Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [114]
A vocal few doubted China’s claims, coming as they did at the height of the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Skeptics assumed the claims were at the very least embellished, if not complete hokum based on voodoo science and luck. Chinese experts were slow to publish their findings in the open literature in part because “leaking secrets” to foreigners was a criminal offense, so there was precious little in the way of written documentation for the rest of the world to study. Until things changed in China, outsiders who believed in prediction would simply have to take the Yingkou–Haicheng story on faith.
Cao was a young carpenter who learned to read and write only after he joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1947. He fought in China’s civil war in 1949, retired from the army in 1954, and was doing “Party work” when he was assigned to help establish the Yingkou County Earthquake Office in September 1974. He lived in the town of Dashiqiao, where the county government was located.
China had launched a seismic prediction program in 1966 with 17 major centers nationwide, 250 seismic stations, and 5,000 observation points. Guided by scientists, more than 100,000 citizen observers were collecting data. Cao worked enthusiastically at the heart of this campaign and took his duties very seriously.
In keeping with Chairman Mao’s ideology and his distrust of elites—including, to some extent, scientists—these citizen observers became the backbone of the program. While trained experts monitored seismographs and carefully surveyed markers across fault lines to track the build-up of stress in the rocks, geomagnetic anomalies, and the release of radon gas, “the masses,” led by men like Cao, kept track of the fluctuations in well water and sometimes the strange behavior of animals, which according to tradition were symptoms of a coming disaster. A few local citizens were trained to measure basic changes in electrical currents in the ground.
After three centuries of relative calm, northern China had been rattled by a series of three large temblors between 1966 and 1969. While geologists in the West were just coming to terms with plate tectonics, earth scientists in China had not yet accepted the theory (and would not until after the Cultural Revolution), so it was only later that they realized the northeastern part of the country was being squeezed from the east and west by colliding plates in the Himalayas and the ongoing subduction of the ocean floor along the Japan–Kuril trench.
On June 29, 1974, the State Seismological Bureau issued a warning that earthquakes might occur within the next two years in an area that included the Yingkou area, home of Cao Xianqing. This was based on a torrent of new data that showed ground movement along the Jinzhou fault. There were also reports (never confirmed) of a rise in sea level in the area.
By mid-December things began to accelerate. Reports of radon gas in the wells emerged, along with changing water levels. Then snakes started crawling out of their hibernation dens, freezing to death on the snowy ground. And the ground had begun to shake. After a swarm of small tremors there came a series of high alerts predicting magnitude 4–5 shocks over the weeks ahead.
Less than a month later, at the next national quake prediction conference in Beijing, Gu Haoding,