Goodbye California - Alistair [67]
Barrow said: ‘That idea about a plane is beginning to sound good to me. What would happen if one of those struck?’
‘Assuming a properly sombre tone of voice, I must admit I’ve given a great deal of thought to this. Say it struck where we’re sitting now. You’d wake up in the morning – only of course the dead don’t wake – and find the Pacific where Los Angeles is and Los Angeles buried in what used to be Santa Monica Bay and the San Pedro Channel. The San Gabriel Mountains might well have fallen down smack on top of where we are now. If it happened at sea –’
‘How could it happen at sea?’ Barrow was a degree less jovial than he had been. ‘The fault runs through California.’
‘Easterner. It runs out into the Pacific south of San Francisco, by-passes the Golden Gate, then rejoins the mainland to the north. A monster ‘quake of the Golden Gate would be of interest. For starters, San Francisco would be a goner. Probably the whole of the San Francisco peninsula, Marin County would go the same way. But the real damage –’
‘The real damage?’ Crichton said.
‘Yes. The real damage would come from the immense ocean of water that would sweep into the San Francisco Bay. When I say “immense” I mean just that. Up in Alaska – we have proof – earthquakes have generated water levels three and four hundred feet above normal. Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, all the way down through Palo Alto to San Jose would be drowned. The Santa Cruz Mountains would become an island. And even worse – to anticipate, Mr Crichton, there is worse – the agricultural heart of California, the two great valleys of San Joaquin and Sacramento, would be flooded, and the vast part of those valleys lie under an altitude of three hundred feet.’ Benson became thoughtful. ‘I hadn’t really thought of it before but, come to that, I don’t think I’d much care to be living in the capital either at that time for it would be dead in line of the first great wall of water rushing up the Sacramento river valley. Perhaps you are beginning to understand why I and my colleagues prefer to keep people’s minds off such things?’
‘I think I’m beginning to.’ Barrow looking at Dunne. ‘How do you – as a Californian, of course – feel about this?’
‘Unhappy.’
‘You go along with this way of thinking?’
‘Go along with it? If anything, I’m even ahead of it. I have the unpleasant feeling that Professor Benson is not only catching me up in my thinking but passing me by.’
Benson said: ‘That’s as maybe. There are, I must admit, another couple of factors. In the past year or so people have begun delving into records and then wishing they hadn’t delved. Take the northern part of the San Andreas Fault. It is known that a great earthquake struck there in eighteen-thirty-three although, at the time, there was no way of calibrating its strength. The great San Francisco ‘quake of nineteen-o-six struck there sixty-eight years later. There was one in Daly City in nineteen-fifty-seven but at a magnitude of five-point-three it was geologically insignificant. There hasn’t been, if I may use the term, a “proper” earthquake up north for seventy-one years. It may well be overdue.
‘In the southern San Andreas there has been no major ‘quake since eighteen-fifty-seven. One hundred and twenty years ago. Now, triangulation surveys have shown that the Pacific plate, in relation to the American plate, is moving northeast at two inches a year. When an earthquake occurs one plate jerks forward in relation to the other – this is called a lateral slip. In nineteen-o-six slips of between fifteen and eighteen feet have been measured. On the two inches a year basis, one hundred and twenty years could mean an accumulated pressure potential amounting to twenty feet. If we accept this basis – not everyone does – a major earthquake in the Los Angeles area is considerably overdue.
‘As for the central area of the San Andreas, no major ‘quake has ever been recorded. Lord only knows how long