Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [116]
In late January, with disaster fever on the wane in some circles, Cao ramped up his own activities. While others were breathing a sigh of relief about the false alarms, he used his position as head of the Yingkou County Earthquake Office to accelerate preparations for the coming disaster. According to an entry in his logbook on January 28, Cao had already organized a twenty-one-person rescue team, a sixteenperson transportation team, twenty-five thousand kilograms of baked foods, a thousand winter jackets, ten thousand pairs of winter shoes, a thousand winter hats, and a thousand cotton quilts in anticipation of a large wintertime earthquake.
From his office in Dashiqiao, Cao maintained frequent telephone contact with the nearby Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory, where a seismograph and a tiltmeter were being monitored day and night. On the first two days of February, several small tremors—too small to be felt by people living in the area—were detected by the team at Shipengyu and while these minor tremors did not cause any alarm at first, the amplitude of the shockwaves seemed to increase with each new event. They were briefly noted in the station’s logbook and Cao kept track of the rumbling as well.
Then a sudden surge of tectonic vibration began on the evening of February 3 and from that moment on things began to happen in rapid succession. A series of small rumbles bloomed into a rash of tremors. This burst of seismicity truly did alarm the workers at Shipengyu, who began a flurry of phone calls to notify the Party Committee, the army, city and county officials, and the Liaoning provincial Earthquake Office to “enhance preparation” for a larger quake.
At the same time they fielded a steady stream of incoming reports from communes and amateur observers with details of tumbled chimneys, fallen gables, and broken windows. Cao himself called Shipengyu to report that water in a dozen wells had dropped twelve to twenty inches (30–50 cm) during the evening, that several other wells that had contained water during the day were now completely dry, and that horses and chickens were making a lot of noise and trying to escape.
By eight o’clock the next morning—February 4, 1975—there had been two hundred tremors, culminating in a magnitude 5.1 event at 7:51 a.m. At 8:15 a.m., seven members of the Party Committee of Yingkou County held an extended emergency meeting at Cao’s urging. When he summarized the overnight flurry of tremors and damage reports and announced that a large earthquake “may occur today during the day or in the evening,” he must have made a convincing case. Immediately after the meeting the committee—without waiting for approval or instructions from higher authority—issued its own sternly worded statement canceling all business and production work, all public meetings, all entertainment, and all sporting activities immediately.
Miles away at the Liaoning provincial Earthquake Office a simultaneous 8:00 a.m. meeting was taking place in which head scientist Zhu Fengming explained the worrisome overnight data to higher-up Party officials. In a bulletin issued just after midnight, Zhu had cautioned them that “the magnitudes are still increasing” and “a relatively large earthquake is very likely to follow.” Nothing quite this urgent had ever been written in previous reports at the provincial level. But the tone was still several notches below the intensity of alarm that Cao Xianqing was raising with local county officials in Dashiqiao.
When Kelin Wang interviewed Zhu and his colleagues in 2004, the senior scientist and his fellow workers in the provincial office confided that none of them had attempted—or felt they were able—to predict a rupture on a given day. By “very likely to follow,” Zhu told Wang he meant “a timeframe of one to two weeks.” Basically, Zhu was the cautious scientist and Cao was more the gambler. Cao turned out to be right, but he never could explain how his prediction was made. Despite the contrast between Zhu’s conservative warning and Cao’s bold campaign