Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [71]
It didn’t take long for the Bee story to hit the wire services. Before the morning’s coffee was cold, it had become a national news item. When Carver and Burke walked in to the convention hall in Phoenix they didn’t see the ton of bricks that was about to land on their heads. “I was met by GSA officials and hustled off for interviews with the national press,” Carver recalled. “I had no idea what was happening. Bud and I had said nothing about magnitude 9 earthquakes in our talks or abstracts and knew nothing of Israel’s article.”
Carver was not amused. “The meeting officials put a beeper on me so they could track me down,” he said. Through the blur of the next several hours he did “a bunch of interviews” trying to explain the giant temblor story and trying even harder to dispel “the erroneous prediction” that Bill Israel had reported. “It was a trying day,” complained Carver. “When I got up to the podium that afternoon to give my talk, my beeper went off. The lecture room was standing room only and there were cameras and lights everywhere. I ignored the beep and got through the talk okay, but my nerves were shattered.”
Was the prediction erroneous? Or simply unattributed? A closer reading of the Bee story shows that the magnitude 9 line had come from Heaton and Hartzell’s paper published back in April. The headline did not specify exactly who “feared” the giant shock, nor which of several groups of researchers mentioned in the story thought a 9.5 temblor was possible. Headlines seldom do. The new data from Carver and Burke were nowhere near as spectacular or unsettling as Heaton and Hartzell’s cautionary tale, so the Bee’s headline writer simply pulled zingers from the old story to sell a less dramatic new one.
Israel had been hanging around the geology department at HSU long enough to collect the personal quotes he needed to show where Carver and Burke were coming from. “The potential power represented by the magnitude of such earthquakes, Carver said, is ‘awesome, incomprehensible,’” Israel wrote. He quoted Bud Burke as saying, “We’re living in a major earthquake zone ... [The fault] is going to go in the next few generations—and it’s going to be big. I don’t think there’s any question about it.”
Israel remembers it well. “I may have gotten them in a little trouble, but I don’t think they felt badly about what happened at all. In fact, I think it helped propel them,” he said. “Gary had done a lot of work in Alaska himself, after the great Alaska earthquake. It was clear at the time that what he was seeing in Alaska was related to what was going on here. So it was a very good time to be a geologist of the new faith. And these guys were all a part of that wave.”
Looking back on it today, even Gary Carver sees some irony in the episode at Phoenix. “Interestingly, years later and based on the work of a number of researchers, evidence for great subduction earthquakes has become widely accepted,” he told me in an email. Despite the scary headline, Bill Israel’s story turned out to be accurate. Scientific opinion eventually caught up with Carver and Burke—even though they never really needed vindication. They had convinced Bill Israel that Cascadia’s fault was capable of monster quakes, and Israel did what he had to do as a journalist to relay that dismal news to the rest of the world.
Once scientists had run through all the alternative explanations, eliminating the wrong answers and convincing themselves