Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest

by Sandi Doughton

  “Many people in the profession tend to think that a geologist who has not at some point worked for the Survey has not been rigorously trained,” John McPhee wrote in Annals of the Former World. “Within the profession, the Survey has particular prestige—as much as, or even more than, the geology faculties of major universities, where chair professors have been known to mutter about the U.S.G.S., ‘They think they are God’s helpers.’ ” As the nation’s needs shifted, USGS scientists shifted their prospecting from gold and silver to oil, uranium, and sources of geothermal power. Survey scientists trained the Apollo astronauts to collect rocks on the moon.

  A USGS topographic mapping crew in Washington’s Cascade Mountains, 1903. (image credits 10.1)

  The esprit de corps that infused the USGS in its early days was the model for the Forest Service, Park Service, and other government agencies “notable for the disinterested effectiveness of their work,” Stegner wrote in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, his biography of Powell. With fortunes to be made and speculators jostling for advantage, Powell insisted the USGS be above reproach. The act that created the agency stated that “the Director and members of the Geological Survey shall have no personal or private interests in the lands or mineral wealth of the region under survey.” To this day USGS employees and their families are prohibited from holding individual stock in mining, oil, or energy companies.

  Earthquake monitoring didn’t become a federal concern until the Cold War. Before then, seismic networks were largely makeshift affairs run by universities. But the defense establishment quickly realized that instruments designed to detect vibrations from earthquakes could also detect vibrations from nuclear explosions. After a ban on atmospheric blasts drove atomic bomb testing underground, money poured in to expand seismic monitoring and develop new techniques. Intelligence agencies picked apart seismograms, trying to figure out what the Soviets were up to.

  “It was spy versus spy in its perfect form,” recalled Allan Lindh, a veteran of the early earthquake programs. Paranoid that the other side was testing bombs on the sly, the federal government asked USGS scientists to figure out if it was possible to conceal an underground blast. They found it could be done if the bomb was set off within seconds of an actual earthquake. So the rush was on to find ways to more quickly spot and measure earthquakes. “That’s when we started programming computers to identify earthquakes in real time,” Lindh said.

  Seismic monitoring in the Pacific Northwest got a boost from the arms race as well as from the need to keep an eye on ground shaking at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The influx of money led to better instruments and more sophisticated methods to analyze seismograms. But the notion that it was the federal government’s job to understand and grapple with the risks posed by earthquakes didn’t get serious traction until Alaska’s 1964 megaquake. An American city was destroyed and more than 130 people died, shattering the nation’s illusion of seismic invulnerability. Even so it took another decade and another threat from foreign powers to get the USGS program off the ground.

  The race this time was to predict earthquakes, and Russia and China seemed to be winning. Soviet seismologists set off a buzz in the early 1970s with claims that they could detect changes in rocks and swelling in the earth’s crust preceding big quakes. It made sense. If cracks formed before a quake, the ground would expand. Could this be the Holy Grail earthquake researchers had been dreaming of? Then sketchy reports started trickling in from the city of Haicheng, on China’s northeastern coast.

  A quake of magnitude 7.3 struck in February 1975, flattening structures for miles. But the death toll was surprisingly low. According to official accounts that reached the West, untold thousands of lives were saved when seismologists predicted the quake and evacuated their comrades to safety. The precursors the Chinese relied on included foreshocks, fluctuations in well water levels, and snakes emerging from hibernation in the dead of winter. Details were murky. Nevertheless, it seemed earthquake prediction was finally coming of age.

  Frank Press, the nation’s leading seismologist and later science advisor to President Carter, joined in the euphoria. Earthquake forecasts would be routine within a decade, he vowed. The coming revolution was touted in the media. In her book Predicting the Unpredictable, USGS seismologist Susan Hough quoted a 1976 article in People magazine that captured the optimism: “Earthquake prediction, long treated as the seismological family’s weird uncle, has in the last few years become everyone’s favorite nephew.”

  Many within the USGS were more skeptical, but they kept their mouths shut. If not for the buzz over earthquake prediction, Congress might never have adopted the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977. For the first time, the bill gave the responsibility for assessing earthquake hazards to the USGS, along with the money to pay for it.

  Prediction research was a big part of the mix, and for a while no idea was too far-fetched. One plan called for triggering a quake with explosives and monitoring it as it unfolded. Geologists were dispatched to find a suitably remote fault in Nevada’s Great Basin before the plan was scrubbed.

  The highest-profile experiment centered on Parkfield, a tiny town in the cattle country of central California. The portion of the San Andreas Fault that runs through the area seemed to rupture with almost metronome-like frequency—every twenty-two years, on average. The motto on the wall of the Parkfield Cafe advises, “If you feel a shake or a quake, get under the table and eat your steak.” When the experiment started in 1985, it had been nineteen years since Parkfield’s last quake.

  A team of USGS scientists, including Lindh, boldly predicted that cafe patrons should expect to dive for cover by no later than 1992. The researchers wired up the fault and waited to capture the precursor signals that were sure to appear. None did, even when the fault finally ruptured in 2004, a dozen years “late.” “What we learned was that we couldn’t predict earthquakes,” Lindh said. It was a worthwhile lesson. “When people around the world are claiming they can predict earthquakes, it’s hard work to prove you can’t.”

  The signal the Russians thought they saw turned out to be a phantom. When Western scientists were finally allowed to investigate the Haicheng prediction, the story they pieced together was more ambiguous than the simple tale of triumph propagated by Chairman Mao’s party apparatus. The national government never issued a specific prediction, but several scientists and a regional earthquake observatory did warn that a quake was imminent based mainly on a ferocious swarm of what proved to be foreshocks.

  Local officials in some provinces broadcast warnings by loudspeaker and urged people to evacuate. Already rattled by more than three hundred shocks in twenty-four hours, many residents heeded the warning and were safe when their flimsy homes collapsed. But people in other provinces stayed put. Similar swarms had shaken the region in the past and weren’t followed by a big quake.

  When a major quake struck seven months later in a neighboring province, China’s prediction bureau offered no warning. More than a quarter of a million people were killed. The famed Haicheng prediction was “a blend of confusion, empirical analysis, intuitive judgment, and good luck,” one analysis concluded.

  With earthquake prediction out of reach, the USGS regrouped. If the agency couldn’t offer short-term warnings, the experience at Parkfield and other quake-prone regions around the world proved the value of long-term studies. The San Andreas didn’t slip on schedule at Parkfield. But it did slip eventually—just as it had before and just as it will again. A better understanding of faults and their behavior became the cornerstone of USGS work, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, the country’s newest hot spot for seismic research.

  If you spend much time at the USGS offices on the University of Washington campus, you’ll hear people asking, “Where’s Craig?” The answer is usually a shrug. He might be in Spokane, briefing local leaders on a newly discovered fault that runs through the center of town. He could be in Washington, D.C., cozying up to a congressional committee. Or
maybe he’s stuck in mind-numbing budget meetings, scrounging for loose change he can parlay into one more lidar survey, one more earthquake trench.

  His team calls him their rainmaker. Others credit Craig Weaver with doing more than anyone else to make the Pacific Northwest as earthquake-savvy as it is today. “Craig wants the research to save lives,” said Ivan Wong, principal seismologist at URS Corp., a leader in quake-resistant design and construction. “There is no one in the Survey to compare to Craig in terms of what he’s contributed to earthquake safety.”

  Weaver is having none of it. “If I ever sit back and say, ‘Oh, didn’t I do a good job,’ it’s time for me to quit,” he said, with feeling. “I just want to focus on what’s next. Where does that Spokane Fault go?”

  As regional seismic hazards chief, Weaver is the face of earthquake research in the Northwest. At press conferences and public meetings, he’s the one who translates the science into English. Weaver can talk to building engineers. He can chat with the mayor and bank CEOs. In fact, it’s hard to get him to shut up. “Craig can really filibuster,” one colleague said, with a mixture of admiration and exasperation.

  That relentless dialogue is part of Weaver’s plan. He realized early on that earthquake studies would never do any good on the shelf. “Craig decided he didn’t want to sit in his office and write scientific papers,” said USGS geophysicist Tom Pratt. “He wanted to make sure the science influenced public policy.” That’s why Weaver made the leap—kicking and screaming at first—from research to management.

  Weaver’s fingerprints are on almost every major earthquake discovery in the region, though usually behind the scenes. A master of the art of budget mining, Weaver knows how to find the bucks, then get the biggest scientific bang out of them. When the USGS gave the Northwest one of its first funding bumps for earthquake research, some scientists wanted to split the money so everyone got a small piece of the pie. Instead, Weaver orchestrated the blitz of seismic surveys up, down, and across Puget Sound that laid the basis for all the work since.

  Lidar coverage in the Northwest is among the most extensive in the nation largely because Weaver helped cobble together a consortium of water districts, county planning departments, tribes, and state agencies to coordinate the work. Each partner pays for the mapping it wants, and the collective was able to negotiate a lower price for the surveys. Everyone shares the data, including geologists on the hunt for faults. “Craig knows how to make things happen,” Pratt said. “Not many scientists do.”

  Because it’s run by scientists, the USGS is more egalitarian than most federal agencies. Weaver’s office at the UW is one of the worst, tucked away in the basement near the seismology lab. The frontline researchers get the nice views. Management jobs in the USGS are often considered more a burden than a prize. Scientists reluctantly rotate through leadership slots, serving their time like a prison sentence until they can return to research. But Weaver found his niche when he took over Seattle’s earthquake program.

  A UW graduate, Weaver was one of the USGS’s first Seattle-based researchers. He started in 1979 when geothermal energy was in vogue. Weaver’s job was to figure out if Cascade volcanoes could be tapped as natural power plants. In the spring of 1980, he and UW seismologist Steve Malone were getting ready to deploy a batch of seismometers to listen for magma movement under the snow-capped peaks. Then Mount St. Helens started clearing her throat. Weaver and Malone quickly changed plans and installed all their instruments around the volcano that was about to make history.

  Mount St. Helens’s cataclysmic eruption was a sobering experience for the USGS. The agency’s monitoring led to life-saving evacuations, but Newsweek pointed out the “embarrassing failure” to predict the blast itself. Nor did the USGS adequately warn communities in the path of the smothering blanket of ash. Weaver joined the crush of researchers who swarmed Mount St. Helens for the next several years, fine-tuning their ability to forecast eruptions by tracking the tremors from magma on the move.

  Another natural disaster deflected Weaver’s career onto the path he’s followed ever since. The Bay Area earthquake that interrupted 1989’s cross-town World Series convinced the USGS to widen its seismic focus beyond California. Seattle’s waterfront viaduct was a dead ringer for the double-decker freeway that collapsed in Oakland, killing forty-two people. The Northwest was just waking up to the threat posed by the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Weaver was tapped to join, and later lead, an expanded earthquake program.

  Watching Weaver work a conference—chatting, laughing, and huddling in the corridor with key players—it seems like he was born to schmooze. But it was an acquired skill. Like his fellow scientists, Weaver loves to natter on about technical details that make other people’s eyes glaze over. “You make an idiot of yourself enough times and you finally realize, hey, we’ve got to change the way we’re talking,” he said. He learned to boil the message down to its essence.

  One of Weaver’s first attempts at public outreach was a disaster. Scientists were about to publish evidence for the massive Seattle Fault earthquake a thousand years ago that lifted beaches twenty feet out of the water and sloughed acres of forest into Lake Washington. Weaver didn’t alert city officials until the evening before the news broke. “That was clearly not the way to do it,” he recalled ruefully.

  The USGS already had a reputation for arrogance, and public relations blunders like that didn’t help. As in the days of King and Powell, the agency still considers itself the elite of the geoscience world. So it came as a shock in the mid-1990s when Congress, under the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, targeted the USGS for elimination as part of its cost-cutting “Contract with America.”

  The public and lawmakers from earthquake-prone states rallied to the agency’s defense. Outraged editorials popped up in newspapers across California. Although several USGS programs took deep cuts, the earthquake work emerged largely unscathed. But a bit of the swagger was gone. “They were basically told, ‘Make yourself more relevant or you’re going to disappear,’ ” Wong said. “I think that threat changed them.” But there are still many problems the USGS is uniquely equipped to address, and delving into earthquake hazards is foremost among them.

  University scientists live from grant to grant. They’re not likely to devote decades to trenching and tracking faults from one end of Washington State to the other. “Universities want you pulling in money and working on international projects,” said USGS geologist Brian Sherrod, who led most of the fault excavations in the Northwest. “We’re paid by the taxpayers to work on problems that affect you.” Academic geologists might take pot shots at the USGS for being conservative and bureaucratic, but many envy their federal counterparts, too. USGS geologists can devote themselves to research year-round, not just during school breaks.

  That sustained focus helped hammer home the Northwest’s seismic perils. Duck-and-cover school drills are routine now, and public works departments plan for earthquake upgrades as a matter of course. When Weaver and Frankel briefed the Seattle City Council on upcoming revisions to the seismic hazard maps in 2012, it was clear that years of talking about earthquakes over and over and over had paid off. No one asked what a subduction zone was. Everybody knew about the Seattle Fault. “People have heard it so many times, it’s not a foreign concept anymore,” Weaver said.

  For the sea change, even Weaver might allow himself a small pat on the back—before chasing off after that Spokane fault.

  The seismic hazard map scientists gathered to discuss at the Seattle workshop in 2012 represents the synthesis of everything that’s known about earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest. But it looks like it was drawn by a first-grader going through a rainbow phase. A thick red band hugs the coast. Next comes a broad stripe of orange that covers Puget Sound and sideswipes Portland. Successive bands of gold and yellow sweep like waves toward the Cascades. On the other side of the crest, green fades into a wide expanse of blue.

  The color scheme is straightforward
. Red means high hazard. Sky blue, not so much. Almost everything else about the map is incomprehensible to the average person.

  The map represents a forecast of how hard the ground could shake in the future—the yardstick engineers use to design buildings. But the map doesn’t show what to expect in any particular earthquake—say a full-rip 9 off the coast or a magnitude 6 on the Seattle Fault. What’s mapped is a mash-up, the statistical equivalent of dumping all possible quakes into a blender and punching “puree.” Instead of forecasting the worst that could happen, the map is a picture of the worst that’s likely to happen. Unless it’s not.

  A growing number of critics say the unexpected devastation from recent quakes shows that seismic hazard maps can be misleading or flat wrong. Coastal communities in Japan based their tsunami defenses on government hazard maps that assumed a magnitude 9 quake was impossible in the Tohoku area. The 2008 quake in China’s Sichuan Province struck in an area colored green for low hazard on the map. More than eighty thousand people died, including thousands of children crushed when poorly built schools and dormitories collapsed. The quake that knocked Christchurch, New Zealand, to its knees in 2011 was on a fault that didn’t even show up on the maps.

  Humbling experiences like those have convinced some experts that countries might be better off just planning for the worst, even if it is a statistical long shot. Others argue that the maps are based on such a shaky tower of assumptions that they’re no better than educated guesses. “The probability that we got the right answer is very small, but that’s not the impression we give with these maps,” said Tom Heaton. Among the first scientists to question the old assumptions about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, Heaton now directs the Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory at Caltech. It makes him nervous that building engineers take the maps as gospel. “It sounds like we’ve got it all figured out … but earthquakes are still a great mystery to us. We get reminded of that when something unexpected happens.”