Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [119]
As vice-premier, Hua was among the first to heap praise on the workers based at the Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory for their stellar efforts to warn the community about the rash of foreshocks—now known to have been true precursors of the big jolt. Followers of the Gang of Four, on the other hand, issued news releases that stressed the leadership role of provincial Party officials with little or no mention of Shipengyu, much less of Cao Xianqing. To make the most of this singular propaganda opportunity, it was evidently better to avoid the devilish details.
The prediction was real yet the results of the evacuation were uneven. Yingkou County’s warning was spread far and wide from early that morning, thanks to the single-mindedness of Cao and his team. In Haicheng County the warnings began later in the day, many decisions to evacuate were made spur of the moment by local committees or individuals at the work brigade or commune level, and some parts of the province—including the town of Haicheng itself—were not evacuated at all. The death toll in Haicheng County was substantially higher than in Yingkou. Thus it became a question of who got the greater credit, or who deserved the blame.
Three months after the disaster, when Vice-Premier Hua delivered a speech at the next national quake prediction conference, he told the famous story of the evacuation of delegates from the meeting hall that night in Dashiqiao just as the ground started to shake. “An officer who was directing people to exit was injured,” said Hua, “but the rest of the one thousand people were all safe.” And who made the prediction the army commanders took so seriously, the prediction that saved so many lives? Hua Guofeng said it was the Shipengyu Earthquake Observatory. The Gang of Four, had they attended the conference, would no doubt have touted Party bureaucrats.
Cao Xianqing insisted it was his Earthquake Office that provided the vital first warning. No doubt the army brass heard about it from several sources, but Cao’s prediction turned out to be the most specific and timely. Perhaps because he was not a trained scientist and could not provide a detailed technical explanation for his decisions—how much was science and how much was instinct?—or perhaps because he was a lowly county official rather than a provincial bigwig, he did not get anointed as a hero of the Haicheng saga. In the feuding between Hua and the Gang of Four, Cao received no official recognition, no meritorious service awards. When China bragged about the world’s first successful seismic prediction and evacuation, the story of Cao Xianqing and his Yingkou County Earthquake Office was not told to the outside world.
The lingering question was and still is whether the prediction had any scientific merit. When Kelin Wang and his colleagues published their findings in 2006, they found that “the most important precursor was a foreshock sequence, but other anomalies such as geodetic deformation, changes in groundwater level, color, and chemistry, and peculiar animal behavior also played a role.” In essence, they wrote, “None of these predictions can be scientifically explained.”
The point seemed to be that even though some things like why snakes crawled out of their dens or why some—not all—mice and rats were dazed and disoriented may not have clear scientific explanations, there was no reason to doubt that they really did happen. Wang and company confirmed that “it was the foreshocks alone that triggered the final decisions” to warn and evacuate. The good news was Haicheng