2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [21]
As Jack was sitting on his bed rubbing his swollen foot, he glanced at the clock. It was 6:35 in the morning. The pain was so bad he thought maybe Brad could pick him up and he could use his one emergency room visit—he hadn’t had one in almost four years. He didn’t want to call Brad too early, so he hobbled over to the kitchenette and pressed “brew” on the coffee machine. As soon as he pressed the button, it started: a small shaking that either would be gone in a second, or not.
Living in Los Angeles, people were used to this from time to time, and most of the time it was nothing. The last sizable shake, which was in Palm Springs in 2020, measured a 7.1 and was felt throughout the Los Angeles area. Immediately after that quake, experts came on the news and declared that it wasn’t “the big one.” What did that mean, “the big one”? Everyone thought about it, but nobody had lived through a “big one,” so people could only imagine.
Jack waited for the shaking to stop. It didn’t. It had only just begun. After about twelve seconds it seemed to double in intensity, and then it tripled, and then everything fell down. Jack ran to hide under his bed. He didn’t make it. A beam from the ceiling hit him in the forehead and that was it.
Brad was literally thrown out of bed. As his ceiling started to come down, he ran to the doorway of the bathroom and just stood, expecting to die. Every piece of glass broke in his condo, everything came out of every cabinet, and the refrigerator-communication center fell over. The framed picture of Brad and his wife meeting Bill Clinton was shattered. The Lalique crystal water faucet he was given at his retirement lunch was smashed into a hundred pieces.
The electricity ceased after the first fifteen seconds. Handheld devices now communicated directly with satellites, so Brad reached for his watch, but he didn’t know who to call or what to do. He called Herb. There was no answer. He called Jack. No answer. Then he got a call. It was his son. The fact that they never spoke didn’t matter now; he was grateful to talk to anybody.
“Dad?” His son sounded panicked.
“Tom, are you all right?”
“No. We’ve had a terrible earthquake.” That his son lived near San Diego, two hundred miles away, and thought the earthquake was centered there, gave Brad an indication of just how big this was. “Are you all right, Dad, is it bad there?”
“It’s bad here,” Brad said. “You have to protect yourself from the aftershocks.”
There was no response. “Tom?” Nothing. “Tom, can you hear me?” The connection was gone. Now it was impossible to get anything on the watch. There were too many people using the satellite system; it was overwhelmed.
Brad made his way outside as soon as the initial shaking stopped. And then he felt the first aftershock. It was an aftershock worse than any earthquake ever recorded in California.
So this was “the big one.” This was the one scientists said in 2010 had a fifty percent chance of happening in the next thirty years. Fifty-fifty. Red or black. The San Andreas Fault had not moved substantially in over three hundred years. “Overdue” was an understatement.
The initial shake was a 9.1. The first aftershock was an 8.7. The second was an 8.2. The third, an 8.0, was bigger than anything that had ever been predicted.
It was funny. Brad remembered a science show he had seen years earlier that talked about the San Andreas Fault. “Compared to other faults,” the show said, “the San Andreas is only capable of something in the high sevens.” And yet the show did point out that in the next million or so years, Los Angeles would be somewhere north of San Francisco.