THE POWER WAS OUT IN THE SPENCER BUILDING. Atkins and Elizabeth used flashlights as they groped their way down a pitch-dark hallway. The ground shook again, another aftershock. The building shuddered and swayed, but the base isolation system cushioned the impact. The walls didn’t buckle or collapse.
“I’m glad to see the aftershocks are finally dying out,” Atkins said sarcastically. Their power and frequency continued to astound him. The ground remained incredibly active.
The building, a modern structure with a handsome, pink granite facade, had escaped serious damage, but the interior was a mess. Desks, computer terminals, and file cabinets were overturned. A bank of security monitors lay shattered on the floor. Office partitions had been knocked over. Window glass littered the carpets.
Atkins opened a door marked with a red exit light and they descended to the basement.
“There it is,” Elizabeth said, playing her flashlight against the far wall. Two steel tables supported an impressive array of seismic instruments, all of them battery powered. There were two types of sensors, both state-of-the-art strong-motion sensing devices: an FBA-23 triaxial sensor and an FBA-11. The data was stored digitally on tape and computer disk. It could easily be downloaded into a laptop.
“Elizabeth, look here,” Atkins said. One of the devices was equipped with a GPS-synchronized clock. The amber “on” light was lit.
“Yes!” he said, clenching his fists. “The GPS network must be back in operation.” If true, it was the best news he’d had in days. They could finally run critical calculations on how much the ground surface had moved during the quake. And, more important, if it was still moving. The amount of deformation would tell them a great deal about whether seismic energy was loading up again in the fault system.
Atkins remembered that the building was also equipped with a GPS monitor. They climbed the stairwell and opened a door to the roof. The GPS antenna, a three-foot-high platform, was bolted to a corner. Its latitude and longitude positions were preset, so it could automatically lock on to the proper array of satellites. Electrical cables connected it to a receiver and modem. A battery and solar panel provided the power.
Like the seismographs, the data was stored on disk. They could format it back at the university. The receiver control panel indicated it had been operational for nearly six hours.
Elizabeth looked out at the city of Memphis as Atkins removed the data recorder. The roof offered an excellent view of the downtown district from the riverfront, extending far to the east. The devastation was much more immediate than when seen from the air. She could feel the heat from the fires, smell the smoke, taste it. Several buildings less than a block away were burning fiercely. One was a high-rise bank. Already big, the fire there was growing larger as a strong wind spread the flames from floor to floor.
Elizabeth tried to count the fires, but gave it up. “No one ever expected this,” she said. The drone of fire engine sirens made it hard to talk without shouting. “We had some fires in Northridge and during the San Prieto quake, but nothing like this. It reminds me of Kobe.”
The fire that had swept through the Japanese seaport in 1995 had almost reached conflagration status. A lot of the construction was wood, small frame houses that went up like dry hay. Memphis was built mainly of brick and masonry, especially in the downtown district. The buildings weren’t supposed to burn, but many of them were doing just that.
Elizabeth was struck by the randomness of the fires. Some blocks were untouched. Others were raging infernos.
“If I’m oriented right, the university’s roughly in that direction,” Atkins said, pointing toward the east with his hands folded. “We’ve got a nice walk ahead of us.”
“How far?” Elizabeth asked.
Atkins shook his head. “Three, maybe four miles.” Getting there wasn’t going to be easy. Not with so many streets blocked. They’d have to pick their way through the damage just as night was starting to fall.
“This wind is really spreading the fire,” Atkins said. It worried him.
Columns of flaming embers sucked skyward were spreading to the roofs of other buildings. To the south, toward Beale Street and the old cotton warehouse district, they were burning more fiercely. Atkins later learned many of the homes in South Memphis were made of wood. It was a poorer, older section of the city, dense with dilapidated, single- and two-story houses. The wind was sweeping burning embers and sparks from those fires across the entire downtown district.
Atkins watched in amazement as a woman’s burning dress drifted by high in the sky, the sleeves flung wide.
A tremendous explosion nearby rocked the building. A fireball curled into the sky behind them. A gas tank had blown up somewhere along the riverfront, a big one.
Atkins didn’t like the way the fires were starting to ring them in.
“We’re leaving,” he said. “Now.”