Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [59]
For those who knew what the data were saying, the late 1970s and early’80s must have been an exciting time. To Herb Dragert’s great satisfaction he had proven his mentor, Tuzo Wilson, right after all. The general public, however, knew almost nothing about it because the latest evidence and the debate it spawned were confined primarily to academic journals, some so specialized that only a handful knew where the cutting edge of this new science could be found.
Even a lot of scientists were unaware of the variety, the volume, and the geographical extent of the data that were piling up. At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 1981, more than a few heads turned when John Adams spoke about mountains of the Coast Range tilting to the east. Like Herb Dragert and Jim Savage, Adams was convinced this could only be happening if the two plates were locked together. His presentation at the AGU had an impact on several other scientists.
“I guess something of it caught the eye of the people in San Francisco who were doing the WPPSS project,” Adams told me. When he uttered the unfortunate acronym, it sounded like whoops, which is the expression almost everyone would come to see as appropriate for the infamous project eventually. The Washington Public Power Supply System was a megaproject involving construction of five nuclear power plants, two of which were to be built in the small town of Satsop, west of Olympia along the mountain highway leading out to Grays Harbor on Washington’s west coast.
Even though the nuclear plant at Humboldt Bay in California was already known to be in trouble because of crustal fractures caused by Cascadia’s tectonic motion, another pair of reactors were going to be installed pretty much on top of the same subduction zone in Washington State. As luck would have it, several of the geo-engineers from Woodward-Clyde Consultants, the group doing the seismic risk analysis for WPPSS (the same company that had done the assessment of Humboldt Bay), happened to be in the AGU convention hall that December.
As Adams remembered it, “One of them basically said, ‘We’re interested in what you’re doing. Would you like to come down and talk to us?’” The Woodward-Clyde geologist who extended the invitation was David Schwartz. He had met Adams a few years earlier and considered him “one of the more interesting guys in paleoseismo logy,” with a new take on active faults.
The presentation was “for our enlightenment,” Schwartz explained. He wanted to stimulate discussion within the consulting team about “what was going on up there” in Washington State in terms of the seismic risk factors that might affect the WPPSS project. Adams arrived at the San Francisco offices of Woodward-Clyde a few weeks later and quickly glanced at a preamble document prepared for the meeting. “I guess you could say it was open-minded,” said Adams. “It certainly wasn’t coming down very strongly one way or the other.” Meaning Schwartz and his colleagues appeared to be scientifically neutral when it came to the question of Cascadia’s fault.
The day’s agenda included two presentations. Masataka Ando went first and laid out the argument that most geologists at the time believed to be true. As David Schwartz distilled it, “You knew the plate was going down but the question was—how was it going down? Was it going down aseismically—in which case you can make the argument you aren’t going to have large earthquakes? Or was it locked? That was sort of the crux of the issue.” Ando, of course, thought it was aseismic.
John Adams delivered the second presentation, his summary of the Coast Range tilting data. He saved the kicker for the end, wrapping up his talk with an overhead slide of the Griggs and Kulm turbidite landslide data from the Oregon coast. Huge offshore mudslides in deep-sea channels from river systems hundreds of miles apart could have been caused only by very large earthquakes, in his view.