PILLARS OF THICK BLACK SMOKE FRAMED THE TALL buildings downtown, the Midwest Bank and Raldo Towers, as well as the two bridges over the Mississippi. There was more smoke than Atkins had expected. More fires. He figured most of them had probably started after the earthquake shattered gas lines. Entering Memphis on Route 61, he’d just gotten his first good look at the city’s skyline.
He picked up Interstate 40 just after it crossed into the city from West Memphis, six lanes of stalled traffic going in either direction. The Pyramid, the city’s distinctive riverfront auditorium, was right behind him. A five-story brick warehouse was burning fiercely a couple blocks off the highway. The dancing flames were giving everyone a hell of a show.
Atkins had a perfect vantage point. He could look right down Thomas Street from the elevated highway. Fire trucks—pumpers, snorkels, and other pieces of heavy equipment—encircled the building. It looked solid, thick-walled, old. Watching from the driver’s seat. Atkins worried that the firefighters were much too close. There was no telling how much the walls had been weakened or what would happen in a good aftershock.
Atkins rolled down a window. The wail of sirens seemed to be coming from a dozen directions at once. The Memphis fire department was probably stretched pretty thin by now. Fire was often the big killer in an earthquake. A lot of people didn’t realize that. Even those who should have known better like building engineers who routinely forgot to turn off gas and electrical power after a quake.
Listening to the sirens—the sound seemed to wrap around the entire city—Atkins wondered how many people had been hit by falling masonry or glass. Rushing into the street during an earthquake was another common, often fatal mistake. A natural reaction, Atkins had done it himself. But it could be deadly around tall buildings.
None of the city’s new skyscrapers had collapsed, but the ground waves had made them sway like trees in a strong wind. Some of the windows had exploded, raining glass on the streets.
As he listened to the radio, Atkins knew that the worst damage was centered just south of Beale Street, the famous blues mecca, where many of the homes and low-rise buildings had shifted on their foundations. That’s where some of the biggest fires had broken out.
Damage in the city was spotty but widespread. Even Walter Jacobs’ office at the University of Memphis had taken a hit. The Center for Earthquake Studies was located in a converted two-story home on the edge of the campus. The chimney and part of the cornice had crashed through the roof into one of the bathrooms. A grad student who showed up early to crunch numbers on a computer in an adjoining room had a close call.
Atkins had gotten a rough description from Jacobs by cell phone. They decided to meet at the scene of a building collapse. Some bricklayers had been salvaging their work on the walls of a discount shopping center. Two twelve-foot-high sections of solid brick had fallen over in one of the aftershocks, crushing the men. Rescuers were frantically trying to dig out any survivors.
All told, a pretty bad quake, but nothing like a big one. You had to experience a magnitude 7.5 quake or greater to appreciate what could happen. Live through one; lose a good friend. Or maybe the woman you wanted to marry. That’s how Atkins tended to grade earthquakes. It was his own personal scale of magnitude. Memphis had been rocked, but its 7.1 hadn’t been a real killer. It wasn’t like Luzon in 1990, or Kobe, or Mexico City.
Still, this one had been something. The image of the ground rolling like an ocean wave stuck in his memory. He’d never seen anything like that firsthand.
It hadn’t happened for a while, but as Atkins made his way off the interstate and headed south on Martin Luther King Boulevard, the old memories came back. He remembered the evening before the quake had hit Mexico City. He was powerless to stop the images from coming, or even slow them down. How Sara and he had made love on the small bed in their hotel room.
Atkins had had the feeling then that Sara wanted all of him, and for the first time in his life, he was ready to give it, to surrender to someone entirely. That night he decided he would share his life with her. He would hold nothing back. She understood and responded with her body in a way she never had.
Driving in the slow-moving traffic, Atkins experienced a moment of intense pain. He knew what had happened. It had happened to him before. Seeing the damage, the shattered buildings, and the body bags after a bad quake made the images of Mexico City come sweeping back. The memory of his last night with Sara in that hotel hit even harder. He would never get over it.
He pushed the memory away. There wasn’t time for that now.
AS Atkins continued south, many of the intersections were blocked by police cars, fire trucks, and clusters of ambulances. He drove by the main entrance to Graceland. The white-columned mansion of Elvis Presley was on a low hill and partly hidden by trees. Two of his private airplanes, a jet and a turbo-prop, were parked on a small plaza across the street. Even after an earthquake, a line of visitors had already formed, waiting for the landmark to open, mainly elderly, silver-haired women who’d descended from a tour bus. They weren’t going to let an earthquake keep them from paying homage to the King.
The collapsed shopping center was near the intersection of Presley Boulevard and Raines Avenue. Atkins parked a few blocks away. Police had strung yellow crime-scene tape around the perimeter of the building. Red and blue lights flashed along streets jammed with emergency vehicles.
Rescue workers were digging furiously around the edges of the wall, searching for survivors, probing the ground with sticks and their hands. A couple of heavyset cops were using dogs.
One look was enough to tell Atkins they were probably wasting their time. The entire west wall, about forty yards of brick, had fallen on the workers.
Atkins spotted Jacobs in the crowd. He was hunched over with a cell phone screwed into his right ear. He wore a battered yellow hard hat, a muddy overcoat, and high-topped rubber boots. An ID badge hung from a chain around his neck.
Jacobs waved him over. “Another reporter,” he said, putting the cell in his coat pocket. “It’s been nonstop since I got up. I’ve already called Reston and asked them to send us some media people. We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”
“How many dead?” Atkins asked.
“So far, twenty-six. There could be seven or eight more buried right here. No one seems to know exactly how many were up on the scaffold when the wall fell over.”
Atkins wanted to know about aftershocks. These were often more deadly than the initial earthquake, bringing down already weakened buildings with astounding suddenness. He’d seen it happen often enough. The first time was in Mexico City.
Jacobs shook his head. “I’ve got five people out setting up a PADS network. So far we’ve had nothing significant.”
PADS stood for “portable autonomous digital seismographs.” The suitcase-sized devices were used to record aftershocks and track strong ground motion. Some of the instruments were being shipped in from the USGS research center in Boulder. They didn’t have enough on hand in Memphis, one of Jacobs’ chronic complaints even though he was no longer with the agency. The lion’s share of USGS funds and equipment invariably went to California. The New Madrid Seismic Zone had always been a poor sister to the San Andreas Fault. Jacobs didn’t dispute that the earthquake risks were greater in California, where they happened far more often. He just wanted to make sure the very real danger in the heartland was also adequately studied. So far, the risk here had not been recognized. The shortages of equipment and staff were glaring.
He handed Atkins a printout from a seismometer.
“The epicenter was right on the Tennessee-Kentucky line. Nearest town is a place called Mayfield. I’ve been there. It’s up by Kentucky Lake. Right smack in the middle of the New Madrid Seismic Zone.”
One of the rescuers raised a hand, motioning for the other diggers to stop. They were all firemen. Despite the cold, some of them had taken off their heavy yellow coats and were working in shirtsleeves. They’d just pulled a man from beneath the wall. He was completely covered with mud. Atkins watched as a big, red-faced fireman with a thick beard wiped mud from the man’s mouth and nose and, kneeling next to him, began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Another man hurried over with a canister of oxygen. They put the mask over the bricklayer’s mouth.
The big man got up, picked up a shovel, and went back to work along the wall. He already knew the outcome. After a few more minutes, an EMS technician covered the bricklayer with a green poncho and helped carry the body to an ambulance.
Spectators had gathered, hundreds of them. They were watching the show in hushed silence, pushing in as close as they could. The cops tried to keep them back, but it wasn’t easy. There weren’t enough of them, nowhere near enough.
That never changed, Atkins thought. Gawkers always turned out in force after an earthquake. So did looters. In Mexico City he’d seen a man break a dead woman’s fingers to get her rings off.
“Well, it looks like all your observations were right on target,” Atkins said. “Even down to the animals.”
Jacobs had actually anticipated the quake. True, it wasn’t an exact prediction—he didn’t give a time or a precise location or a probability, all key ingredients. And yet Atkins thought his friend still had reason to be proud. So much of their science remained highly intuitive. Jacobs thought conditions were ripe for a quake and had been proven right. That was about as good as the science currently allowed.
“I’d say so,” Jacobs said. “We haven’t had a temblor that strong since the one I was telling you about back in the 1890s. We were sure overdue.”