Cascadia's Fault (22 page)

“At first, it was the excitement of a scientific discovery” that kept Yeats motivated. Unfortunately, telling people about a catastrophic seismic threat was a lot like telling them that a lack of exercise and a bad diet and would make them fat. “The reaction was, ‘Yes, I know, but I don't want to think about it, let alone do anything about it,'” Yeats wrote in his survival guide to earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest.

After a while, though, public lethargy became a real drag. “Suddenly, earthquake science stopped being fun, and as a scientist, I began to feel like a watchman on the castle walls warning about barbarians at the gate, begging people to take me seriously,” he lamented. Despite recurring images in the news of death and destruction from previous subduction disasters, people seemingly didn't have the will to respond. Perhaps burying one's head in the sand is a type of survival mechanism, a way of coping.

CHAPTER 13

Cascadia's Segmented Past: Apocalypse or Decades of Terror?

For Stephanie Fritts, moving to a small town seemed like a logical way to escape the chaos and frenzy of the modern world. When she arrived in her chosen paradise on the western edge of Washington State, nobody said anything about megathrust earthquakes or tsunamis. Ilwaco was an idyllic resort community with a mild climate, white sandy shores, and tall green forests.

She had lived the jet-set life of a fashion buyer for the May Company department store chain, and in the early days it seemed like a great job. Based in Portland, she spent half her life in New York hotels, missing her husband and children way too much. She began to question her “contribution to society” and decided that “clothing people just wasn't doing it.”

Then one day her father told her he could use some help running his department store—an old-fashioned local landmark that carried everything from ladies' wear to oakum—in the fishing town of Ilwaco, just across the Oregon line in the lower left-hand corner of Washington State. Here the turbulent outflow of the Columbia River creates Cape Disappointment and the Long Beach Peninsula, a narrow, sandy spit
that forms the outer boundary of Willapa Bay. A necklace of quiet little hideaways like Seaview, Long Beach, and Ocean Park were being transformed into retirement and tourist destinations famous for clam digs, sandcastles, kite festivals, and the scenic splendor of the Pacific.

So Stephanie decided to make a lifestyle change. She went to work in her dad's store and not long after settling in started volunteering as an emergency medical technician for the Pacific County ambulance service. She really liked the feel of public service, of doing something positive for society. She had no idea how much bigger that job would eventually become.

Willapa Bay is the main place where Brian Atwater was quietly digging into tide marshes and stream banks in the spring and summer of 1986, finding evidence of huge prehistoric earthquakes and tsunamis. Few local residents were aware at the time that he was in the neighborhood or what he was up to, and it's probably just as well because the news when it finally came out was most unwelcome. Like ships in the fog, he may even have crossed paths with Stephanie Fritts, unaware they would later join forces on a much-needed public safety campaign.

Stephanie's own introduction to plate tectonics and tsunami waves came on May 7 that year, when a distant rupture triggered a chain of events that would rattle nerves and change the lives of people living in Pacific County. On the Wednesday in question her husband, David, who worked in the lumber industry, had driven to Portland on business when a magnitude 8 quake sent shockwaves through the U.S. Naval Air Station on Adak Island, at the far end of the Aleutian archipelago 1,200 miles (1,900 km) southwest of Anchorage.

It was the largest seismic event in Alaska since the Good Friday disaster of 1964. The ground shook and rolled for almost two minutes. Even though the event would be classified as a “great” earthquake (magnitude 8 or higher), it caused only moderate local damage—cracked masonry and concrete walls, collapsed ceilings and partition walls, spalling on concrete beams and piers—all of which was described
by the
Anchorage Daily News
as “one of many temblors that rattle the chain every year.” Two things, however, made this one different.

The first was that it had been forecast a year earlier by a team of scientists at the University of Colorado. The researchers were looking for precursors, things that change in the earth just before large main shocks. This being one of the most seismically active regions on the planet and the same big subduction zone that had caused the disaster of 1964, a whole slew of new instruments had been installed by 1974—the Central Aleutians Seismic Network—providing a flow of data with enough details to spot even subtle changes.

One of those changes was a sudden drop-off of seismic activity. When all the normal rumble and grind along a big subduction zone mysteriously goes quiet, watch out—something's bound to happen. Or at least that was the theory at the time. When this quiescence was noticed in a segment of the plate boundary near Adak Island, the researchers in Colorado decided to go out on a limb. They said a major earthquake would occur near Adak before the end of October 1985.

When October came and went and the only big rupture was down in Mexico City, the scientists gracefully admitted their mistake and chalked it up to experience as a “failed prediction.” Six months later, on May 7, 1986, a quake roughly a hundred miles (160 km) southeast of Adak Island did occur at precisely the location they had thought it would. By then a new computer system had been installed at the Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, just north of Anchorage. It was designed to record and locate the focal point of earthquakes quickly, analyze the data, and predict whether or not a tsunami had been generated at the same time.

This was the second thing that made the May 7 shockwave different. It was the first test of the new software. The alarm system was tripped and a team of geophysicists on duty at Palmer had to decide whether to believe the computer. They knew this segment of the Pacific plate had failed before in a magnitude 8.6 temblor in 1957, generating a tsunami
that did extensive damage in Hawaii. They confirmed very quickly that the current rupture was definitely located along the sea floor and was therefore certainly
capable
of generating waves. Whether it actually had or not was another question.

Sometimes a slab of sea floor will move more horizontally than it does vertically, so these kinds of jolts don't always lift a wall of water that becomes a tsunami. In the end it was a judgment call. With the odds apparently in favor, the team at Palmer did the cautious thing and notified emergency officials, who sounded the alarm all around the Pacific Rim that a wave had probably been triggered.

From the moment of rupture until the alarm went out only eight minutes elapsed, less than half the time it used to take when the work was done by hand with calculators, rulers, and maps. The new system developed by Palmer station chief Thomas Sokolowski made this the fastest tsunami warning ever issued.

The trouble was that the computer system was still based primarily on seismic data—instrument readings of the earthquake's ground motion—with no quick way of directly measuring waves in the ocean. This was back in the days before deep-ocean detection buoys that could register a change in sea level and provide accurate data about how big the waves were and what to expect in places like Hawaii, Japan, Vancouver Island, or Willapa Bay—where a tsunami
might
be headed. Without the buoys, the new warning system was still an educated guess based on tide gauges and eyewitness reports from coastal communities when and if a wave made landfall.

 

School was out and the kids had already made it home when the madness began. Up to her arms in soapy water, Stephanie Fritts stood in her driveway and stared at the spectacle for several minutes, not quite sure what was happening. By late afternoon that Wednesday the sun had come out and warmed the day enough to make washing the car a tolerable task, which is what Stephanie was doing when she noticed
traffic—lots of it—heading southbound down the Long Beach Peninsula at high speed.

She immediately switched on the radio and heard a cursory news story about a big wave possibly en route from Alaska and wasn't sure what to do next. She tried phoning her husband in Portland. Again and again and again she tried, with no luck. The lines were jammed. She did eventually get through to her parents across town and told them she was on the way to pick them up. She wrangled four children—ages three to fifteen—into the car and decided not to worry for the moment about David because in Portland he should be far enough inland to be beyond the danger zone.

But David was worried about her and the kids. After hearing the same vaguely ominous, fact-free news item on the car radio, he too made a dash for the nearest phone. He called the home number and called and called, unable to get through. So he decided to make a beeline for the family, driving west and north from Portland toward Astoria, where the big bridge crosses the Columbia just below Ilwaco. These were the days before most people had cell phones, so nobody in or near the danger zone could find out what was really happening. For David Fritts it was a shot in the dark.

 

As the first wave, a 5.8-foot (1.8 m) swell, came ashore on Adak Island, emergency bulletins echoed down the west coast of North America from Alaska to British Columbia and on to Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii. The quake had indeed generated a tsunami. In Kodiak a siren started wailing shortly after 5:00 p.m. Alaska time to warn people that a wave could strike there within the hour. Over in Valdez, it was only the luck of the draw that no ships were docked at the Trans-Alaska Pipeline terminal. The captain of an inbound tanker decided to slow his vessel to twelve knots in order to stay in deep water until the danger passed.

Along the Washington shore the U.S. Coast Guard sent airplanes
and helicopters equipped with loudspeakers buzzing down the beaches to warn people to head for higher ground. They radioed fishing boats at sea and urged their skippers to head farther offshore. Even on the protected inside waters of Puget Sound the captains of ferry boats were warned away from their docks as the wave approached. A ship laden with dangerous cargo outbound from Seattle toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca was stopped by the Coast Guard and told to wait.

With four children and her parents in the car Stephanie Fritts was finally ready to make a run for it. She started driving southeast toward the Astoria Bridge. Traffic snarled almost immediately. Just outside of Ilwaco, they hit gridlock and were stuck on a country road only a few feet above sea level—waiting for what might be a killer wave—with nowhere to go. High ground was miles away. For nearly 17,500 people in five counties along the coast, a fine spring afternoon had vanished, replaced by a confusing, gut-clenching race to get away from the water as the sun set and the air turned colder.

Eventually Stephanie did get across the bridge at Astoria and as far inland as Westport, Oregon, where she managed to find both high ground and a motel where they could stay for the night. Then things got really crazy. In the darkening chaos of frantic headlights and confusion, David drove right past their motel in the opposite direction on his way home to find them. At the Astoria Bridge the Oregon State Police were allowing traffic to cross the river southbound to escape the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington, but they had blocked all traffic going north. Nobody was allowed back in to the danger zone. David found himself stuck in the Astoria Bridge line-up with no idea where his family was or what was about to happen.

 

When the first wave from Adak Island finally reached the northern tip of Vancouver Island at Cape Scott, it was only four feet (1.2 m) above mean high tide. When it got down to Neah Bay in Washington, it was only two feet (60 cm) above normal. At Grays Harbor and Willapa
Bay, it was less than that. The maximum height of the Adak tsunami was a harmless 1.8-foot (54 cm) slosh by the time it hit the beaches in Hilo, Hawaii. In Japan it was a hissing five inches (13 cm) of foam. By 10:00 p.m. Pacific time that night emergency officials began lifting the evacuation orders. All that scrambling and racing around in the dark had been for nothing. Stephanie and David Fritts still didn't find each other until later the next day.

Angry and frustrated citizens in dozens of coastal towns called it a false alarm. For others a potential disaster had degenerated into a poor joke. “We gave this big party and nobody came,” quipped Lieutenant Commander Tom Pearson of the Coast Guard in Seattle. A train of five small waves were in fact triggered when the ocean floor heaved upward, so in reality it was not a false alarm. There was simply no way to tell how big the waves would be.

For Stephanie Fritts and others with small children to round up and protect, or for those who got separated from loved ones, family, and friends in the panic of those first few hours, the experience was nothing to laugh about. “This was the first I had ever known that the Pacific Coast could be impacted by a tsunami and I was having visions of the old movie
Krakatoa.
I didn't really understand the whole thing and was confounded for the most part! I didn't realize that tsunamis were real and not an invention of the movies,” she said.

The thing that stuck in her mind was the lack of information. There had to be a better way of detecting and measuring what happens at sea when a subduction event tears the ocean floor apart. The more immediate and dire implications of an Alaska-type catastrophe happening very close to home, just a few miles offshore from Long Beach—a monstrous quake and train of waves from Cascadia—was another whole movie that nobody had explained to Stephanie and her neighbors. She was annoyed and motivated enough to do something about it.