Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [117]
The Revolutionary Committee of Liaoning province organized a ninety-minute meeting for two o’clock that afternoon in the Haicheng guesthouse, to be attended by a dozen government officials from Haicheng and Yingkou Counties—Cao Xianqing among them—along with an army officer from the People’s Liberation Army troop that was deployed in the area. During the meeting Li Fuxiang from the provincial Earthquake Office estimated a magnitude 6 or greater “may occur within the next few days.” Again, not quite the strong message that Cao was delivering in his hometown. While he attended the somewhat inconclusive two o’clock meeting, the evacuation of buildings in Dashiqiao and Yingkou County was already well underway.
Throughout the afternoon Cao continued to announce that a large shockwave would occur that day. Word was spread by telephone calls to communes and production brigades and by loudspeaker broadcasts in the streets. When the swarm of small tremors recorded at Shipengyu hit 501—and then went quiet—late in the afternoon, Cao’s intuition told him this was the calm before the storm, the final energy build-up before the big rupture. He was heard to say that the later the quake occurred the larger it would be, a magnitude “seven at seven o’clock and eight at eight o’clock.” Hearing this, some of the more senior scientists smirked at Cao’s homespun certainty.
Meanwhile, Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory workers had been spreading the word as well. They convinced the movie operator of the nearby Shipengyu Production Brigade that a jolt was coming that night, so word went out that there would be movies that evening. Movies in the village were always projected outdoors. The hope was that people would be attracted away from their houses—another spontaneous, local decision that definitely saved lives.
Cao and his colleagues faced another, more daunting challenge that evening. With the Chinese New Year approaching on February 11, the city of Anshan had dispatched a leading cadre and a greeting delegation to Cao’s hometown of Dashiqiao to express good wishes and to give a stage performance to entertain a headquarters delegation from the 39th Army stationed there.
Because of the prediction, army officials had to decide whether or not to go ahead with the evening’s festivities, scheduled for 7:00 p.m. Simply canceling was not an option since the Anshan delegation was already in town. The ranking army commander was said to be furious about the situation. He decided to cancel the stage performance, but he did insist that the greeting ceremony proceed as planned—a sign of respect for the high-level delegates who had traveled all the way to Dashiqiao. Just to be on the safe side, all seven doors of the assembly hall were kept wide open on a cold winter’s night.
Come seven o’clock, Anshan’s leading cadre delivered a mercifully brief speech, the army brass expressed their gratitude, and the whole affair was wrapped up by 7:20 p.m. In keeping with protocol, highranking officers and the cadre who sat on stage left the building first. Nearly a thousand in the audience patiently followed in an orderly fashion, the last few walking out the door at exactly 7:36 p.m.—just as the magnitude 7.3 Haicheng earthquake began. The assembly hall collapsed in a heap of rubble.
The rupture occurred near the boundary line between Haicheng and Yingkou Counties, a left-lateral slip on a northwest-trending “blind” fault (one that did not show at the surface) that was not known to exist before the earthquake. It did not occur on the southern peninsula along the segment of the Jinzhou fracture zone they’d been watching so closely. The epicenter turned out to be 125 miles (200 km) northeast of there—between Dashiqiao and Haicheng—only twelve miles (20 km) away from the Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory. The shockwaves caused extensive ground failure and liquefaction in both counties, with widespread destruction