The Big Ones by Lucy Jones

Author:Lucy Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Manchuria, especially Liaoning Province, was always on the list, since the migration of big earthquakes was about the only concrete phenomenon they had to work with, and those three provinces were in its path. Instruments were installed in Liaoning, and in 1974, officials began monitoring ground tilt and electric currents. They found unusual signals. For instance, that summer they found what appeared to be strong tilting of the ground in the same direction at several sites. This was reported at the annual conference as cause for concern. The same signal showed up each successive summer. The scientists had neither the background nor the necessary control readings to rely on, so it was only later that they recognized their data was the result of water being pumped out of the ground for irrigation, rather than data that could contribute to anticipating any earthquake.

Coming into the winter of 1974–75, the scientists in the Seismology Bureau were on edge. They were recording data they had no context for interpreting, aware of the migration of earthquakes but with no basis for guessing which place would be next—and deathly afraid of the consequences of missing a big earthquake. In December, a swarm of small earthquakes started near the town of Benxi in Liaoning, culminating in a magnitude 5.2 earthquake on December 22. That size earthquake was not too common, and it caused great concern. In the next two weeks, various predictions were issued by the local earthquake office for several different locations, but mostly around the area where the magnitude 5.2 had occurred. In some locations, people slept outside for a few days for fear of collapsing buildings. As the swarm of earthquakes died off, the alerts were withdrawn. Weekly reports continued to stream in, often registering strange animal behavior. But the peak of such activity, on Saturday afternoons, seemed to coincide with political meetings exhorting workers to report such anomalies, which were regularly held on Saturday mornings.

On February 1, 1975, another swarm of small earthquakes began. When on the morning of February 4 more than five hundred earthquakes occurred in twelve hours near Haicheng, including a magnitude 4.7 that caused some damage, chaos ensued. Many opted to self-evacuate rather than await word from the government (which itself depended on the slow communication systems of 1975 rural China). The local observatory in Shipengyu that was recording these presumed foreshocks called their local town leaders and told them to expect a large mainshock that night. The movie operator for the community decided to show movies outdoors throughout the night, to convince people to leave their homes. An official in that county, which was named Yingkou, had been extremely active in earthquake preparation, and he called for a formal evacuation.

When the magnitude 7.3 Haicheng earthquake finally came on the evening of February 4, lives were saved as a result of some of these exercises. The capital city of Yingkou county had seventy-two thousand residents, and although two-thirds of the buildings in the town collapsed, only twenty-one people died.

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