Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [6]
We live on a bluff above the sea on the mainland coast of British Columbia, about two hours’ drive north of Vancouver. We have no idea how well our condo will withstand four minutes of intense shaking. Civil engineers generally agree that well-built wood-frame structures are flexible enough to ride out most earthquakes without collapsing, but Cascadia’s shockwaves will reverberate far longer than most quakes. We tell ourselves we’ll be okay, that the condo may be damaged but we’ll probably get out alive. How then do we cope with the aftermath?
We’re two hours away from the nearest big city, Vancouver, which may be in much worse shape than our own coastal hamlet. Rescue squads, medical aid, and emergency supplies will go first to the areas of greatest need, where the greatest numbers of people are affected—and where television cameras will focus the world’s attention. To us this means help may be a long time coming to Sechelt, so we’re pretty much on our own.
When they hear that I’m working on the Cascadia story yet again, friends and neighbors usually cringe. The first question everyone asks is when it’s going to happen. I tell them I don’t know, but some very smart people are trying to figure it out. Then they shrug. What can we do? It’s too overwhelming to think about.
PART 1
TREMORS AND RIPPLES
CHAPTER 1
Mexico City: Preview of Coming Events
On the night of September 19, 1985, a jetliner packed with journalists, foreign rescue workers, and worried family members banked low across the flanks of Mexico City. The twinkling sprawl of suburbia gradually gave way to a black hole at the heart of the city. Only the twisting flames of unquenched fires and pockets of light powered by emergency generators penetrated the gloom. From window seats on final approach it was impossible to see the full extent of damage down below, but every person on that plane knew they were about to land in the haze of an ongoing nightmare.
Even on the ground visibility was so limited the arriving passengers could not appreciate how bad things were that first night. Robb Douglas, a Canadian television news cameraman, went to work straight away using a battery-powered lamp to shoot pictures of rescue teams digging through hunks of broken concrete and twisted steel. All he could capture in the small beam of light projected from his camera were close-cropped images of frenzied workers—their grim, sweat-streaked, exhausted faces. Dust and smoke and death.
Early the next morning the scale of the disaster revealed itself. “When the sun came up you could see—holy shit! It looked like it had been bombed—like the city had been bombed,” Robb would tell me later. “All those buildings had just dissolved.” In little more than three minutes of horrific shaking, 10,000 people had died. Unofficial estimates would later push the death toll to 40,000 or more. Another 50,000 were injured and 250,000 were homeless.
In the city proper, 3,124 buildings were severely damaged and 412 had collapsed. If you included the impact on outlying regions, more than 6,000 buildings had either been destroyed or so heavily damaged they would have to be demolished. With a population of eighteen million, the world’s second largest city was reeling from the blow and woefully unprepared for the aftermath.
Those of us who did not see it first-hand, who did not stand like Robb on the brink, who did not smell the blood or hear the screams barely paid attention. If we didn’t know someone who lived there, it was one more disaster, far away and too gruesome to think about. But flash back several months to the summer of 1985 and consider the context.
On June 23, a terrorist’s bomb blew Air India flight 182 from the sky off the Atlantic coast of Ireland, killing 329 passengers. On July 19, the Val di Stava dam in northern Italy collapsed, killing 268 people. On August 2, Delta Air Lines flight 191 crashed near Dallas, killing 137 people. Ten days later a Japan Airlines flight from Tokyo to Osaka crashed, killing 520, the deadliest