the cottage and piled into the car, throwing gravel as they sped off to the south.

  Mission indeed, she thought. All three of them had police records, and Bull had done hard time in a Washington state prison for theft. Bull was dangerous, a walking time bomb of barely contained anger inside a muscular body. And Jimmy, she thought somewhat guiltily, was a barely functional idiot.

  Her grandson, by contrast, was smart, but completely misguided, wishing for the chance to experience some sort of mythological glamour as a Quaalatch brave and ready to go fight off the majority of white society—provided he had enough money for liquor and gas.

  Marta served herself a fresh cup of tea and sat down, trying to pick through the warning signs for clues about their mission. Undoubtedly she would hear of it later, and it was unlikely to make her happy. Lester was on a collision course, his own disaster simply searching for the right place to happen. And even she was helpless to intervene on the path chosen.