Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [66]
Newly arrived in Oregon, a state with remarkably little in the way of major earthquake history, he counted himself among the fence sitters when the debate about Cascadia’s fault began to heat up in the late 1970s. He even joked about it in a book he wrote called Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest. In the introduction he shared his skepticism with others who figured giant temblors were a California affliction. “That was certainly my own view in 1977, when I moved to Corvallis, Oregon, even though I had been studying earthquakes for many years—in California, of course. My neighbor said, ‘Earthquakes? Bob, you gotta be kidding!’”
Yeats, however, was in the audience at the AGU convention in 1983 when John Adams delivered his paper about the eastward tilting of the Coast Range mountains. He knew that Adams was pretty convinced the landscape was being deformed by active subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate. The releveling of the highway survey markers proved that the entire block of coastal mountains was tilting and Adams took this to mean that strain was building up.
Adams had also mentioned to anyone who cared to listen his fascination with the turbidite cores found off the Oregon coast in 1971 by Gary Griggs and Hans Nelson, two graduate students working under the direction of OSU professor LaVerne Kulm. Yeats knew Kulm and his students personally, of course, and was well aware of their discovery. Now, here was this young Adams fellow from Cornell, recently transplanted to the Geological Survey of Canada, suggesting the cores might be evidence of very large prehistoric quakes.
Yeats’ reactions were doubt and caution. “As a student of natural disasters, I worry about needlessly alarming the public,” he wrote in a book aimed primarily at the general reader. “What would be the reaction of people in major cities like Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland to such bad news? ‘Cool it, John,’ I said. Good scientist that he is, John Adams ignored my advice and published his results anyway.”
Not surprisingly Adams’ new information made more or less zero impact on the public at large because it was read mostly by other scientists. The media still had not picked up on the story. That was about to change.
Yeats was concerned enough about the implications of a growing body of evidence that he got together with Oregon state geologist Don Hull to organize a special seminar to be held in Monmouth in February 1987, just ahead of the regular meeting of the Oregon Academy of Sciences. The agenda featured John Adams, Tom Heaton, and Brian Atwater, as well as “skeptics who had previously advocated the idea that no earthquake hazard exists on the Cascadia Subduction Zone.”
Somehow The Oregonian in Portland got wind of the meeting and wanted to send science writer Linda Munroe to cover the story. Yeats was reluctant because press coverage might cause the lead investigators to pull their punches. “I wanted the scientists to be completely candid, not worrying about a front-page doomsday quote in a major newspaper,” he explained. Munroe asked him to trust her and he did, so the conference went ahead as planned.
Yeats described the atmosphere as electric going in to the meeting, yet in the end ironically, and perhaps surprisingly, hardly any sparks flew. The presentations were so solid the doubters were either convinced or decided to keep their thoughts to themselves. “There was no argument,” Yeats wrote, “no controversy! Most of the scientists at the meeting were so impressed with the