Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [145]
Sixteen emergency care hospitals in Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, and Portland—many of them built before the latest earthquake codes came into effect—suffer full or partial failure of load-bearing walls. The oldest wing of St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver collapses in a shower of red bricks and dust. The wings that remain standing are only partly functional because the emergency power generators either don’t kick in or are running at less than full capacity. More than 580 public school buildings that would have been used as triage and refugee evacuation centers have been badly damaged and are unsafe to enter. There was never enough money to reinforce them all in time.
After fifty cycles of harmonic vibration, dozens of tall buildings have shed most of their glass. In some downtown intersections the cascade of broken shards has piled up three feet deep. Whirling sheets and splinters of broken windowpanes sail down windy canyons, slicing and maiming and killing as they go. The tops of high-rise towers bang together like bull goats in rut.
Shockwaves have been pummeling the Pacific Northwest for four minutes and thirty-five seconds now and it still isn’t over. After sixty-four cycles—skyscrapers swaying rhythmically from side to side in giddy wobbles—enough welds have cracked, enough concrete has spalled, enough shear walls have come unstuck that some towers begin to pancake. The same death spiral everyone saw in New York on 9/11 happens all over again. Smaller buildings, but more of them. Dozens go down in the four northern cities. Even as far south as Sacramento, damage to tall buildings is moderate to severe. Glass is falling and people are screaming down stairwells.
In all five major cities tens of thousands of people have been seriously injured. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, more are dead and all the coroners are quickly overwhelmed. But it’s too soon to count bodies. More than a third of the oncoming shift of police, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and doctors do not show up for work. They are either stranded by collapsed buildings, bridges, and roadways, injured or dead themselves, or sticking close to home to make sure their own families are okay before going to work. People who survive the collapses must do their own search and rescue for family members, friends, and neighbors still trapped in the rubble. Help will come eventually, but who knows when?
Tens of thousands of people gather in streets, schoolyards, and city parks, searching for safe ground, in dire need of relocation. Fright, confusion, and panic ripples through the huddled masses. Pets are running loose, barking mad, and there are reports of wild animals escaping from zoos. Looting has already begun and local authorities are quickly overwhelmed. The governors of Washington, Oregon, and California declare states of emergency and call the White House for federal backup. The National Guard is mobilized in all three states.
Canada has no national guard. A handful of coast guard and navy vessels from the Esquimalt base on Vancouver Island are getting mobilized, but most of the active army units are stationed back east or deployed overseas on peacekeeping or combat missions. The engineering battalion and all its equipment has been moved east of the Rockies in a budget-cutting exercise, so it will take many hours or perhaps days for heavy rescue teams to get past the landslides, wrecked bridges, and buckled runways.
When Canada’s prime minister calls his good friend, the American president, the news is not encouraging. The United States is committed to several foreign war zones, so there are no heavy-lift transport planes or helicopters readily available to help in British Columbia. Every troop and every spare piece of equipment in operational condition has already been dispatched to Washington, Oregon, and California. All twenty-eight of America’s urban rescue teams specially