Goodbye California - Alistair [122]
Barrow said: ‘You are in a jovial mood today, Professor.’
‘Alas, events happening around me and people asking me the questions do tend to make me less than my optimistic sunny self. Forgive me. Next, up here in the central San Andreas, we are digging an interesting hole between Cholame and Parkfield. We know we’re smack on the San Andreas there. Very active area, lots of shaking and banging going on most of the time but, again ominously, no great earthquake has ever been recorded in this area. There was a pretty big one some way to the west, back in the ‘eighties, at San Luis Obispo which could have been caused by the San Andreas or the Nacimiento Fault which parallels the coast west of the San Andreas.’ He smiled without any particular mirth. ‘A monster striking in either fault would almost certainly dump the Morro Bay nuclear reactor station into the sea.
‘Further north, we’ve drilled deep down between Hollister and San Juan Bautista, a few miles to the west, partly because this is another dormant area – again there have only been comparatively minor shakes in this area – and because it’s just south of Hollister that the Hayward Fault branches off to the right to go to the east of San Francisco Bay, cutting up through or close by Hayward, Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond then out under the San Pablo Bay. In Berkeley the fault actually runs under the university football stadium, which can’t be a very nice thought for the crowds of people who attend there regularly. There have been two very big earthquakes along this fault, in eighteen-thirty-six and eighteen-sixty-eight – until nineteen-o-six San Franciscans always referred to the latter as “the great earthquake” – and it’s there that we’ve drilled our ninth hole by Lake Temescal.
‘The tenth one we put down at Walnut Creek in the Calaveras Fault, which parallels the Hayward. Our suspicions about this fault are in the inverse proportion to what we know about it, which is almost zero.’
Barrow said: ‘That makes ten and that, I take it, is all. You spoke a few minutes ago about poor old Los Angeles. How about poor old San Francisco?’
‘To be thrown to the wolves, it would seem, the orphan left out in the snow. San Francisco is, geologically and seismologically, a city that waits to die. Frankly, we are terrified to tamper with anything up there. The Los Angeles area has had seven what you might call historic ‘quakes that we know of: the Bay area has had sixteen, and we have no idea in the world where the next, the monster, may hit. There was a suggestion – frankly, it was mine – that we sink a bore-hole near Searsville Lake. This is close by Stanford University which had a bad time of it during the nineteen-o-six earthquake, and, more importantly, just where the Pilarcitos Fault branches off from the San Andreas. The Pilarcitos, which runs into the Pacific some six miles south of the San Andreas may, for all we know, be the true line of the San Andreas and certainly was some millions of years ago. Anyway, the nineteen-o-six shake ran through many miles of unpopulated hill regions. Since then, unscrupulous property developers have built cities along both fault lines and the consequences of another eight-plus earthquake are too awful to contemplate. I suggested a possible easement there, but certain vested interests in nearby Menlo Park were appalled at the very idea.’
Barrow said: ‘Vested interests?’
‘Indeed.’ Benson sighed. ‘It was in nineteen-sixty-six that the US Geological Survey’s National Center for Earthquake Research was established there. Very touchy about earthquakes, I’m afraid.’
‘Those bore-holes,’ Ryder said. ‘What diameter drills do you use?’
Benson looked at him for a long moment then sighed again. ‘That