Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [113]
The emphasis on mitigation certainly sounds logical and sensible, but scientists and the politicians who hand out research funding also know or suspect that a vast number of ordinary people really do want and expect to be warned. Many assume that predicting the next quake is—or should be—the primary goal and responsibility of all researchers involved in earthquake studies. Impossible as the dream of prediction may sound to skeptics, optimists tend to believe that if enough smart people are given the right tools to do the job, there’s no problem science cannot solve eventually.
With Chris Goldfinger’s newer, longer timeline, showing at least forty-one Cascadia quakes in the past ten thousand years, one might think enough data have finally been gathered to show a pattern. If there is a pattern, then a forecast of some kind should be possible. No matter how much scorn the doubters may have heaped, no matter how many false alarms have been sounded over the years, the optimists refuse to quit. There’s always the promise of better technology, more data, faster computers that should be able to spot patterns in nature’s chaos. Plus there’s the tantalizing story of one earthquake prediction that was absolutely right.
Kelin Wang, a scientist working for the Geological Survey of Canada who spends most of his research time today working on Cascadia’s fault, told me the story of the Haicheng earthquake in China in February 1975. It was prediction’s golden moment. Wang had heard the heroic stories of Haicheng as a young student. In 2004 he returned temporarily from Canada to the land of his birth and took advantage of a new openness in China to dig up the details of what happened in the months and days leading up to the now famous prediction.
He and three colleagues interviewed many of the people involved in China’s official quake prediction program and were given free access to a treasure trove of declassified documents, including thousands of pages of handwritten notes and data logs. The story they found is laced with political intrigue and, for skeptics, a lingering ambiguity. What follows is a condensation of what happened.
At 8:15 a.m., February 4, 1975, Cao Xianqing walked in to a hurriedly convened meeting of his local Party committee in Yingkou County, about three hundred miles (500 km) northeast of Beijing, and announced that “a large earthquake may occur today, during the day or in the evening.” He urged county officials to “please take measures” to make sure people were evacuated from their homes and workplaces as quickly as possible. Although higher ranking authorities in the Liaoning provincial government would later take credit for orchestrating the prediction, most citizens of Yingkou and Haicheng Counties were aware that Cao—known locally as Mr. Earthquake—was the man behind the crucial first warning on that fateful day.
The warning itself and the subsequent saving of thousands of lives would become the stuff of seismic legend and folklore: the world’s first and to date only successful earthquake prediction followed by an evacuation. Thousands of lives were saved. Researchers around the world heard reports—both censored and at the same time dramatized—of what happened that day in China. Everybody who felt the least bit optimistic about the ability of science to predict fault failures was extremely keen to learn more. Several foreign delegations were dispatched to study China’s success.
A quick seven months later the National Academy of Sciences in the United States would publish