The only man who was enthusiastic about the earthquake from the start was geologist Irving J. Witkind of the U.S. Geological Survey, who was living in a trailer on a rise to the north of Hebgen Lake, above the Culligans and Parade Rest, while he surveyed and mapped the area.
When the first shock hit, he figured his trailer had somehow broken loose and was rolling down the hill. He charged out, intent on stopping it. From the way the trees were swaying in the absence of any wind, he knew it was a genuine earthquake. He hopped in his jeep and headed down toward the lake. He saw the [earthquake] scarp just in time to stop.
“It's mine! It's mine!” he shouted as he got out of the jeep and realized the full measure of his fortune. His words will echo wherever geologists gather in years to come. Professionally, his once-in-a-thousand-lifetimes fortune in being on the scene of a major quake meant as much as discovering an unfound Pharaoh's tomb would to an Egyptologist.
âFrom
The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake,
by Edmund Christopherson. The 1959 magnitude 7.5 earthquake was centered about fifteen miles north of Yellowstone National Park.
MY ADVICE, IN CASE YOU EVER CONSIDER THE OPTION, IS don't ever mess with Faye Carter. Her way of dealing with stress can be ugly. Case in point: That evening, she did indeed drag me to that meeting at the Pie Pizzeria. And no, it was not a case
of a pregnant woman having food cravings. She did not take bite one. She just hung there like a vulture waiting for death, insisting that I look like I was having a whee of a good time.
It started like this, the moment we reached the table:
Faye: “Hi, everyone, this is my friend Em Hansen. She's a shy geologist who wants to drink beer and whoop it up, just like the rest of you.”
Me (finding no words but plenty of body English, including, but not limited to, cringing and sheepish grinning): “Gaa-uhn” (Which probably means something in Arabic or ancient Tahitian, but, freely translated from Wyoming cowgirlese, means “I feel an intense desire to sink through the floor to the center of the Earth.”)
Logan de Pontier: “Hey, Em, sit down. And what's your friend's name again?”
Me (finding my voice at last, given this extraordinary setup): “Attila the Hun.”
Faye (with meltingly lovely smile, self-deprecating hand gestures): “I'm Faye Carter. Attila is just my stage name.”
Logan: “Ah. Great. Well, let me introduce you around. This is Wendy Fortescue. She works at the Seismic Station up here at the university. This is Ted Wimler, a
compadre
from the UGS. Hugh Buttons, director of the Seismic Station. Pet Mercer, science reporter for the
Tribune.
There'll be a couple more coming. Come on and sit down. Can I get you a beer?”
Me: “Oh God, please, yes.”
Faye: “Not for me, thanks. My karma currently disallows it.” Everyone at the table seemed content enough to ignore that last remark. They shifted and shuffled around to make room for us to get seated, mercifully putting Faye in the back corner beyond the bulk of Hugh Buttons, where she could contemplate the graffiti on the brick walls if she liked. I sat at the other end of the table, across from Logan and between Pet Mercer and Ted Wimler.
I had to strain to hear Hugh, who had apparently been in the middle of giving Pet Mercer and the others an update on the. earthquake situation. He was a big guy with a puffy stomach and elastic-waist pants, which made him look like a watermelon sitting in a shower cap.
“We haven't had very many aftershocks,” he said. “I had expectedâor should I say hoped for?âmaybe three or four times as many. But what we have does begin to paint the plane of the fault.”
Pet pulled an almond out of a pocket and popped it into her mouth. I noticed that she hadn't taken any pizza from the communal dish, and didn't even have a plate in front of her. She said, “I've noticed that there has been surprisingly little historic seismic activity right along the fault. Why is that?” She passed him a map showing a black dot at the epicenter of every earthquake that had occurred in Utah over the past thirty years.
Hugh stared meditatively at the map. “Yes, you've noticed our odd blank area right where the fault lies. Well, that's because all these other quakes were fairly small, but there were a lot of them. Here, for instance. That's the Book Cliffs. These are all rock bursts in the coal mines there. Tiny. But the earthquakes along the Wasatch fault, when they occur, are much larger, and the larger the quake, the further apart they occur temporally. If the fault slipped more easily, we'd have many small earthquakes for every medium one we do have. It's got to do with the fault geometry and the way the stress accumulates in the rock.”
Pet nodded. She said, “You've always taken pains to explain to me that the Wasatch fault is a zone, not one discrete plane.”
“Right, it's a set of fractures, and each one is in fact a zone of subparallel fractures, because a fault does not fail in precisely the same place each time.”
“So which part cracked this time?” the journalist asked.
Hugh inhaled and exhaled visibly, his bulk rising and falling with the action. “The hypocenterâthat's the actual point of slippageâwas
on the Warm Springs branch of the fault, the part that runs near downtown.”
“Runs
under
downtown,” Pet suggested.
Seeing that Pet was trying to get the director of the Seismic Station to make a statement he was perhaps not yet ready, from a scientific standpoint, to make, I asked, “Where was the epicenter?”
Epicenter
was one of the terms I had spent the previous hour brushing up on in my old physical geology textbook. The epicenter of the earthquake was that point on the Earth's surface immediately above the area of slippage; the rock would not fail on the line where the fault actually came to surface, because the Wasatch fault plunges into the Earth at an angle, dipping away steeply to the west.
“Just west of downtown,” Hugh said. “Out toward the UGS, in fact.” He smiled jauntily over toward Logan de Pontier and Ted Wimler. “But in deference to our esteemed colleagues there, we're not calling it the UGS Quake.”
“You mean, in kindness to Sidney's memory,” Ted said dramatically.
I turned and looked at Ted, a rather slight man who parted his limp hair down the middle. His eyes were too close together for the width of his soft face. I wondered what his exact relationship had been with the deceased state geologist.
Hugh Buttons tipped his head to one side and averted his eyes sorrowfully.
Wendy Fortescue, the seismology tech, rolled her eyes and groaned. Pet Mercer's eyes snapped her way.
I saw Logan's eyebrows tighten downward. They were rather heavy, and quite expressive, giving him a brooding look when he did that. “It's been one hell of a day, eh? She left two kids, although they'll of course go live with their dad, andâ”
“A fine woman, and an excellent scientist,” Hugh said, his voice thickening. “A tragedy.”
Ted said, “Everything must be a shambles up at the house there, Wendy.”
Wendy drew one knee up toward her chest and said, “I haven't been home.”
Logan asked, “Has the funeral been scheduled?”
Hugh Buttons said, “Tomorrow morning.”
“So soon?” someone asked.
“She was Jewish.”
Pet Mercer glanced back and forth, taking in everyone's reactions. I realized then that she was watching them with the same kind of intensity I was, and, unless I misjudged, with much the same sort of intent. “Tell me about Dr. Smeeth, Wendy,” she said softly. “I understand that you roomed in her basement apartment.”
Wendy said, “I've got nothing to say. I don't want to be in the funny papers. You reporters are all a bunch of maggots.”
Oblivious to Wendy's coarseness, Ted said, “I can tell you this: People bad-mouthed Sidney, said she was a troublemaker. But I thought she was the best boss I've ever had. She gave me every opportunity. She encouraged me with all my ideas. Iâ”
“This isn't all about you, Ted,” Wendy growled.
Artfully not looking at Pet, Hugh said, “I'd prefer we discussed this at another time. We've all had a long day, and I'm sure ⦠ah ⦠that Pet here has some more questions before she has to go to press with her story. We don't want to keep you, Pet.”
Avoiding looking at Pet, each person averted his or her eyes in a slightly different direction. I began to get the idea that, even as cute as she was, Pet Mercer was considered a bit of a piranha where science news gathering was concerned. She was slightly built and perky, and her hair bounced as she wrote, and it was clear that she used her diminutive appearance to put her interview subjects off their guard, but that this group had been treated to that trick once too often. She said, “Yes, I do need to get to press, Hugh, but, if you'll forgive me, Dr. Smeeth is part of the
story. Ted, you said people called her a troublemaker. Could this trouble you're talking about have anything to do with the contention that existed between her and the governor's office? I have sources who say there was quite a dustup between them two days ago over the Towne Centre project. Can you give me more on that?”
Ted cleared his throat in preparation to give her a dramatic answer, but before he could speak, Hugh Buttons said, “Dr. Smeeth served at the pleasure of the governor, Pet. She was a fine scientist, and stringent in her interpretation of her mandate. Naturally, there would be places where she would rub against any person whose job it is to make political decisions. It is the nature of the game. It is ⦠I want to say almost unavoidable, but, damn it, Pet, I don't want to go on record saying anything like that, because it's so obviously the case that it comes off sounding contentious.”
Ted had found his voice. “Yeah, but in this case, it was more than a little disagreement. Hell, I heard herâ”
Logan said, “That's enough, Ted. It's not our place to get mixed up in politics. Remember, our job is to report findings, not create policy.”
Pet watched each man carefully. As she did so, her hand slipped into a pocket, produced a raisin, and popped it into her mouth. She chewed it quickly, like a chipmunk.
Ted closed his eyes indignantly. “Logan, there is a time and placeâ”
Logan barked, “But not here, and not now, and not mixed up with the earthquake. This is an important chance for us to get the word out about seismic risk, and we're not going to confuse it with some crap about political infighting that'll make us look like a bunch of idiots. We are
scientists.”
His thick eyebrows had lowered again.
Ted shut up. If I had been on the receiving end of that look, I think I'd have stayed quiet for a week.
Pet threw down her pen. “Okay,” she said, “you guys are dodging me again. Come on, why shouldn't scientists create public policy? I mean, who better than the people who really understand what's going on? Look what happened with the extension of the Salt Palace. Some say that the county just shopped around until they got the geological opinion that fit their game plan. Now we have another project even closer to the known trace of the fault. No, it's worse than that. Today's data say it's right
on
the fault. So why aren't you guys screaming at the tops of your lungs?”
There was silence at the table for perhaps fifteen seconds, during which time nobody ate and several people drank.
Ted stared into his pizza morosely.
Pet caught Ted's eye and mouthed the words
I'll call you.
Ted's lips curled eagerly.
Pet blinked at Ted, evincing obliviousness to his reaction.
Hugh said, “The problem is, Pet, that there is a difference between theory and fact. That the crust of the Earth cracks and slips along gigantic shear planes is a fact. We can observe directly that it does so, or, where exposures are good, where it
has
done so. Unfortunately, the exact location and intensity of tomorrow's slippage is not known. Tomorrow's slippage is a matter of theory. A theory is considered good if it predicts events, and is discarded if events occur that refute it. Prediction is another matter, as we have been explaining. Prediction is the application of common sense to observed factsâif it has always snowed in December in the past, we presume it will snow in December againâbut in the case of geologic hazards, its utility is quite limited. The future of the Earth's crust is absoluteâstresses will build up and faulting will occurâbut our specific knowledge of that future is no better than an educated guess. We can gather historical and carbon dates from past faulting events and calculate statistical averages that tell us about how often faulting occurs at a given location, but an average interval is a mathematical result, not a schedule. Using
satellites, we can now measure the motions of the Earth's crustal plates, but observing a build-up of stress does not set a date for the moment it will be released.” Hugh took a bite of pizza, shook his head, and chewed. “Besides, Pet, science is most accurate when it is unemotional and rational, and politics is anything but that. Politics must strive for the best for the most. If as a scientist I must decide who will benefit from my observations and whom to exclude from benefit, my thinking is immediately clouded.”