Jake and the Quake by Cary Sneider

Author:Cary Sneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tumblehome, Inc.
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Earthquake!

San Francisco Bay—Tuesday, October 17, 1989—5:04 p.m.

Unknown to Jake, Marty, and 11 million other people who lived in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, about sixty miles south of the heart of the city, and eleven miles underground, a huge portion of Earth’s crust had started to move. The pressure on this portion of the San Andreas Fault had been building gradually for nearly a hundred years. Now the rocks that had been jammed together for so long finally gave way. In a scraping motion that lasted about twenty seconds, a huge portion of Earth and everything that was on it moved six feet to the northwest and nearly four feet upward. The break stretched for twenty-five miles along the fault line.

In the not-too-distant future, Mr. H would hand out a dozen hard-boiled eggs to his students so they could observe, in small groups, what happens when the eggshell is cracked and two pieces of shell rub together. This time, Jason would not be laughing when Mr. H. asked his students to imagine what it is like for people who live on the pieces of cracked shell when one piece moves, even a little bit, against another.

People living right over the fault felt it almost immediately, in its full intensity. While the actual fault did not break the ground, the stress was so great that deep cracks and ditches appeared on the surface, undermining roads and lawns, houses and cars. The deep, powerful vibrations traveled slowly outward from the epicenter of the quake, like ripples in a pond viewed in slow motion.

Toppling buildings in the nearby communities of Watsonville and Santa Cruz, the ripples moved outward. A few seconds later, the ripples passed under Candlestick Park, where the powerful vibrations startled more than fifty thousand fans awaiting the first pitch of the third game of the World Series.

The ripples passed on into the city of San Francisco, where the streets were jammed with rush-hour commuters and last-minute shoppers. After shaking the foundations of the great city, the ripples moved on, under the waters of the bay, shifting the great pylons that supported the massive Bay Bridge, and passing through the city of Oakland, with its high-rise freeways, huge apartment buildings, and office towers.

As the earth swayed, so did buildings and bridges, built to support weight from above, but not to withstand jostling from below. Thousands of pages of calculations compiled by engineers to predict whether or not their structures could withstand a major quake were about to be tested. The ground undulated up and down, back and forth, lifting, pulling, and pushing the fragile structures of humankind.

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