Fault Line Read online

Seeing that Pet was trying to get the director of the Seismic Station to make a statement he was perhaps not yet ready, from a scientific standpoint, to make, I asked, “Where was the epicenter?” Epicenter was one of the terms I had spent the previous hour brushing up on in my old physical geology textbook. The epicenter of the earthquake was that point on the Earth’s surface immediately above the area of slippage; the rock would not fail on the line where the fault actually came to surface, because the Wasatch fault plunges into the Earth at an angle, dipping away steeply to the west.

  “Just west of downtown,” Hugh said. “Out toward the UGS, in fact.” He smiled jauntily over toward Logan de Pontier and Ted Wimler. “But in deference to our esteemed colleagues there, we’re not calling it the UGS Quake.”

  “You mean, in kindness to Sidney’s memory,” Ted said dramatically.

  I turned and looked at Ted, a rather slight man who parted his limp hair down the middle. His eyes were too close together for the width of his soft face. I wondered what his exact relationship had been with the deceased state geologist.

  Hugh Buttons tipped his head to one side and averted his eyes sorrowfully.

  Wendy Fortescue, the seismology tech, rolled her eyes and groaned. Pet Mercer’s eyes snapped her way.

  I saw Logan’s eyebrows tighten downward. They were rather heavy, and quite expressive, giving him a brooding look when he did that. “It’s been one hell of a day, eh? She left two kids, although they’ll of course go live with their dad, and—”

  “A fine woman, and an excellent scientist,” Hugh said, his voice thickening. “A tragedy.”

  Ted said, “Everything must be a shambles up at the house there, Wendy.”

  Wendy drew one knee up toward her chest and said, “I haven’t been home.”

  Logan asked, “Has the funeral been scheduled?”

  Hugh Buttons said, “Tomorrow morning.”

  “So soon?” someone asked.

  “She was Jewish.”

  Pet Mercer glanced back and forth, taking in everyone’s reactions. I realized then that she was watching them with the same kind of intensity I was, and, unless I misjudged, with much the same sort of intent. “Tell me about Dr. Smeeth, Wendy,” she said softly. “I understand that you roomed in her basement apartment.”

  Wendy said, “I’ve got nothing to say. I don’t want to be in the funny papers. You reporters are all a bunch of maggots.”

  Oblivious to Wendy’s coarseness, Ted said, “I can tell you this: People bad-mouthed Sidney, said she was a troublemaker. But I thought she was the best boss I’ve ever had. She gave me every opportunity. She encouraged me with all my ideas. I—”

  “This isn’t all about you, Ted,” Wendy growled.

  Artfully not looking at Pet, Hugh said, “I’d prefer we discussed this at another time. We’ve all had a long day, and I’m sure … ah … that Pet here has some more questions before she has to go to press with her story. We don’t want to keep you, Pet.”

  Avoiding looking at Pet, each person averted his or her eyes in a slightly different direction. I began to get the idea that, even as cute as she was, Pet Mercer was considered a bit of a piranha where science news gathering was concerned. She was slightly built and perky, and her hair bounced as she wrote, and it was clear that she used her diminutive appearance to put her interview subjects off their guard, but that this group had been treated to that trick once too often. She said, “Yes, I do need to get to press, Hugh, but, if you’ll forgive me, Dr. Smeeth is part of the story. Ted, you said people called her a troublemaker. Could this trouble you’re talking about have anything to do with the contention that existed between her and the governor’s office? I have sources who say there was quite a dustup between them two days ago over the Towne Centre project. Can you give me more on that?”

  Ted cleared his throat in preparation to give her a dramatic answer, but before he could speak, Hugh Buttons said, “Dr. Smeeth served at the pleasure of the governor, Pet. She was a fine scientist, and stringent in her interpretation of her mandate. Naturally, there would be places where she would rub against any person whose job it is to make political decisions. It is the nature of the game. It is … I want to say almost unavoidable, but, damn it, Pet, I don’t want to go on record saying anything like that, because it’s so obviously the case that it comes off sounding contentious.”

  Ted had found his voice. “Yeah, but in this case, it was more than a little disagreement. Hell, I heard her—”

  Logan said, “That’s enough, Ted. It’s not our place to get mixed up in politics. Remember, our job is to report findings, not create policy.”

  Pet watched each man carefully. As she did so, her hand slipped into a pocket, produced a raisin, and popped it into her mouth. She chewed it quickly, like a chipmunk.

  Ted closed his eyes indignantly. “Logan, there is a time and place—”

  Logan barked, “But not here, and not now, and not mixed up with the earthquake. This is an important chance for us to get the word out about seismic risk, and we’re not going to confuse it with some crap about political infighting that’ll make us look like a bunch of idiots. We are scientists.” His thick eyebrows had lowered again.

  Ted shut up. If I had been on the receiving end of that look, I think I’d have stayed quiet for a week.

  Pet threw down her pen. “Okay,” she said, “you guys are dodging me again. Come on, why shouldn’t scientists create public policy? I mean, who better than the people who really understand what’s going on? Look what happened with the extension of the Salt Palace. Some say that the county just shopped around until they got the geological opinion that fit their game plan. Now we have another project even closer to the known trace of the fault. No, it’s worse than that. Today’s data say it’s right on the fault. So why aren’t you guys screaming at the tops of your lungs?”

  There was silence at the table for perhaps fifteen seconds, during which time nobody ate and several people drank.

  Ted stared into his pizza morosely.

  Pet caught Ted’s eye and mouthed the words I’ll call you.

  Ted’s lips curled eagerly.

  Pet blinked at Ted, evincing obliviousness to his reaction.

  Hugh said, “The problem is, Pet, that there is a difference between theory and fact. That the crust of the Earth cracks and slips along gigantic shear planes is a fact. We can observe directly that it does so, or, where exposures are good, where it has done so. Unfortunately, the exact location and intensity of tomorrow’s slippage is not known. Tomorrow’s slippage is a matter of theory. A theory is considered good if it predicts events, and is discarded if events occur that refute it. Prediction is another matter, as we have been explaining. Prediction is the application of common sense to observed facts—if it has always snowed in December in the past, we presume it will snow in December again—but in the case of geologic hazards, its utility is quite limited. The future of the Earth’s crust is absolute—stresses will build up and faulting will occur—but our specific knowledge of that future is no better than an educated guess. We can gather historical and carbon dates from past faulting events and calculate statistical averages that tell us about how often faulting occurs at a given location, but an average interval is a mathematical result, not a schedule. Using satellites, we can now measure the motions of the Earth’s crustal plates, but observing a build-up of stress does not set a date for the moment it will be released.” Hugh took a bite of pizza, shook his head, and chewed. “Besides, Pet, science is most accurate when it is unemotional and rational, and politics is anything but that. Politics must strive for the best for the most. If as a scientist I must decide who will benefit from my observations and whom to exclude from benefit, my thinking is immediately clouded.”

  Pet for once looked flummoxed. “Well, okay, moving on, then. Have you come up with a name for the quake?”

  Hugh smiled at Pet in a fatherly way. “I’m glad we’re back on stable ground, not to make a seismic joke. In fact, Pet,
it doesn’t have to have a name. It wasn’t that big an event.” His smile turned wan. “Let’s save a name like ‘the Salt Lake City earthquake’ for the big one. Sorry to downgrade your earthquake, and I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not newsworthy, but you’ll recall that we’ve had three others in the five to five point five range in the past hundred years around Salt Lake City. Use it for its educational value. Talk about what the big one would be like by contrast.”

  The reporter scribbled madly. “Okay, good,” she said. “But really, Dr. Buttons, it’s got to have a name. This was a big earthquake for a lot of people. Like the Ottmeier family, whose infant son Tommy was fatally injured when the bookcase fell over on him.” Her sharp eyes focused tightly on Hugh’s face, watching for his reaction.

  Hugh Buttons closed his eyes, drawing himself inward. “Please don’t ask me for a quote on that, Pet.”

  Faye interrupted from the far end of the table. “Little Tommy died?” she asked. “I—I didn’t hear about that.” Her complexion had paled.

  Pet said, “Well, he’s not dead yet, but I hear it’s imminent. Wow, what a news cycle this one is becoming. All the extra press personnel who are here already for the Olympics are completely ravenous for the human-interest stories. The parking lot outside the hospital looks like a display yard for media vans with jack-up satellite dishes. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN—everyone’s down there. And the blood bank’s going wild. You know Salt Lakers—when there’s an emergency, every last one of us rolls out in support.”

  “So you’re in hog heaven,” Logan said.

  Pet gave Logan one deft bat of her eyelashes. “Well, Logan, I suppose I would be if that were the trough at which I fed. But I’m a science journalist, and I’d rather focus on the science. Report the story behind the story, the educational bit that might just help people be a little more intelligent about how they go about living in a huge earthquake fault zone.”

  Ted Wimler leaned toward Faye. “The parents put the kid to bed below this humongous oak bookcase that was already leaning into the room, they had so much on it. So much for bookish people being smart, huh?”

  Wendy Fortescue whipped her narrow little face his way and said, “Shut up, Ted.”

  “How frequent are earthquakes around here anyway?” I asked Logan.

  “That depends on the size of quake you’re talking about. Felt earthquakes? One like today? About every forty years around here.”

  Pet said, “Yes, I’m aware of the earlier quakes that were big enough to get your attention. Let’s see: 1910, 1949, and, if you count the one over by Magna, 1962. And Salt Lakers felt Montana’s Hebgen Lake seven point five quake in 1959, and the seven point three Borah Peak, Idaho, quake in 1983. I’ve looked them up on your UUSS Web site. I found the ‘Personalizing the Earthquake Threat’ section and read the accounts you posted from the old newspapers. Great stuff. And there must have been smaller quakes, too, right? So it sounds like you begin to have some data. So tell me, what do the data tell you?”

  Hugh shifted in his chair and took a sip of beer. “We have anecdotal data, yes, but remember, our records only go back a hundred and twenty-five years. Our seismographs were pretty primitive in 1910, and even though the recording equipment had improved, the instrumentation network was still scanty in 1949, so while we could triangulate the epicenter of those quakes, we couldn’t get much resolution on the subsurface picture. Even now, we’re struggling to get a more three-dimensional picture. Funding, it’s always funding. Seismographs and telemetry cost money.”

  “Amen,” said Logan.

  Hugh continued. “And again, the local quakes we’re talking about are fairly moderate-size ones—the five to five point five range. Like Logan says, the recurrence interval—that calculated average—for those is well under a hundred years. But Logan here can also tell you a lot about the big presettlement earthquakes—the sevens—that this segment of the Wasatch has seen in the last few thousand years. Always remember, for every whole number larger on the Richter scale, thirty-two times more energy is released. So a seven would release almost one thousand times more energy than a five. Those are the ones that we truly need to worry about. We’d be looking at a lot more than just a few chimneys down, and, ah, so much more than the one casualty.”

  One thousand times bigger. I wondered what, if anything, would have been left of Mrs. Pierce’s house after that level of shaking.

  Logan bunched his eyebrows again. “I gave you the publications on that, Pet,” he said, “and you should talk to the emergency-preparedness people again to get that from a human angle. Hugh, tell her more about today’s event. You said you’ve begun to paint the slippage. So is it official? Did the movement occur south of 600 North Street? If it’s down on a latitude with the survey, that puts it six blocks south of that at least.”

  I listened sharply, remembering the map we had looked at together that afternoon. Salt Lake City’s street-numbering system is excruciatingly practical, in a weirdly original kind of way, like a lot about its Mormon founders. The street is called 600 North—the 600 is not an address, and there is no North Street—and it’s right between 500 North and 700 North. The quirks of the street-numbering system formed the basis for my suspicion that the men who designed Salt Lake City were all engineers, and not one of them a closet poet. But then, Mormonism has always struck me as a religion designed around expediency and practicality, with an answer for every question and a contingency for every eventuality, and no quarter given to spoilers like chaos or entropy or even ambiguity. Which was part and parcel of my disinterest in joining it: as a geologist, I see ambiguities in everything. Or perhaps it’s my ability to perceive ambiguities that makes me good at geology.

  But I digress. Logan had a gleam in his eye that said he was highly interested in Hugh Buttons’s answer. And the degree of his alertness had reminded me of the missing fault line he had added to his USGS map. What had he said? The dashed, or “approximately located,” line had been on an earlier map but had been left off the 1992 edition?

  Hugh replied, “Yes, we are confirming that the Warm Springs branch of the Wasatch fault does continue south of 600 North. We’re showing movement spanning from 100 North to South Temple.” He shot a quick look at Pet Mercer. “Again, Pet, that’s not a very big earthquake. A ground-rupturing quake, a six point five or a seven, would have ripped loose several kilometers north to south.”

  “And if we had ground rupture,” I said, still trying to get a handle on the scale of such events, “what would be the vertical throw created by that size quake? How big a scarp would we see?”

  Hugh took another sip of his beer. He focused tightly on the foam at the top. “Again, Logan’s your man. What’s the rate of vertical movement, Lo? A millimeter per year, right?”

  Logan gave Hugh a look that said, You know damned well what the rate is, but said, “Yes, that’s our best estimate, but that’s an average. These things don’t go off like clockwork. Earthquake prediction is, as you said … well, not truly possible. There are too few data—too few observations—and an average is a mathematical construct, not an observation of nature’s pattern. And as Em is suggesting, movement on the Wasatch comes in large jumps, sudden releases of stress that are rare by the standard of human experience. Say the recurrence interval—that’s how often you get an event that size on this segment of this fault, Pet—is a thousand years. In fact, the interval is one thousand three hundred and fifty years, plus or minus two hundred. Do the math. That would give you about a four-foot-high scarp running down the middle of West Temple from north of the capitol clear down past the Convention Center. Or worse, because you get back-tilting and antithetic faulting. The place is ripping apart, not just moving up and down. The kind of vertical offsets we see when we are able to cut a trench across the fault are in fact ten feet or more.”

  Pet twisted this way and that in her seat, taking notes with great concentration. She hadn’t slipped any nuts or raisins out of her pockets in quite a while. “Okay,” she
said, “so that would crack a few foundations, right?”

  Logan leaned forward onto the table, his green eyes wide with amazement. “You have a quake that size on this fault, it won’t matter what’s built across it, Pet. Every building within miles not built to Code Four will be badly damaged, if it isn’t outright flattened, and we’re going to be a whole lot more worried about the dead and dying than about any kind of real estate. We’ll have kill rates up to thirty percent. Utilities will collapse, food and clean water will run out, the hospitals and the doctors and nurses that staff them will be under piles of rubble, and we won’t be able to bring in supplies or triage personnel because we’ll have bridges down all over the place and the airport runways will be submerged under water draining east from the Great Salt Lake. And even if that water weren’t as salty as all hell, it wouldn’t be potable, because it will be laced with that tailings pond crud Kennecot’s got stacked up behind those levees that are going to breach.”

  It’s POSSIBLE THAT Faye’s lack of appetite had more to do with Logan’s description of a “big one” than with her little hitchhiker’s affect on her digestion, but I made up for her gastronomic shortcomings by putting away four pieces myself. The Pie does a good pizza, and I am a glutton when it comes to that all-American combination of Italian ingredients.

  Several more geologists joined us before the last crumb and string of melted mozzarella vanished from the table, but I forget their names. They discussed the observations they’d made that day, often stepping around Pet Mercer’s questions so they wouldn’t be quoted before they were ready, but they did keep the conversation lively by telling war stories about other temblors they’d experienced, where they were during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, or the latest they’d heard concerning the debate over the geologic setting of the Republic Day quake in India in 2001. Like I said, everybody has an earthquake story, and it wasn’t long before they got into volcanic eruptions, landslides, and flood stories.