8
Earthquakes aren’t a man’s murder of his pregnant wife. They’re not court-ordered desegregation. They’re not Kennedys. For several weeks after the last network news crew packed up and left Boston, you could feel the city’s disappointment with the earth. Obviously, no one had been eager to be personally crushed by falling timbers or to see their possessions go up in flames, but for a few days in the spring Nature had toyed with the city’s expectations, and people had rapidly developed covert appetites for televised images of bodies under sheets of polyethylene, for the carnival-ride sensation of being tossed around the living room, for a Californian experience, for major numbers. A hundred dead would really have been something. A thousand dead: historic. But the earth had reneged on its promises, mutely refusing to reduce buildings to exciting, photogenic messes; and the death count never made it off the ground. For all the impact the numbers had on local viscera, the thirty-seven earthquake-related injuries could have been caused by boring car accidents, the $100 million of property loss by neglected maintenance, and Rita Kernaghan’s death by a boring heart attack. Journalistic aftershocks dwindled to an article or two per week. Local reporters still scoured Essex County in search of lives ruined by the disaster, but, to their dismay, they couldn’t find a single one. Homeowners were repairing walls and ceilings. Questionable structures were being inspected and reopened. It was all so morally neutral, so sensible.
Fortunately for everyone, the Red Sox began June by sweeping a series with the Yankees at Fenway and carrying a streak of seven wins on a trip to the American League West. No sane person believed the Sox would actually end up winning their division, but at the moment they could hardly be said to be losing ground, and what was one supposed to do? Boo in advance? Later in the summer there would be plenty of opportunities to revive the old hatred and envy—Bostonians’ hearts would pound and their throats would tighten at the very thought of baseball’s winners, their soporifically effective pitching staffs, the arrogant baby-cheeked sluggers whom God unbelievably permitted to hit homer after homer, and the horrible fair-weather fans, cheap euphoria smeared across their faces like the juice of sex and peaches, who thought that this was what baseball was about, that it was about winning and winning handily—but as long as the streak lasted, the city was full of heathen haves blissfully oblivious to the have-nots of the sports world, and in the absence of further tremors, the fear of death and personal injury had retreated to its rightful place, far to the rear of people’s minds.
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.
On the other side of the fence, a coalition of local pro-choice groups was promising to flood Boston Common with a hundred thousand protesters during a rally on July 14. One of the organizers had written to Renée for permission to include her in a list of public figures supporting the rally. Renée had called the organizer and asked her, “Why do you want me on your list?”
“You’re the geologist. You were on TV.”
“A lot of people were on TV.”
“Are you saying you don’t want to be on the list?”
“No, no, go ahead. Put me on it.”
“All right.” The organizer had sounded annoyed. “We’ll put you on it.”
The regional administrative offices of the Environmental Protection Agency were on the eighth floor of a prewar granite block across from the Federal Courthouse, in the old part of downtown where if you studied the tops of the buildings and then looked at the street again you expected to see all the men wearing fedoras and dark narrow ties and Buddy Holly-style glasses.
Outside the courthouse, six female protesters in knitted mittens had wound Saran Wrap around their photographs of fetuses. Sheets of cold water were sliding over themselves on the slopes leading down into the combat zone, rain streaking the city’s gray-green windows and soaking the handcards advertising sex by telephone that were lodged under every wiper blade that wasn’t moving. It was a trick Renée had seen New England summers play many times before: a high of 53° today and more of the same expected on the weekend.
The hard plastic chairs in the vestibule of the EPA offices discouraged sitting. Some were grouped in a half circle that suggested clubbiness even though they were empty; the rest stood isolated at odd angles to the walls. When the deputy regional administrator, Susan Carver, came out to meet her, Renée left rain marks on the floor by the notice of equal employment opportunity she’d been reading.
Carver was a tall and heavy person with fleshy white cheeks and thick eyebrows. Her glasses had round cranberry-colored rims and lenses soaped by the federal lighting. She was like a brainy white rabbit stuffed into a size 14 suit. She was leading Renée back to her office when a balled-up piece of paper sailed out of an open door and glanced off her massive shoulder. She caught it on the fly, with surprising deftness, and stopped in the doorway. Four middle-aged male administrators wearing colors such as rust brown and silver-blue looked up from their desks with a guilt that was more like a bated delight. Wordlessly, Carver tossed the ball of paper through an orange hoop attached to the wall and returned to Renée while the men cheered.
“You wanted to talk to me about Sweeting-Aldren.”
“Yes.”
“This is in regard to the earthquakes in Peabody.”
“Yes.”
Obviously pleased with herself for making the basket, Carver sat down behind her desk and joined her white paws on the desk top, stretching the pinstripes at her elbows and shoulders. On the windowsill behind her stood framed photographs of her family: a chunky teenaged girl with a small nose and a flat, eager face who looked like she was good at computers, a doughy boy of eight or ten, and a skinny, grinning husband. There was a water pistol, a .38 revolver, by her Rolodex. With an amused maternal wariness, as if the company were another of her children, she said, “What has Sweeting-Aldren done, in your opinion?”
Renée reached for the shoulder bag that held her documents but slowly drew her hand back without having touched it. “There’s some evidence,” she said, “that they’ve been pumping liquids down a very deep well for a number of years, if not decades, and that they may have induced the earthquakes we’ve seen in Peabody.”
Carver’s eyebrows rose and fell almost imperceptibly. “Go on.”
Renée opened her bag and gave a poised and cautious presentation. She didn’t look up from her documents until she’d finished. Carver was wearing a faint, abstracted smile, as if continuing to savor the basket she’d made.
“Let me see if I’ve understood your chronology,” she said. “First Sweeting-Aldren begins to drill a deep well somewhere, in the late sixties. Then in 1987 there’s a swarm of small earthquakes near Peabody that lasts three months—”
“And tails off with unusual abruptness.”
“And tails off rapidly. Then there’s a spill in Peabody, not particularly large—at most a couple of years’ worth of undumpable effluents. And finally, not long after the spill is discovered, the Peabody earthquakes start up again, apparently in connection with the Ipswich earthquakes but actually not, according to you.”
“Not just me. Nobody in seismology has a persuasive model for linking Ipswich and Peabody.”
Carver nodded. She’d picked up her water pistol and was nibbling on the sight blade. “I understand. Although the impression I get is that there’s a lot that seismologists don’t know about what makes earthquakes happen when and where they do, especially earthquakes on the east coast.”
“A model of induced seismicity explains the Peabody swarm perfectly.”
“Yes, I understand. Although again it all depends on your assumption that a hole was actually drilled and drilled near Peabody. Since there may be other ‘models’ that are equally persuasive.”
“Such as?”
Carver shrugged. “Maybe a natural source of earthquakes in Peabody, and then a ‘model’ of cyclical demand that explains April’s spill there. You see, I’m not sure how well you understand the chemical industry. Short-term stockpiling of both raw materials and unprocessed wastes is very commonplace. Sweeting-Aldren stores incinerable wastes until demand improves for the products they make in their high-temperature reactors. And in the meantime, last month, an earthquake ruptured one of their storage tanks.”
Renée nodded. She’d
expected—in fact, hoped—that Carver would play devil’s advocate. “Can I ask if you guys, the EPA, have actually been inside the Peabody plant to make sure they’re treating all these wastes the way they say they are?”
“Certainly you may ask. The answer is no. We have not been lowering probes into their tanks. We have not been watchdogging their internal processes. We have neither the staff nor the legal right to go checking every pipe and every valve in every factory in America.”
“Although of course this is kind of a suspicious case.”
“Ah, yes. A suspicious case.” Carver pushed on the arms of her chair and with considerable exertion repositioned herself. “Let me explain something to you, Renée. As a survivor of the eighties who’s still working for EPA. The reason we’re doing a minimally acceptable job of protecting this country’s environment is that we’re realistic, and we have priorities. This is the real world we’re dealing with, and in the real world you can’t acid-test every conceivable hypothesis. You have to focus on what’s coming out of the drainpipes and the smokestacks, and that means taking some things on faith occasionally. If a company like Sweeting-Aldren isn’t polluting the air or water—”
“Until the spill last month.”