ELIZABETH HOLLERAN HAD GOTTEN UP MUCH later than usual. She slipped into a pair of khaki chinos and a denim shirt and went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. She normally drank decaf, but not this morning. Groggy with fatigue, she needed a jolt of the real thing. She’d crawled into bed shortly after 3:00 a.m., then had awakened twice, unable to sleep, too agitated by Otto Prable’s video and the data she’d seen at his office.
Holleran was trained to be extremely skeptical about any purported earthquake prediction. It was an inbred, almost instinctive defense mechanism. There were too many well-meaning incompetents. Too many psychics. Too many wild-eyed quacks ready to come out of the woodwork and forecast a big quake. She’d come by her skepticism naturally. Her father was a retired biologist who’d taught at Northwestern for nearly thirty years. What she knew about the rigors of the scientific method and self-discipline she owed to him. He’d trained her to rely solely on her own observations and verifiable facts; nothing else mattered. Nothing.
Holleran wanted to go over Prable’s data again and examine it carefully with all the critical skepticism she could muster. She wanted to do her best to find the holes that would quickly disprove it. There was bound to be a miscalculation or false assumption on his part, but it might take her days of hard work to ferret it out and she didn’t have any time to spare.
She needed to call Jim Dietz. She’d meant to do that yesterday, but had completely forgotten once she started looking at Prable’s data. Their plan had been to work the trench at Point Arguello for another two or three days, depending on the weather.
Holleran turned on the radio and got out some breakfast dishes. By then it was past 8:00. Time for the news. She caught something about a strong quake with damage and injuries near Memphis. Holleran dropped her cereal dish in her haste to turn up the volume. Milk and cornflakes splashed onto the tile floor.
The quake had occurred four hours earlier. It measured a magnitude 7.1 on the Richter scale.
Stunned, Holleran hurried to her bedroom where she kept her laptop. Within seconds she was hooked into the Internet site for the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center. Based in Boulder, the center continually updated seismic episodes around the world.
There were already several entries for the New Madrid quake. The epicenter was approximately 120 miles north of Memphis in extreme southwestern Kentucky. The earthquake had hit at 12:22 Universal Time. Some buildings in Memphis had collapsed, and there were early reports of loss of life.
Holleran nervously tapped in the homepage for the USGS Center for Earthquake Research at the University of Memphis. It was the main clearinghouse for the New Madrid Seismic Zone. She watched as a profile of the quake’s seismic pattern slowly scrolled down on the screen. It was striking.
The east-west ground motion was exceptionally violent. The P and S waves looked like saw-toothed mountain peaks interspersed with plunging valleys. P stood for the primary wave. It arrived first. The S, or secondary, wave was slower-moving but harder-hitting. Both were body waves, originating in the body of the rock. The amplitude—represented by the height of the wave—was pronounced. The shaking had lasted forty seconds. So the quake was of fairly long duration.
Holleran punched a couple of computer keys and got a model of the P and S waves.
The S waves had continued for nearly fifteen seconds. Their elastic vibrations sheared or twisted rock sideways and moved the earth with an up-and-down, side-to-side motion. The quake’s surface waves, the Love and Rayleigh waves, had also been of long duration.
The quake had been felt five hundred miles away in Chicago, where the skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue had swayed slightly. The buildings hadn’t suffered any damage, but the oscillations had continued for a full minute. Moderate damages—mainly collapsed chimneys and broken gas lines—were reported in St. Louis about 170 miles away. There were similar reports from Little Rock and Louisville. The quake had been felt in Pittsburgh and Charleston, South Carolina.
Those distances were a little short of incredible to a California-trained seismologist like Holleran.
The radio had an update about injuries in Memphis. Eleven people were dead, crushed in their cars when a section of a highway overpass had fallen. Hospital ERs were jammed and the death toll was expected to rise. An old, river city like Memphis had an abundance of unreinforced brick buildings. Holleran would bet some of them had crumbled like card castles when the first strong waves hit.
Her pulse racing, Holleran took some breaths to try to settle down. Her hands were trembling when she picked up the telephone to call Jim Dietz.
Holleran pressed the auto dialer for the dig site at Point Arguello. Dietz picked up the phone. He’d already been at work for an hour and had gone back to the trailer to fill his water jug.
“Did you hear about the quake in New Madrid?” she asked.
“I just checked out the Internet site at Boulder,” he said. “Pretty nice magnitude.”
“Jim, I’m not going to make it out there today.”
“You finally got that big date, right?” Dietz, as ever, his charming self.
“I’m going to Memphis.”
The line went quiet. She began to tell him about Otto Prable.