Strong Motion (37 page)

Insurance companies had resumed sales of earthquake insurance, although they freely admitted that with rates beginning at $30 per $1,000 of coverage, almost no one was buying. Con artists working door-to-door did brisk business in bogus discount policies, however. The stock of companies and banks with large capital investments in the Boston area remained depressed, as did the market for real estate in Essex County and in low-lying areas farther south, including Back Bay and much of Cambridge. (Buildings on filled marshes and other reclaimed land were particularly susceptible to seismic shaking.) Wealthy municipalities were afraid of sparking an all-out panic by sponsoring earthquake drills; poor communities had other worries; and so no drills were held.

The Reverend Philip Stites quietly observed in a broadcast editorial on WSNE that he didn’t think God was done with the Commonwealth, nor would He be until the last abortion clinic in the state had closed its doors. Stites went on to condemn as un-Christian the recent bombings of facilities in Lowell, saying that it was for God, not man, to mete out punishment. As of June 8, fifty-eight members of Stites’s Church of Action in Christ were sitting in Boston and Cambridge jail cells. They had declined to post bail after their arrest for blocking entrances to various clinics. Cartoonists and columnists portrayed Stites as a wealthy dandy unwilling to soil his hands by getting himself arrested with his troops; they made fun of his highly visible wooings of local conservatives; they detected “an odor of hypocrisy” in everything he did.

On the other side of the fence, a coalition of local pro-choice groups was promising to flood Boston Common with a hundred thousand protesters during a rally on July 14. One of the organizers had written to Renée for permission to include her in a list of public figures supporting the rally. Renée had called the organizer and asked her, “Why do you want me on your list?”

“You’re the geologist. You were on TV.”

“A lot of people were on TV.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to be on the list?”

“No, no, go ahead. Put me on it.”

“All right.” The organizer had sounded annoyed. “We’ll put you on it.”

♦

The regional administrative offices of the Environmental Protection Agency were on the eighth floor of a prewar granite block across from the Federal Courthouse, in the old part of downtown where if you studied the tops of the buildings and then looked at the street again you expected to see all the men wearing fedoras and dark narrow ties and Buddy Holly-style glasses.

Outside the courthouse, six female protesters in knitted mittens had wound Saran Wrap around their photographs of fetuses. Sheets of cold water were sliding over themselves on the slopes leading down into the combat zone, rain streaking the city’s gray-green windows and soaking the handcards advertising sex by telephone that were lodged under every wiper blade that wasn’t moving. It was a trick Renée had seen New England summers play many times before: a high of 53° today and more of the same expected on the weekend.

The hard plastic chairs in the vestibule of the EPA offices discouraged sitting. Some were grouped in a half circle that suggested clubbiness even though they were empty; the rest stood isolated at odd angles to the walls. When the deputy regional administrator, Susan Carver, came out to meet her, Renée left rain marks on the floor by the notice of equal employment opportunity she’d been reading.

Carver was a tall and heavy person with fleshy white cheeks and thick eyebrows. Her glasses had round cranberry-colored rims and lenses soaped by the federal lighting. She was like a brainy white rabbit stuffed into a size 14 suit. She was leading Renée back to her office when a balled-up piece of paper sailed out of an open door and glanced off her massive shoulder. She caught it on the fly, with surprising deftness, and stopped in the doorway. Four middle-aged male administrators wearing colors such as rust brown and silver-blue looked up from their desks with a guilt that was more like a bated delight. Wordlessly, Carver tossed the ball of paper through an orange hoop attached to the wall and returned to Renée while the men cheered.

“You wanted to talk to me about Sweeting-Aldren.”

“Yes.”

“This is in regard to the earthquakes in Peabody.”

“Yes.”

Obviously pleased with herself for making the basket, Carver sat down behind her desk and joined her white paws on the desk top, stretching the pinstripes at her elbows and shoulders. On the windowsill behind her stood framed photographs of her family: a chunky teenaged girl with a small nose and a flat, eager face who looked like she was good at computers, a doughy boy of eight or ten, and a skinny, grinning husband. There was a water pistol, a .38 revolver, by her Rolodex. With an amused maternal wariness, as if the company were another of her children, she said, “What has Sweeting-Aldren done, in your opinion?”

Renée reached for the shoulder bag that held her documents but slowly drew her hand back without having touched it. “There’s some evidence,” she said, “that they’ve been pumping liquids down a very deep well for a number of years, if not decades, and that they may have induced the earthquakes we’ve seen in Peabody.”

Carver’s eyebrows rose and fell almost imperceptibly. “Go on.”

Renée opened her bag and gave a poised and cautious presentation. She didn’t look up from her documents until she’d finished. Carver was wearing a faint, abstracted smile, as if continuing to savor the basket she’d made.

“Let me see if I’ve understood your chronology,” she said. “First Sweeting-Aldren begins to drill a deep well somewhere, in the late sixties. Then in 1987 there’s a swarm of small earthquakes near Peabody that lasts three months—”

“And tails off with unusual abruptness.”

“And tails off rapidly. Then there’s a spill in Peabody, not particularly large—at most a couple of years’ worth of undumpable effluents. And finally, not long after the spill is discovered, the Peabody earthquakes start up again, apparently in connection with the Ipswich earthquakes but actually not, according to you.”

“Not just me. Nobody in seismology has a persuasive model for linking Ipswich and Peabody.”

Carver nodded. She’d picked up her water pistol and was nibbling on the sight blade. “I understand. Although the impression I get is that there’s a lot that seismologists don’t know about what makes earthquakes happen when and where they do, especially earthquakes on the east coast.”

“A model of induced seismicity explains the Peabody swarm perfectly.”

“Yes, I understand. Although again it all depends on your assumption that a hole was actually drilled and drilled near Peabody. Since there may be other ‘models’ that are equally persuasive.”

“Such as?”

Carver shrugged. “Maybe a natural source of earthquakes in Peabody, and then a ‘model’ of cyclical demand that explains April’s spill there. You see, I’m not sure how well you understand the chemical industry. Short-term stockpiling of both raw materials and unprocessed wastes is very commonplace. Sweeting-Aldren stores incinerable wastes until demand improves for the products they make in their high-temperature reactors. And in the meantime, last month, an earthquake ruptured one of their storage tanks.”

Renée nodded. She’d expected—in fact, hoped—that Carver would play devil’s advocate. “Can I ask if you guys, the EPA, have actually been inside the Peabody plant to make sure they’re treating all these wastes the way they say they are?”

“Certainly you may ask. The answer is no. We have not been lowering probes into their tanks. We have not been watchdogging their internal processes. We have neither the staff nor the legal right to go checking every pipe and every valve in every factory in America.”

“Although of course this is kind of a suspicious case.”

“Ah, yes. A suspicious case.” Carver pushed on the arms of her chair and with considerable exertion repositioned herself. “Let me explain something to you, Renée. As a survivor of the eighties who’s still working for EPA. The reason we’re doing a minimally acceptable job of protecting this country’s environment is that we’re realistic, and we have priorities. This is the real world we’re dealing with, and in the real world you can’t acid-test every conceivable hypothesis. You have to focus on what’s coming out of the drainpipes and the smokestacks, and that means taking some things on faith occasionally. If a company like Sweeting-Aldren isn’t polluting the air or water—”

“Until the spill last month.”

Carver smiled. The smile meant: Will you let me finish? “Sweeting-Aldren is a responsibly managed company. Maybe if I had nobody else to worry about, I might go in there and doublecheck all this stuff. But I’m dealing with companies pouring half a ton of cadmium and mercury salts per hour into estuaries. I’m dealing with waste-management contractors taking oil with PCB levels in the parts per thousand and toluene and vinyl chloride levels in the parts per ten and dumping them in fifty-year-old tanks beneath abandoned gas stations. I’m dealing with landfills that are on the brink of contaminating groundwater pretty much statewide from here to Springfield. I’m dealing with companies who”—Carver counted the strikes on her fingertips—“ignore our regulations, ignore the fines we levy, ignore court orders, and finally go bankrupt and leave behind hundred-acre sites contaminated for eternity. On the other side we have a public prone to panic, and presidents who make it a point of pride every couple of years not to
cut
our funding any further.”

“But the spill in Peabody.”

“There were PCBs in it. I can hear you. And the company misled the public for a couple of days, not that Wall Street didn’t see right through it. Then again, it’s an extremely human response to deny something when you’re embarrassed. Hi, Stan.” Carver aimed her pistol at the doorway, where a man in a pea-green blazer was holding a manila folder. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Renée frowned. A few minutes?

“This hole of yours,” Carver said. “If it was drilled at all, it was supposedly drilled outside Hereford, Massachusetts. In order to make your ‘model’ fit, haven’t you more or less arbitrarily moved a five-mile-deep hole a hundred fifty miles east?”

“Eastern Massachusetts is what it says in
Nature
. Eastern Massachusetts.”

“Do you have any other references on that?”

“Not—yet.”

“And
Nature
is a . . . British publication. You know, I hate to say this, but I’m not particularly comfortable with a theory that depends on a British magazine editor’s grasp of American geography.”

Renée’s eyes narrowed.

“Other objections, off the top of my head. Why spend umpteen million dollars on a deep oil well in 1969? Do you know what a barrel of oil cost back then?”

“Yes. I do know. But I can’t believe there wasn’t anybody in America able to see 1973 coming. They had huge profits. They were probably glad to take the write-off.”

“You don’t make money on a write-off. And wouldn’t a company with so much foresight know about induced seismicity too? Anybody who opens an elementary seismology textbook must know about it. But according to you, the earthquakes in 1987 took them by surprise.”

“I assume they’d looked at the Denver study,” Renée said. “In Denver there was some history of earthquakes and the largest induced event was a magnitude 4.6. In Peabody there was no history of earthquakes and no reason to expect any. Plus they were pumping at a small fraction of the rate the Army pumped in Denver. And there’s something else, actually, that I forgot to mention, which is that the operations vice president of Sweeting-Aldren has his house insured against earthquake damage.”

Carver touched the muzzle of her pistol to her lips, as if blowing smoke off it. She smiled at Renée serenely. Was it possible she’d been corrupted by Sweeting-Aldren? Renée dismissed the idea. She could see that the problem here was that Carver simply didn’t like her.

“I take it you’re not a homeowner,” Carver said.

“That’s right. I’m not a homeowner.”

“Nothing wrong with that, of course. However, it may be that you don’t quite understand how much the people who do own homes are concerned about losing them. And that people who’ve been in Boston all their lives might remember the earthquakes in the forties and fifties. Who is that—Dave Stoorhuys?”

She made him sound like somebody she drank beer with. “Yes.”

Carver nodded. “Caution. Caution is the only word for him. Have you met him?”

“I know his son.”

“Yes, but you see I actually deal with these companies on a daily basis. And strange as it may sound, there happen to be some very decent and well-intentioned people in the industry. In fact I’ve seen as much or more self-interest and self-promotion on the academic side of the fence as I’ve seen on the commercial side. Is this what you wanted to hear? Obviously not. But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I think you’re barking up the wrong tree with Dave Stoorhuys and Sweeting-Aldren.”

“What if I found the pumping site myself and brought you pictures?”

“You want permission to spy and trespass? You want Mommy’s approval?” Carver’s eyes glittered. “I suppose if you showed me something more solid than an academic conjecture, I’d have somebody check it out. Although frankly there are a whole lot worse things a company can do with those chemicals than pump them four miles underneath the water table.”

“What if they’d come to you for a license to pump their waste underground. Would you have given it to them?”

“If you’re talking about legal liability for earthquake damage, you should be talking to somebody else.”

“Like who.”

“The press always loves a good story.” Carver looked at her watch. She stood up. “I’ve noticed they’re pretty keen on you too.”

“This is your responsibility,” Renée said. “If they are pumping, the only thing they’re violating is EPA regulations. I think somebody should at least go and see if they have a well on their property. And if they do, it should be seized before they have a chance to shut it down.”

“I’ll take a look at our records.” Carver was walking to the door now, forcing her visitor to stand up. Every government official knows that people who complain to agencies invariably consider themselves special, and that they become flustered when they finally realize they don’t seem special to the agency. A proud and self-conscious supplicant like Renée was particularly easy to fluster and get rid of. It was therefore a specific meanness on Carver’s part that she took the time to add: “I have to tell you, I’ve heard it all before. I’m afraid you’re tripping on a romance, a little bit.”