Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

This wasn’t to say that Essex County had entirely stopped shivering. Portable seismographs installed cooperatively by Boston College, the USGS, and Weston Geophysical were registering as many as twenty shocks per day in the vicinity of Peabody, and the occasional blip near Ipswich. The Richter magnitudes seldom exceeded 3.0, however, and although no two scientists agreed about exactly what was going on, the activity was generally taken to represent aftershocks to the events of April and May. Granted, aftershocks to moderate earthquakes usually tail off quickly, and granted, the aftershocks in Peabody weren’t doing this, but in view of the unusually strong foreshocks to the May 10 events, Larry Axelrod and other seismologists theorized that the rupture of rock beneath Peabody had for some reason been “unclean.” As Axelrod explained it to the Globe , the chicken with its head neatly lopped off convulses for a moment but soon lies still, while the chicken with a mangled neck can go on thrashing for an hour, though ever more feebly.

Almost no one in seismology would absolutely guarantee that Boston had seen the last of strong motion. The sole exception was Mass Geostudy, a private research venture sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers and the nuclear power industry. Overlooked in news articles, Mass Geostudy wrote a testy letter to the Globe and informed readers that “there is zero probability of greater Boston experiencing an earthquake as severe as the May 10 temblors in the next 85—120 years.” Many other scientists agreed that the stress release on May 10 had indeed diminished the risk of further major earthquakes, but a substantial minority, including the venerable Axelrod, continued to warn that “it ain’t over till it’s over.” They pointed to the unusual aftershock pattern and to evidence of deep, fault-like structures in the dozen miles separating Ipswich and Peabody. While there was no reason to expect a rupture over the entire twelve miles (this would be a major earthquake), a smaller rupture couldn’t be ruled out either.

The phrase of the hour, applied willy-nilly to all things geophysical in the eastern United States, was “not well understood.”

Rather than spend a billion dollars making Massachusetts as catastrophe-resistant as California, the state legislature chose to allocate a million dollars for immediate seismological research. (Even a million seemed like a lot to a state with serious budget troubles.) Much of the money went to Boston College to fund a full-scale seismic mapping of Essex County. Exposed faults were inspected for fresh offsets (none was found), and Vibroseis equipment was put to work. Students drove a truck-mounted machine to selected sites and surrounded it with a grid of listening devices called Geophones. At carefully timed moments, the machine chirped into the earth, and from the underground refractions and reflections and dilations of the chirps, as recorded on the Geophones, buried structures could be mapped in much the same way as a fetus is mapped by ultrasound.

Early results of Vibroseis mapping revealed a tangle of discontinuities crisscrossing Essex County and extending to greater depths than had previously been supposed. Ambiguity escalated as seismologists tried to correlate earthquake hypocenters with mapped structures. The new data lent support to a variety of competing models. It also gave rise to new models that contradicted not only each other but all the earlier models.

On June 7, a BC student planting a Geophone in a wooded lot in Topsfield discovered the naked body of a Danvers teenager who had been missing for a month, and the Red Sox edged Seattle in ten innings.

The rest of the state money was being spent on studies in short-term earthquake prediction, organized by scholars from as far away as California. One group planted sensors in the bedrock to measure changes in its electrical conductivity. Another was monitoring magnetic fields and listening for extremely low-frequency radio waves. Four independent groups were studying less glamorous but equally well established indicators: changes in the depth and clarity of water in wells, release of methane and other gases from deep holes, oddities in animal behavior, and foreshock-like clusters of tremors.

A mini-scandal broke when Channel 4 learned that the state had given a Michigan post-doc $15,000 to import a tank of Japanese catfish and observe them in a darkened motel room outside Salem. Several studies had indicated that this species of catfish became upset on the eve of earthquakes, but the Michigan postdoc was shy and made a poor impression on camera. The Channel 4 reporter, Penny Spanghorn, called the experiment “perhaps the ultimate rip-off.”

By and large, the media and the public assumed that the research groups would issue urgent warnings if a cruncher appeared imminent; that this was what they’d come to Boston for. The groups themselves had no such plans. They were scientists and had come to gather information and advance their understanding of the earth. They knew, in any case, that the governor would never take the economically disruptive step of issuing an all-out warning unless most of the prediction methods agreed that a major shock was due. In the past, the methods had specifically not agreed about the timing, severity, and location of major earthquakes. This was why the methods were still being tested. When the groups said so, however, the public took it as modesty and continued to assume that somehow, should a disaster loom, a warning would be issued.

Aside from the catfish story, press coverage of the prediction efforts was enthusiastic, and the experimental installations became highly sought after by local young people. A report of muddied water in a pair of wells in Beverly was later retracted when a teenager confessed to having dumped dirt and gravel into them “as a prank.” Soon after this, a far-flung earful of Somerville youth was arrested by Salem police while “box-bashing” in a lonely place. The youths had thought it would be fun to confuse a portable seismograph by jumping on the ground and simulating tremors, but it was not much fun, and so they attacked the seismograph with baseball bats.

In the first week of June every household in eastern Massachusetts received a brochure called tremor tips. The brochure, which had been printed in California, was illustrated with palm trees and Mission Style houses and recommended that children crouch under their desks at school, that downed electrical wires be avoided, that gas leaks be reported pronto, and that supplies of canned food and bottled water have been purchased well in advance. Supermarkets and discount stores responded with special Quake Survival displays, and gun dealers throughout the region reported a jump in sales.

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.