ATKINS HELD THE SPEED AT SEVENTY. IF HE went any faster, the Explorer had a tendency to slip out on the curves. The toll road that ran south from Mayfield to the Tennessee border was empty of traffic and in good shape.
Elizabeth had the map open on her lap. They’d head south another thirty miles into Tennessee and pick up Route 412, which would take them to the bridge at Caruthersville.
Atkins had the radio on. There was heavy static. Most of the local stations had been knocked off the air. Occasionally, they were able to pick up big stations in Philadelphia and Chicago, which were broadcasting one appalling bulletin after another. Heavy damage on an unprecedented scale was reported throughout the Mississippi Valley.
Riverfront Stadium had partly collapsed in Cincinnati. The city’s Delhi Hills section had been hit hard. The Columbia Parkway was in shambles.
The Muddy Fork district in Louisville was on fire. The Interstate 64 and Interstate 65 bridges over the Ohio River were down.
In Lexington, Kentucky, the Civic Center and many of the buildings along Broadway Avenue were badly damaged. Fires were spreading across the downtown business district.
The worst news was from St. Louis. The city had taken a huge hit. A major hospital in the West End, Bernard-Parks, had collapsed. There was live radio coverage from a young woman who broke down on the air as she struggled to describe the devastation.
“Eight floors have collapsed, the entire west wing,” the woman said. “The emergency room was crushed. It’s just gone. At least forty people were in there, mainly mothers with sick children.” The reporter was losing it. “I can hear people trapped in the rubble screaming. There’s absolutely no one to help. No ambulances. No police. It’s almost impossible to get anywhere in the city. So many buildings are down.”
One horrifying bulletin followed another.
Little Rock’s Cammack Village and the Allsopp Park District were burning. Buildings were down on both sides of the Arkansas River.
In Chicago, glass from shattered high-rise windows had rained down on Michigan Avenue. Some buildings had collapsed in the Loop. The Shedd Aquarium on Lake Shore Drive was damaged.
Atkins turned off the radio. He was supposed to be a professional. He knew what to expect—or thought he did. This was far worse than anything he’d ever dreamed possible.
“With damage as far north as Chicago, we’ve got more than one fault in play here,” he said. “This thing has spread a lot farther than the New Madrid Seismic Zone. It’s triggering other faults.”
“There’s plenty of precedent,” Elizabeth said. “Remember Landers-Big Bear?”
The 1992 quake in Landers, California—and its unusual consequences—had come as a complete surprise to seismologists. At magnitude 7.5, it was the biggest quake in the state in four decades. A series of faults in the remote Mojave Desert suddenly came to life, causing strong shaking over much of southern California. The main event in Landers was followed three hours later by a second big quake, a magnitude 6.5 near the town of Big Bear thirty miles away and located on another fault.
“I was with a team that examined the sequence,” Elizabeth said. “There was no question that the Landers quake touched off Big Bear. There was a whole string of surface ruptures. The slippage just kept moving from fault segment to fault segment. If that had been central Los Angeles instead of the sparsely populated Mojave, it would have been catastrophic.”
But nothing like this, Atkins thought. Los Angeles and southern California had never seen anything like this. And likely never would.
“If this one is triggering other faults, we’ve got a big problem,” he said. It was his personal nightmare, one shared by most seismologists. That a big quake could set off others like a seismic blasting cap.
Hundreds of buried faults were scattered throughout the Mississippi Valley and the Midwest. Only a few were still considered active, including the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which wasn’t even the largest. Any of them could suddenly “switch on.” And no one knew how many faults remained undiscovered.
That was seismology’s dirty little secret. A big one could strike virtually anywhere, anytime in the heartland, near any large city. Any fault could suddenly come to life.
If that happened, there was no telling where it might stop. Potential disaster lurked everywhere. A series of faults ran all the way from the Mississippi Valley up the Eastern seaboard. Few people realized that, or understood how vulnerable large sections of the country were to earthquakes.
“We’re going to need some good GPS data,” Elizabeth said. The Global Positioning System was the fastest way to see how much the earth had moved up or down—how much the crust had deformed. Measurements obtained by GPS satellites could show how far the seismic energy had spread or, more important, if it was still spreading.
The degree of deformation would also indicate how much seismic energy remained in the ground, a major clue in determining whether another big quake was likely.
Atkins also wanted to get some SAR data off the satellites. Synthetic Aperture Radar interferometry was a satellite technique that produced highly detailed, high-resolution radar maps of the earth’s surface. Not as precise as GPS data, SAR had the advantage of mapping a much larger geographic area, producing images that covered a sixty-mile-wide sector on each pass. It was the quickest way of determining how much the earth had deformed over broad areas.
Getting good seismic data in the next few days would be crucial. That’s why Atkins wanted to do everything possible to get his portable seismograph set up near Blytheville. Their best bet remained those geologists at Arkansas State University. Jacobs had mentioned them during their brief radio transmission. They were closer to the epicenter than anyone. Atkins hoped they’d gotten some instruments set up. It would be a big load off his mind to know they were up and running. They needed to be operational over there as soon as possible.
He was driving on Tennessee Route 51. They’d skirted Dyersburg, passing within six miles of the largest town in extreme northwestern Tennessee. The sky in that direction had a strange orange glow.
Atkins knew what it meant. So did Elizabeth.
Dyersburg was on fire.
They picked up Route 412. They were about ten miles from the Mississippi and the bridge. The rolling, wooded countryside was slowly flattening out, becoming delta bottomland the closer they got to the river.
Elizabeth lowered her window to get a blast of cold air to help her stay awake.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Numb with fatigue, Atkins was concentrating on keeping the Explorer on the twisting, two-lane road. He hadn’t heard a thing.
He rolled down his window. The air had a strong sulfurous smell. He suddenly had to grip the wheel hard as the vehicle pulled sharply to the right. They almost swerved into a ditch.
Another aftershock.
“Listen!” Elizabeth said.
Slowing down, Atkins heard it. Loud cracks that sounded like cannon shots.
He realized what it was. Trees were snapping.
The ground shook harder. The odor of sulfur was stronger. There was a strange whistling sound, loud and piercing, almost like a steam kettle.
“The ground’s liquefying!” Atkins shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here.” As far as they could see in the darkness, the fields on both sides of the highway looked like they were boiling. Jets of black water shot up from holes that had opened in the ground, some with a distinctive cone shape.
Monster sand blows, the larger ones were fifty yards across and were spouting off like geysers, blowing clouds of muck and hot vapor into the sky.
A gaping sand blow opened directly ahead of them, swallowing a section of the highway. Braking hard, Atkins tried to get around it. The Explorer’s rear tires sunk into oozing mud and spun.
Atkins slipped into four-wheel drive and punched the gas pedal. The tires pulled free.
He floored it.
They risked getting stuck repeatedly in the heaving earth. The ground kept erupting. Heavy, carbonized fragments of long-buried trees blasted into the air. Some shot out like missiles. Chunks of hardened peat flew up, peppering the roof of the Explorer. A piece of wood the size of a suitcase cracked the windshield.
They had to keep going. Atkins barreled down the road. The Explorer bounced hard, slamming into a dip. The ground was shaking and bursting open. Muddy water kept shooting up from the sand blows. Trees continued to splinter.
Atkins didn’t think they were going to make it. Then, suddenly, they were out of the worst of it. The road was firmer. Despite the open window and cold air, Atkins was sweating heavily.
A few miles later they came to a sign for Interstate 155 and the bridge. The approach was just up ahead. A sign showed the turnoff for a ferry. Two cars with flashing blue lights blocked the road. Tennessee state police.
“The bridge is out,” one of the troopers said. His voice was subdued, strained. He stepped up to the mud-splattered Explorer and Atkins got a better look at his face. A young man, maybe mid-twenties. He looked scared. “The center span fell into the river.”
Atkins saw where the main span had collapsed. It looked like a half-mile section was missing. Most of the superstructure had fallen into the river. Incredible. Severed suspension cables dangled from one of the support towers that remained standing.
The wind changed and Elizabeth heard something, a strange new sound.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“That’s a waterfall, lady,” one of the troopers said.