On Shaky Ground: America's Earthquake Alert by Nance John J

Author:Nance, John J. [Nance, John J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, History
Amazon: B018YPUQRY
Goodreads: 28835708
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1988-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Pasadena, California—November 29, 1978

Karen McNally was practically yelling at her car radio as she pressed the accelerator toward the floor, the vehicle’s speedometer already reporting illicit velocities to an inattentive driver.

“Where is it? Where?”

Some announcer in some station somewhere in the Los Angeles area had read the item—obviously a fast-breaking five-bell story off the news wires—but he hadn’t said enough.

As she wove between several cars, trying to make headway through the usual L.A. freeway traffic toward Caltech in Pasadena where she could get answers, the possibility that this was the very thing she had been waiting for and working for during the past nine months filled her with a sense of frustration.

“There has been,” the announcer had said, “a major earthquake in Mexico.”

“Oh, damn!” had been Karen’s first response. The squashed accelerator had come a few seconds later.

I’ll bet this is our quake! The words echoed in her head as she changed lanes once again, downtown Pasadena sliding by her now, the off ramp leading to Caltech just two miles ahead.

The image of her colleagues from both the United States and Mexico tending the array of seismographs placed around the southern coastline of Mexico in the state of Oaxaca, 290 miles south of Mexico City—the thought that the very earthquake they were trying to capture might have occurred on the very day she had returned to the United States to finish a technical paper (which had gone begging for weeks)—was very upsetting. But it was an upset filled with excitement that the earthquake prediction might have come true on schedule, and perhaps—just perhaps—right in the middle of their seismograph network.

“Where, dammit, where?”

News from everywhere else poured from the radio, but there was no further mention of the quake. Karen was still fumbling with the tuning knobs as she pulled up in front of the Caltech lab and abandoned the car to race inside to the seismograph drums.

All the needles had jumped toward the mechanical stops with the wave arrivals of a genuine great quake, and initial calculations (which were already under way when she burst through the door) seemed to indicate that the tremendous pulse of seismic energy was coming from south of Mexico City, from the southern coast of Mexico.

Karen’s first suspicion was exactly right. It was indeed her earthquake!

A team of Texas seismologists had first indentified the area as ripe for a seismic “event” a year before in 1977, predicting a 7.25 to a 7.75 great quake within one and a half years. But she had been the first to build a net of seismographs in an attempt to “trap” the quake they thought was coming. Now here it was, roaring in on schedule (nine months into an eighteen-month forecast) and at an Ms magnitude of 7.8, which was on the upper end of their magnitude prediction.

Karen McNally, Ph.D., senior research fellow at Caltech and one of the brightest young seismologists on the trail of earthquake prediction, was ecstatic—and eager to get right back to Los Angeles International Airport and aboard any flight that could carry her south once again.

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