“Oh.”
“Where's the greatest seismic risk in the U.S.?”
“California, right? Or Alaska?”
I started listing the numbers I'd read the day before in my geology text. “No. Probably Boston. One good shock through that area, with all that unreinforced brick, and wham. Or Saint Louis. Neither city has earthquake protection in its building code, and yet the most destructive earthquakes on historic record have occurred not far from them. Boston: Saint Lawrence River, 1663, Mercalli magnitude tenâthat's like a Richter seven. Devastating if it happened today. Boston,
wham.
Half of New York, too, I'd imagine. Or the 1886 quake that knocked down Charleston, South Carolina. Saint Louis: shaken by New Madrid quakes, 1811 and 1812, both magnitude eight or worse. The ground accelerated so fast that it snapped the tops off the trees. And yet the average citizen does not think of Saint Louis as a big seismic zone. In California, everyone braces for the earthquakes, and every revision of the building code decreases risk. In Saint Louis, they have diddly.”
Pet was silent for a moment, thinking. “Thank you. You clarified my thinking on that point. But still, the main point is to get people thinking about these things.”
“No, the tough part is getting them not just thinking but also educated, so that they
understand.
People don't seem to understand that the Earth's crust is continuously under tremendous stress, and that there are certain places where it's likely to snap. California, sure. Alaska. Salt Lake City. There are places where the stress is minimal, and we worry about other things instead. And there are
other
places where we don't even
know
it's likely to snap, because while we don't have
historic
records of movement, Mother Nature may have been winding up the spring for eons. And Congress just cuts the budget, thinking it's not important
to have scientists out there studying these things, that God won't let it happen here, or that we'll all be dead from pollution or viruses when it does happen, or who knows what!” Noticing how strident I was beginning to sound, I leaned back in my seat and took a long pull on my beer. “The Earth's crust is being moved by convection cells in the mantle,” I said more calmly. “We're riding around on a big heat engine. The flywheel goes clear to the center of the Earth. There's no amount of wishful thinking on our part that's going to make it stop.”
“You're talking about plate tectonic theory,” Pet said briskly. “The Earth's crust is broken into large and small plates that are driven this way and that by those convection cells in the mantle, the molten layer below the crust transferring heat from the core outward. See? I know this stuff. The plates stretch apart, as here at the Wasatch fault, or they collide and push upward, as the Himalayas.”
I added, “Or they grind past each other, as the San Andreas fault in California. Or one slides under the other, as the Juan de Fuca Plate diving under the North American at Seattle. But the human mind cannot comprehend things happening at such immense scales except in the abstract. We think in a scale as long as our arms, or the lengths of our feet. We're just scrambling around trying to make a go of it over the few decades we're alive, always much closer to the edge than we like to contemplate.”
“But geologists are good at that abstraction. You eat ambiguity for breakfast.”
“Yes,” I said. “We deal with ambiguity and uncertainty, and for the most part, we do it qualitatively, not quantitatively. That makes it even more difficult to get our points across. If geology were a more quantitative science, it would be easier, because while most people don't really understand numbers, they've at least been taught to respect them. When we give a statistician all the carbon fourteen data we can regarding how many episodes
of fault rupture we have and how long ago they occurred, he crunches them through a preset formula and comes up with an average number of how often a quake that size occurs. The public thinks that means they know how likely they are to get hit by a magnitude seven earthquake. They believe it out of hand. When engineers deal with uncertainty, they also put a number on it, and even though that number is conjured out of thin air and dressed up with a fancy titleâan âuncertainty coefficient,' or something like thatâpeople get real impressed. But most of the work of geologists is qualitative, because we're dealing with things that are so large or so long-term that assigning numbers is sometimes meaningless. So we say things like, âWe're building houses in a fault zone. Don't you think we ought to build them stronger, or perhaps build somewhere else?' And everyone accuses us of being simpleminded. Give them a numberâsay âOn average, we'll only get a magnitude seven quake here every twelve hundred years, and the last one was maybe a thousand years ago'âand they figure they've got two hundred years to go, and feel all comforted, like they've got the picture straight.”
“So what would you do?” Pet asked.
“Well, for one thing, I won't build a house in a fault zone.”
“But you rent an apartment in one.” Pet smiled sardonically. The expression looked odd on her perky little face.
“Yeah,” I said. “Seems like I'm a risk-taker after all.” I stared into my beer, trying to take comfort the soft reflection of light off the surface of the brew. “In order to see what we see, we also have to know that we don't quite see it perfectly. We perceive the imperfection of our own understanding. And that's necessary, because it keeps us from going off half-cocked, like I said. But it also forces us into an odd kind of humility. It's a funny package, huh?”
“You're like a bunch of lizards, each hiding under his own little rock.”
I laughed at the image. “We're born to see things in four and
five and six dimensions at once, and it makes us a little apprehensive. Ambiguity can be anxiety-producing. We see our own capacity for error, see the incompleteness of the incoming data. So we appear hesitant, reclusive, while all the time we're the only ones who can hope to resolve the questions we're grappling with. When will the next earthquake strike, and where? What, therefore, should be the policy regarding construction of homes in Salt Lake City? Or Boston? How much oil is left to fuel the cars and trucks on which we depend, and where is it? What killed the dinosaurs, why are the coral reefs in the Caribbean dying now, and will similar events kill us?”
“All right, but yesterday morning, the Warm Springs branch of the fault slipped, and the earth shook. How ambiguous is that?”
“It isn't,” I said. “And it is. Where's the fault?”
“Well, it's ⦔ Pet paused. “Oh. Yeah. You're having to interpret where it is most of the time, not just when it's going to slip.”
“Uh-huh, and that spells dollars and cents, because it means that we're uncertain how to prepare for life in a fault zone. How long before it slips again? Are you going to make everybody build to the expense of Code Four even if the big quakes might not come around except once every twelve hundred years? That's over fifteen times our lifetime. Do the math. It's a sticky mess. And finances are finite. If you have only
X
dollars to spend on seismic renovation, do you spend it all on one or two structures, or do you spend a little bit on all of them? And do you close schools because of the risk of what might happen to the buildings?”
“You sound like a politician,” Pet said.
“I just try to understand the problems they face,” I answered. “That way, I don't get riled enough to kill one of them.”
Pet smiled. “
Now
we are back on a riddle we
can
solve. Dr. Smeeth.”
“âScreaming Sidney,' I've heard her called.”
“Not your typical geologist.”
“No,” I agreed. “She was much more vocal than most of us. But a damned good geologist, from all I've heard about her. And, as director of the UGS, she had to take a lot of flak from above.”
Pet nodded. “Okay, so Sidney Smeeth answered to the governorâthrough Maria Teller, the director of Natural Reservesâand neither of them have training in the sciences. What do you suppose that does to the mix?”
“I don't know. I guess you'd have to look at what she was answering to them forâher exact mandate, that kind of thing.”
“Fair enough. The state geologist is there to manage the exploitation of the state's mineral wealth, and guide examination of things like geologic hazards.”
“Landslides,” I said. “Earthquakes. Swelling and liquefying soils.”
“Precisely,” Pet said. “And we have all of those right here in Salt Lake County, as well as most of the state's human population. In support of public housing but perhaps contrary to public safety, we also have a mandate to develop the âbuilt environment' of the state.”
“A mandate?”
“Yes. Building and planning departments work with people who are building. If no one was building anything, the Building Department would not exist, because they make their income by charging fees for writing permits, not by keeping land undeveloped. When you think about it, it's a conflict of interest to put building and planning in one department.”
“Do you have a specific development in mind?” I asked.
“Well, the new stadium, like I said, and the mall it's attached to. The Towne Centre project.”
“Hmm. Yesterday's earthquake put the stadium to the test. It flunked. And the seismic record Hugh Button's getting may reveal
the exact location of that branch of the fault, turning a dashed line into a solid one.”
Pet nodded. “Makes you wonder why that dashed line was deleted in the first place, doesn't it?”
I pulled back, insulted. “You think a USGS geologist would leave a line off a map for political reasons and the UGS would follow suit?”
“Lots of hands touch those maps.”
“Now you are sounding paranoid.”
“And you are sounding naïve.”
I
said, “That deletion of a dashed line is a perfect example of a geologic controversy. One geologist thinks the fault stops somewhere north of town; another looks at the same evidence and says it marches right on through.” I took a sip of beer so I could momentarily hide behind the bottle. “Who put that interpretation into the UGS seismic map anyway?”
“I hear that the infamous Frank Malone had a hand in it.”
Frank Malone, the engineering geologist whose name appeared in one of the files Tom had me read. Now is when I definitely begin shutting up!
I told myself, but I said, “The same Frank Malone who digs trenches but won't let anyone see what's in them? What's he got to say for himself?”
Pet replied, “Interestingly enough, I can't reach him for comment. He is not answering his telephone calls.”
“Well, there are talented geologists and there are not-so-talented geologists,” I said, evading her gaze by looking out the window.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “The geologist clams up again.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be,” Pet replied, the annoyance in her tone putting the lie to my apology. “If I can't get what I need from a geologist, I think I know who to ask.”
Embarrassed, I took advantage of the call of nature to take a break from our conversation and headed for the rest room. When
I came back, Pet was just finishing up a call on her cell phone. Her tone was much more terse and aggressive than it had been. “I want to ask you about the cracked welds in the new stadium,” she was saying into the phone. “Fine, off the record. What I tell my editor depends on what you tell me. Uh-huh. Right.
And
I want to talk to you about Sidney Smeeth. Yeah, I have a lit-tle suspicion that you have something to tell me about all that. Mm-hmm. What? Well, okay, eleven will do nicely.” She listened a moment longer, then said acidly, “I understand perfectly.”
“You get hold of Frank Malone?” I asked when she put the phone down.
“Perhaps. Let's just say someone who'd know more about that fault and that stadium than you.”
That hurt. “You're getting kind of rough there, Pet.”
Pet covered her reaction with a final long sip of her beer. At length, she put down the bottle and gave me a deeply probing look, all fluff and playful artifice gone. “I suppose I should say I'm sorry. But this is too important.”
“I can respect that. Just be careful.”
Pet shook her head dismissively. “No, you're being careful, and that's fine for you, if you must. But let me tell you, being careful doesn't get you there. Being careful is staying home and doing what mommy tells you to. Being careful is watching it all happen and not doing a damned thing about it. Sometimes you just have to open up your mouth and report what's happening.”
That sounded to me like the bull was charging, only I wasn't sure if Pet would find a matador or an abattoir on the other side of the red cape. And with that thought, it occurred to me that Tom's cautionary training was finally beginning to take hold. I said, “Well, if you don't like being careful, there's also being reasonable.”