But many of the two thousand students who lived in those buildings were dead or seriously injured. Some had horrible wounds, and no one to treat them.
Students and a few campus police officers were climbing through the rubble looking for survivors. Screams seemed to come from a dozen different directions at once.
Jacobs saw a pair of bare legs sticking out from under a section of drywall. He thought he saw one of the legs move and started to pull away a covering of debris.
Stopping immediately, he opened his mouth to cry for help, but no sound came out. He fell to his knees and vomited.
Jacobs took another look at the gaping face. The girl’s hair was brown and matted.
He heard someone come up behind him. A young man.
Still on his knees, Jacob waved the youth away and tried to warn him not to come any closer. It was too late. The student already had taken a good look.
“Oh, God!” he cried, and put his hand over his mouth. He dropped next to Jacobs and retched.
Jacobs saw a man he recognized, a middle-aged doctor who lived in the neighborhood. Wearing a gold jogging suit and carrying a small black bag, he was moving around the piles of brick and glass, trying to help the injured.
Jacobs called to the man, but his voice was thick with bile. He was fighting to control his stomach.
He finally got the words out.
The doctor came over, took one look at the body, and angrily said, “Don’t waste my time with the dead!”
On the way back to the earthquake center, Jacobs had to stop several times. He felt weak, drained, and couldn’t remember when he’d last slept.
When he got to his office, he found Guy Thompson. He was still having trouble with his stomach.
“Any improvements with our communications?” he asked.
Thompson frowned. “Nada, but all is not hopeless.”
Overshadowing their many other problems was the need for information on what was happening in the ground. The quake had knocked out telephone lines, which meant they couldn’t access data from their PADS network. All but a few of the seismic instruments were linked to the office by telephone lines. So were the handful of GPS monitors they’d only recently installed at sites in western Tennessee and Kentucky.
Two of the six GPS units and four of the seismic instruments operating in the New Madrid Seismic Zone transmitted data by radio wave, but the radio towers had been knocked down or otherwise disabled. The units were still recording data but there was no way to send it back to Memphis.
“We’re going to have to get out in the field and collect it ourselves,” Jacobs said. “And that’s a bitch with all the roads torn to hell and the bridges out.”
It angered him that they’d never considered the importance of arranging for a helicopter to retrieve data. They also needed to do flyovers of the earthquake zone to see what the ground looked like. Pretty basic, but hopeless. No helicopters or planes were available.
They’d repeatedly tried the military and national guard, but every available aircraft continued to be used for emergency medical flights.
Jacobs bitterly remembered the many disaster planning sessions he’d attended. The assumption had always been that a quake, even a big one, wouldn’t knock out all the land lines. Everyone figured that patchy telephone connections would somehow survive and that they’d be able to receive at least some real-time seismic data.
Their assumptions had proven all wrong, every damn one of them. When they needed precise seismic information the most, it wasn’t available.
Thompson reported they’d had better luck keeping in touch with the USGS earthquake evaluation center in Boulder. Thanks to a system called “packet radio,” they’d been able to use a special radio modem technically called a Terminal Node Controller, or TNC. The device connected to a two-way fifty-watt shortwave radio receiver and could hook up to a computer terminal.
They could send and receive computer data through “packets” of radio waves. Jacobs remembered how some staffers had thought the system was a waste of time and money. But it was paying for itself in gold. The major shortcoming was that it was agonizingly slow. Using packet radio, a computer could send at only 4800 baud per minute. Even a discount department store computer could transmit at 9600 baud.
Still, it was something. They had two TNC units up and running. They also had a “fly away” satellite hookup. Jacobs had set up the suitcase-sized device on a courtyard bench just outside the annex. The opened lid of the forty-pound unit served as the antenna. By adjusting the compass and punching in the right code coordinates, they locked in on a satellite so they could transmit. A laptop computer was patched in with a keyboard and eight-inch video screen. Once they uplinked with a satellite, the unit functioned as a telephone. They could also send and receive computer data.
The only problem: it wasn’t working.
Intense solar flares had knocked it out along with the Global Positioning System.
Jacobs angrily threw across the room a chunk of plaster that had fallen on his desk.
“We’re operating blind here!”
He thought, again, about Atkins. It had been hours since they last talked. Jacobs wondered if his friend had made it to the epicenter and gotten his seismograph set up. There’d been reports that the bridges over the Mississippi from north of Memphis five hundred miles to Hannibal, Missouri, were either knocked down or heavily damaged. Every one of them.
Jacobs hoped Atkins had been able to cross the river. They needed his data. Among other things, it would help them gauge the depth and size of the fault that had triggered the monster quake.
Guy Thompson cried out: “Hey, I just got an E-mail through to Boulder.” His laptop was hooked to one of the TNC units. Thompson was wearing a cowboy hat with an eagle feather tucked in the band. He’d also put on another Western shirt, bright red with pearl buttons. “They’re trying to send a team here, but the Memphis airport’s out of service.” He looked at Jacobs. “They say the control tower’s been knocked over. Demolished.”
“Any more on the exact location of the epicenter?” Jacobs asked. With their seismic network in shambles, they had to rely on USGS in Boulder for precise information.
“No change. It remains approximately ninety miles north, northwest of Memphis. Longitude ninety degrees west. Latitude thirty-six degrees north. Right at Blytheville. It’s been felt as far north as Montreal.”
The location corresponded with data from their own seismographs, which were running on an emergency power generator. They had a bank of four rolling drum instruments. The first big shock wave had knocked all of them off scale. Since then they’d recorded three major aftershocks in the magnitude 7 range and dozens of minor temblors.
Jacobs knew where and when the quake had occurred, but he still didn’t have the complete picture. He wanted to know the depth of the epicenter. That alone would tell them a great deal about seismic wave propagation, the shape of the fault, its size.
The emergency traffic they were picking up off the shortwave channels was catastrophic.
Memphis General Hospital was out of service. Several major buildings in the medical complex had collapsed. Only one of the city’s hospitals could still admit patients, and it was overwhelmed with the seriously injured. National Guard units were trying to set up a first-aid station at Forrest Park. There were desperate calls for plasma and blood donors.
“Here’s some good news,” Guy Thompson blurted out. “I just got through to Boulder again.”
“I could sure use some,” Jacobs muttered.
“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration just sent out a bulletin,” Thompson said. “The GPS system is coming back on-line, and the tracking stations are back in business.”
Every seismologist in the annex clapped and whistled. Jacobs closed his eyes. Yes, good news. But tempered by the realization that with telephone lines down, they still needed to get out in the field to collect the data.
The constellation of twenty-four satellites had been out of service for the last five days, the result of severe solar flares. Their precise measurements would show to the millimeter how much the earth’s surface had been deformed by the earthquake, how much it had risen or fallen. That would help them set up a strain-field pattern, a way of calculating whether seismic energy was still building.
Unlike the sophisticated array of GPS stations scattered along the San Andreas Fault, only a handful had been
