Siren blasting, they tore into Gilbertsville. Lauren operated the portable bullhorn. Hessel headed down a steep road into the heart of town, which had been shaken to pieces.
Lauren tried to keep her nerve up by concentrating on her job. She didn’t want to think about her own home and the boat dock.
“The dam’s out!” she said, her amplified words booming into the darkness. “Everybody get out! There’s a flood!”
The horror of what she was seeing almost choked off her words. Many of the buildings had collapsed. Some still stood with entire walls sheared off. Roofs had caved in. Walls had buckled. The shaking had set off car alarms.
A few people staggered through the wreckage. Thrown from their beds, they looked dazed, in shock.
The sheriff swerved around downed power lines that hissed and threw white sparks, splintered trees, smashed houses. He headed back up the hill that led out of town, racing toward the highway. They’d done all they could.
Lauren looked back up the valley toward the lake. She saw the glint of something silver-white in the darkness. It was massive and moving fast.
“Here it comes!” she said, watching the flood wall roll into view.
The leading edge, a crest thirty feet high, was pushing smashed barges, pleasure boats, and a pile of twisted logs.
“I see it,” the sheriff said, glancing in his rearview mirror.
He realized this was a race they weren’t going to win.
MAYFIELD, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 13
3:05 A.M.
THE JARRING STRENGTH OF THE AFTERSHOCK stunned Atkins and Elizabeth. Incredibly powerful, it knocked them down in the road.
“That was at least a mag 7,” Atkins said, pulling himself up off the ground. His clothing, caked with mud, had frozen solid in the cold air. The temperature had dipped below freezing.
“Aftershocks in that range are unbelievable,” Elizabeth said.
“It’s not like California, is it?” Atkins asked.
“It’s not like anything since maybe Alaska,” she said. The monster Good Friday earthquake that had struck Anchorage in March 1964 registered a magnitude 8.6. The epicenter was under Prince William Sound, a hundred kilometers away. Parts of the shoreline had risen as much as ten meters. But even there the aftershocks didn’t compare with these.
The earthquake had knocked over Mayfield’s two main power transformers and toppled a string of electrical towers. Even in the dust and murky darkness, Atkins and Elizabeth could make out the dimensions of the disaster. On the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale it would have scored the maximum value, a XII.
Developed in 1902 by the Italian seismologist G. Mercalli, the scale assigned intensity values based on observations of physical damage on a scale that ranged from I to XII.
Atkins knew the definition for Level XII by heart:
Damage total.
Waves seen on ground surface.
Lines of sight and level distorted.
Objects thrown into the air.
The grim description fit Mayfield perfectly. As in Gilbertsville, twenty miles east, people were already out in the streets, wandering with flashlights amid the rubble, broken glass, and smashed foundations that had once been their homes. Many of the frame and brick houses looked like they’d been blown up. The damage was extensive, the debris pulverized.
They’ll have plenty of dead here, Atkins thought as Elizabeth and he made their way through the ruins of what had once been an attractive town of 10,000 residents. They were heading for the high school where he’d left the Explorer. Located in the center of town, it was only a few blocks from the railroad tracks, but it would take nearly an hour for them to cover the distance.
Atkins shuddered when he considered the potential carnage in Memphis. Barely 120 miles due south, the southern city was known for its fine old brick architecture. So was St. Louis, 150 miles to the north. All those unreinforced brick buildings were certain death traps.
The United States wasn’t ready for anything like that, but from what he’d seen in Mayfield, the time of innocence was over. This quake was a killer.
Two-story homes had been knocked off their foundations. Trees were down everywhere, snapped off at the base of their trunks. Water gushed from ruptured fire hydrants, filling the gutters and sewers to overflowing. Atkins knew that wouldn’t last long, only until the water left in the shattered mains ran out. After that, the town would be without fresh water for drinking—or fighting fires. And fire was almost a certainty after a big earthquake, a fact often overlooked even by survivors.
The worst damage was centered around the courthouse and senior high school. The school buildings were destroyed. At first glance, the courthouse looked as if it had miraculously escaped damage. The huge gold-painted rotunda appeared to be in one piece.
Then Elizabeth saw what had happened.
“It collapsed in on itself,” she said.
The post-Civil War five-story building was now only three stories tall. The other two, crushed together, weren’t even visible. Elizabeth had seen the same thing in Northridge, California, where an entire four-story apartment complex, more than five hundred units, had folded up. That one area was where most of the deaths had occurred.
The ground lurched again, a strong vertical movement. Atkins looked up at the darkened courthouse just in time to see it pancake to the ground in a cloud of dust and flying bricks. For a few moments, the onion-shaped rotunda balanced precariously on the rubble, then tilled to the side and shattered.
“We’ve got to get some instruments set up,” Atkins said. “These aftershocks are really something.”
Getting into the field was his immediate, overriding priority. Any seismic data they gathered about the location and strength of the aftershocks would be crucial in plotting what had happened underground. And more important, in figuring out what could still happen. Atkins had one seismograph left in the Ford Explorer he and Walt Jacobs had used. He wanted to get it hooked up and running.
Nearly one hour after the quake had struck, they found the Explorer parked in the lot behind the smashed high school. A large tree, it looked like an oak, had toppled next to it, covering the hood with its branches, but not causing any serious damage. Elizabeth’s rental car wasn’t as fortunate. A forty-foot television aerial had collapsed, slicing it in two.
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 13
3:40 A.M.
WITHIN FORTY MINUTES OF THE QUAKE, THE National Guard helicopter dropped Walt Jacobs and the other seismologists at the University of Memphis. The big UH-60 Black Hawk barely touched down before it peeled off after getting an urgent medical evacuation request from a nearby hospital that had sustained severe damage.
Staggered by the widespread destruction he’d seen—it was all around him—Jacobs wasn’t himself when he finally made radio contact with Atkins and Elizabeth. He’d been criticized for equipping each team that had gone to southern Kentucky with a shortwave radio.
