The Temblor of Diablo

The Temblor of
Diablo
James W. Cotton




Copyright © 2007 by James W. Cotton
All Rights reserved






























In memory of my mother
Roberta A. Cotton
January 22, 1943 to September 11, 2002
Proud resident of California and alumnus of The University of California at Berkeley.
































The Temblor of  Diablo
James W. Cotton

         I’ve never been a fan of commercial airliners, or at least the landing part of the flight. I’ve been working for Natural History Monthly for the last five and a half years, and quickly arrived to the rather coveted position of ‘Contributing Editor’ which earned me several free flights to some exotic locations, but I still never got used to air travel. It’s weird. I’ve flown in small planes (I even acquired my own private pilot license) and never had an issue. I was in the military for eight years and flown on C-130’s, and even once in the jump seat on an F-16 and never had an issue. Today, like many other times, in spite of three Vodka Collins mixers, I was still biting my lip as I was awaiting that dreaded grinding of gears and that telltale ‘thud’ as the landing gear locks into place, and looking even less forward to that squeaking and jerking sensation as the landing gear make contact to the runway.

         This trip had me even more apprehensive. I’ve been sent to some pretty exotic locations over the years, and  had learned fast about the blurry line between the definitions of the words ‘exotic’ and downright ‘primitive’ but this trip was neither. I wasn’t landing in somewhere as austere as Katmandu, or even as battle torn and hazardous as the facility formerly known as ‘Saddam Hussein International Airport,’ outside Baghdad (I went there once before many years before with a colleague who was doing a story on the Mesopotamian empire). This time, as I looked out the window, I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, Angel Island, and Jack London Square. This time, I was flying into the very modern, very safe port of call known as Oakland International in Oakland California.

         An hour and a half after the plane was on the ground, I had managed to gather my luggage and find the Avis desk, where I had keys to a late model Kia Optima awaiting me. I had some crappy, overpriced food at one of the airport cafeterias, and waited for the fog to lift, both outside and in my head (after all, I had three Vodka Collins on that three and a half hour flight from Chicago O’Hare.) It was early in the morning still, and I had a somewhat long, hazardous drive ahead of me.

         Okay, maybe it shouldn’t be as long of a drive as it is….after all, how far is it from Oakland to Walnut Creek? Since I would be going in opposite direction of the rush hour traffic, it shouldn’t be long, right? Just up Hegenbrugger Road to Interstate 880, then to Route 24, through the Caldecott Tunnel, and I’d be right in Lafayette….that is if I would ever get over my now twenty five year old silly superstition of the Caldecott Tunnel. When I had just received my driver’s license, there was a horrible accident involving a fuel tanker in the tunnel through the Oakland Hills, and about a dozen people died a horrifying death. Ever since then, I always took Fish Ranch Road through Tilden Park, over the top of the mountain between Orinda and Berkeley and avoided the deadly tunnel. I’ve known about this route for some time.

         Perhaps now, it can be understood….not only was I on an assignment for my magazine, but also, I was on my way home. Contra Costa County, California, is my home town. I was born in Concord, I went to High School in Lafayette, and for some time, before I made my break from the area in hopes originally of never returning, I lived in Walnut Creek. I left with a lot of business unfinished, words unsaid, and issues unresolved. I came here to write an article, but I also knew in my heart that it would only be right if I worked some time into my schedule to resolve some of the outstanding controversy among family and friends.

         The Oakland Hills are composed of the twisted, crumbling Ultramafic materials known as the Franciscan Formation, an amalgam of old ocean floor basalts, sea floor sediments, quartz dikes and twisted bands of Radiolarian Chert that were stuffed haphazardly under the western coast of what is now California during the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods. As I crested the hilltop, I could see the broad, bare face of Mount Diablo poking above the fog that still blanketed the valley that held the cities of Walnut Creek and Concord. Mount Diablo is one of the most unmistakable and easily recognized natural features of Northern California, as it can be seen from most of the northern half of the state, and is easily recognized by the three points along it’s broad summit. It is comprised of a large slab of Miocene sea sediments that was uplifted within the last few million years as the San Andreas Fault became active and began forcing the continental shelf material to crumple and force its way above sea level.

         If you ever looked at a relief map of this part of California, the first thing you would notice would be that all the ranges of hills and mountains, valleys and bays all run parallel to one another. The San Andreas Fault runs from the Southeast to the Northwest, right along the peninsula that carries the cities of San Francisco, Pacifica and Mountain View, and all these other features run parallel to it. Several other faults run along these as well, and at the time, the California Department of Mines and Geology (CDMG), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the universities in the area had been working cooperatively to install a new network of seismic monitors that would give scientists a better picture of the tectonic structure of the area. The new monitors, coupled with the modern computer technology, would be able to give us all a four dimensional look at subterranean structures unlike anything ever seen before. It was a technological marvel that I was honored to be the first ‘outsider’ to have a look at. I was given the assignment personally by my Editor in Chief, and was instructed to do an in depth article with virtually unlimited word space to do it in. My expertise in the field was predominately the non foliated Metamorphic and plutonic Igneous facies, commonly called in the trade ‘Hard Rock Geology,’ but having been raised and educated in this region, I was the best candidate for this assignment.

         I had reserved a room at the Best Western on Linda Drive, also known as Contra Costa Boulevard (one of a few street name changes that had occurred in my absence from the area)  and from there would be short drive to the Denny’s Restaurant near the Sun Valley Mall, my favorite hangout when I was a teenager. It was partly cloudy, low clouds and fog, about fifty five degrees, typical of a mid-March morning. I dropped my bags off in the room and went to the twenty four hour restaurant where I would arrange to first meet the county’s sheriff, who would take me down to Danville, where the monitoring station was at the end of Stone Valley Road, down another side road called Country Oaks. I didn’t recognize several of these streets, nor would I recognize just about anything in this area that held more than two million residents. This area must have quadrupled in population since those days nearly fifteen years since I called it home.

         As I was finishing my eggs and hash browns, a rather robust man in a green uniform bearing a bronze star shaped badge sat down next to me and placed his San Francisco Examiner next to me.
         “Go ahead, finish up,” he said friendly. “I’m in no big hurry.”
         “Ah, you must be Sheriff Bosley,” I inquired as I reached for my cell phone. “I was getting ready to call you.”
         “Aristotle Petrovich, right?” he asked as he showed me a page from a four month old copy of Natural History Monthly in which I had written an article on Lapis Lazuli mines in Pakistan and Kashmir, and the association of the precious mineral with Uranium and rare earth ores (and still recovering from the rather hazardous trip to that region….I  told you I had some interesting assignments over the years)
         “Folks just call me Arie,” I said. “Aristotle sounds a bit too eccentric.”
         “You’re in California, now!” he reminded me. “There’s no such thing as too eccentric here! Your boss called me about twenty minutes ago, suggested you’d be here.”
         “He knows me too well,” I said. The truth is, I’ve had some unusual loyalty to Denny’s. I cooked at this one when I was going to Stanford, and I waited on tables at the one on Airport Way in Fairbanks Alaska while I was working on my Doctoral Dissertation at UAF. Since then, I always went to a Denny’s when I came to a strange town, and I had even managed to find Denny’s in Germany, New Zealand and Canada!
         “The monitoring station is on some land owned by the county, and only I and the three scientists who run the show have keys to the gate, so I’ve got to take you up there.”
         “Sounds like fun,” I said haphazardly.
         “Sounds like you really love your job….”
         “Well, I admit, I wasn’t exactly an angel when I was an adolescent,” I admitted. “The last time I was in a vehicle that said ‘Contra Costa Sheriff, I was….”
         “Handcuffed and in the back seat,” said the sheriff. “I remember. 1981, you and two of your friends had stolen that giant chicken in front of the Baywood Farms plant and were putting it in your math teacher’s yard on Halloween night! I was a rookie deputy, and my partner and I received the call. You kept saying over and over ‘please don’t call my father! He thinks I’m studying for a German test!”
         “If you haven’t noticed, I’m not the delinquent I was then…”
         “Ah, you were young,” he said. “We all do dumb things at that age. When I was that age, I….”
         “You don’t have to tell,” I finished. “Let’s get going.”

The area around Danville and Alamo used to be pretty open and vacant, at least east of the 680 freeway, but now there were large tracts of million and two million dollar homes and country clubs. My parents were Arabian Horse enthusiasts and one of their friends had a large breeding and training facility out here. As we passed the old farm, I took note of the golf course and tennis courts that replaced it.
         “That was Murrel Lacey’s old place,” he said.
         “And the old Kroboth Farm behind it,” I said as I pointed to a ridge covered with large, elegant houses. “I used to know them, too. Rode lots of miles looking for lost Herefords in these hills!”
         “The only cows you’ll find in this area now are in the butcher’s section at Safeway!”
         At the end of the paved part of the road stood a rusty Powder River gate, with a chain and a couple padlocks. The sheriff got out of the Blazer and unlocked the gate. He drove through, then instructed me to close and lock it.
         “It’s another half mile up here,” he said. “It’s muddy and bumpy, that’s why I brought the four wheel drive.”
         I thought nothing of the ride up here in an S.U.V. since I noticed that in spite of hundreds of miles of beautiful paved streets, the majority of drivers on these roads felt compelled to drive wasteful Hummers and Cadillac Escalades instead of more practical smaller cars which would be more conducive to saving a little more of the three and a half dollar per gallon of gas that seemed to be typical of this ‘environmentally sensitive’ state.
         After ten minutes of ride along the kidney jarring dirt road that hugged the overgrown side of a steep ravine, we arrived at a small, unremarkable one story gray building with a few antennas and satellite dishes strewn about.
         “Here it is,” he said. “Here’s the state and federal government’s idea of how to spend twenty million dollars!”
         Well, I always believed it was what’s inside that counts. I went into the only door that accessed the eight hundred square foot building, and was greeted by two men in blue jeans and flannel shirts. One was working on some gadgets about the size of coffee cans, and the other was tapping away feverishly on a computer keyboard.
         “Ah, you’re in luck!” said the man at the computer. “You get to see this thing in action! We just had an event in Gilroy about a half hour ago!”
         “This thing works clear down there?”
         “Yeah, we’ve got sensors tied into this system from Salinas clear on up to Kelseyville!” he answered proudly. “By the end of next year, the network will cover the entire San Andreas system, from the Imperial Valley to the Oregon border, and the year after that, we’ll have the eastern Sierras, Mojave Desert, Cascades and the Garlock Fault systems wired as well. We’ll have six of these monitoring centers on line, all tied into the main one down in Victorville, and then uplinked to the main DMG headquarters in Menlo Park!”
         “I’ve played with seismographs for some time,” I said skeptically. “What makes this one different?”
         “Multiple triangulation points,” he said. “Along with a superimposition of images of known geology in given areas. Not only do we get a read on intensity, but we also get info on focus. We can triangulate an event vertically, as well as horizontally.”
         He began tapping again on the computer.
         “This is the Gilroy quake we just captured,” he said. “Known in the system as Event P218.”
         At first, the screen showed the typical display of a series of lines horizontally across the screen, only with one greatly disturbed along a vertical axis, much like the seismographs we’ve all seen in the magazines and the movies.
         “But check this out!” he said as it showed a map like image of the area south of Santa Clara and San Jose. The freeways and major highways were marked in red, streams and lakes in blue, topography in light orange and known faults in bright yellow. With some manipulation by a mouse, the image turned into a three dimensional cross section of the area near the intersections of US Route 101 and California State Highway 132, and a series of animated concentric red rings radiated out from a large yellow band that denoted a moderate sized fault with a somewhat angular strike. According to the gauge along the side of the screen, the event was centered at a point about nineteen miles below the surface.
         “Just a little one,” he said. “Three point eight, to be exact. Around here, most of us wouldn’t even feel it. But we knew within ten seconds everything about it. Best of all, we learned something real neat. WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THE EXISTENCE OF THIS FAULT!”
         “So this will not only give us better data on earthquakes, but it’ll help us find some previously unmapped seismic features?”
         “If there’s a fault laying anywhere in this state, we’ll know all about it in the next eight months to a year! It’s pretty cool!”
         I pulled out my notebook and started writing some of the information down.
         “You got a laptop?”
         “Of course,” I said.
         “Then here’s the earthquake,” he said as he proudly handed me a CD. “Look at it for yourself! The time, date, exact magnitude, strike, slip, energy release, magnitude, surface disruption, everything. In fact, this system can even give us some information on stress transfer to other faults in the system.”
         “You guys been working on this yourselves?”
         “Actually, we’ve done nothing but provide some of the data for the models and design the sensors,” he said. “This magic actually is courtesy of the techno-geeks down there in Santa Clara. That’s where the majority of the budget went.”
         I spent an hour and  a half there with Dr. Malcom Richardson, the one at the computer and a graduate and current faculty member from the University of California (I did chide with him about my status as an alumnus of Stanford) and his plowback and partner, Peter Fitzgerald, who was at the time working on his Doctoral Dissertation at the California State University in Sacramento. Dr. Richardson seemed to be the brains of the operation, at least with the computer technology, but it was Fitzgerald who seemed to have the best handle on the system overall, as he was the one preparing, installing, and often removing, repairing and reinstalling the hardware that made all this stuff work. He shared with me several adventures he had in installing these things around this part of the state.
         “These have to be buried at least six feet in the ground to work properly, and that has to be into hard packed C-Horizon mineral soil,” he said proudly. “Most of the time, a Ditch Witch or a gas powered auger, along with a couple of naïve graduate students is all it takes, but a couple of times it’s been myself with a round nosed shovel and a long stick to beat the rattlesnakes away! Oh, and I’ve been shot at a couple times too!”
         “Shot at?”
         “Oh, now and then you end up near somebody’s farm, and they don’t know what you’re doing, and they think you’re trespassing. Then there was the time out there in the Mendocino National Forest, where I almost got a Malaysian Swing in my face, and a twenty two in my ass!”
         “National Forest land?” I asked. “Shouldn’t have any problem with the Department of Agriculture.”
         “Nah, the government and I already had an arrangement,” he said. “ I had issues with the clandestine Marijuana plantation that was going on in the National Forest! Last August I stumbled upon about four acres of it! Thought I’d be some trouble I guess.”
         “He got those sensors in, though!” said Dr. Richardson.
         “I went there two weeks later, after the harvest!”
         “But boy was that stuff good!” said Dr. Richardson. “He brought back some buds that were about a foot long, and after they dried, you could damn near roll a joint without using papers….uh, you’re not putting this in the article, are you?”
         “And I’m not sharing this with the sheriff, who is right outside in that Chevy Blazer, either!”
         I guess you’ve got to love California!

         After I took some photographs with my rather high tech, top end digital single lens reflex camera that was issued to me courtesy of the magazine, I interrupted the sheriff from his cell phone.
         “Do we have any Turmeric,” he asked the voice on the other end. “…I don’t think they have it at Safeway….no, Nutmeg or Mustard won’t work….the recipe calls for Turmeric….”
         He looked over toward me. “I’ve got to stop downtown, at a little specialty shop…it’s where I buy most of my spices….”
         “Okay,” I said. “I’ve had to stop for the old lady at some places I wouldn’t normally go…”
         “Nah, I’m the one needing the spices,” he said. “I saw this Italian Beef thing on the Rachael Ray show, and I’ve GOT to try it out….”
         I said no more!

         After the brief stop in downtown Walnut Creek, I was comfortably back in the hotel room. I still had most of the day ahead of me, so I decided to drive around for a little bit. It would be interesting to see what was the same, what wasn’t. Already, I had noticed the growth, and noticed the nature of such growth. It wasn’t the ‘ticky tacky little boxes’ like the old song, but instead it was rather opulent homes with gardens and tennis courts. Some of them listed for several millions of dollars.
         I drove down Geary Road to Pleasant Hill Drive, past Acalanes High School, my alma matter, and made the right turn up the hill onto Reliz Station Road. Near the top of the hill, I came upon the two story hip roof house that I called home for most of my childhood. Not too surprised I was to find a Century 21 Realtor sign displayed next to the juniper bush by the driveway. I stopped and pulled one of the brochures from the small box attached to it. I looked over it briefly.
         “Four bedroom, three bath house on 34,000 square foot lot,” it read. “City water, city sewer. 3822 square feet of living space. Swimming Pool. Modern kitchen. Quality schools, high growth neighborhood, close to parks and bike trails. Listing price $4,225,000.”
         Ironically, I owned a place not much different from this at this time (minus the pool) that was on a two and a half acre lot with a small barn that I kept two horses in, and it had slightly more living space. It was built about the same time (in the early 1960’s) and I only paid slightly more than two hundred thousand for it only a year previous. The biggest difference in the two was about two thousand miles. At the time I lived off Hunt Club Road in Gurnee Illinois, and this was Lafayette California. I continued on toward the town of Moraga, which now numbered somewhere around a hundred and fifty thousand residents. The town barely existed when I lived here before.
         I had been in these parts about five years before. I came here frantically after a call at work from a relative in Toledo, who informed me that my mother had lost a valiant battle with cancer. I flew out here, two days after the anniversary of the tragic events in New York City and Washington DC to attend the memorial service and try to make some amends with family, but I didn’t stay long enough to do so. The day after the funeral, I was on a plane back home. I was in such a hurry to get out of here that I was even content to book a seat on a flight into the less desirable Midway Airport on Chicago’s south side.
         I knew that my father was now living in Martinez. I had been given his address some time ago by a cousin who I still kept in touch with, but I never wrote, and I never called. I took the drive up Geary Road to Alhambra, which would lead me right into Martinez, but when I got as far as the old Macalvey Nursery, I chickened out and went back to the hotel. I was tired, I had been up since eleven o’clock the previous evening, and I just wanted to lay down and unwind.
         In spite of the now bright sunlight coming in through the window in the mid afternoon, I went to sleep.

         At about five in the afternoon, I was rudely awakened by the hotel phone ringing. I answered it, thinking it might be one of my editors from the magazine. I should have known better, as Chicago is two hours ahead of California, and I knew most of the folks in the office would be long gone home by then.
         “Mister Petrovich,” said the stern, unrecognizable voice on the other end of the phone. “I’d like to enquire about the nature of your article….”
         “It’s just about earthquakes and seismic sensors,” I said. “Who is this? What’s it to you?”
         “It’s about marketing,” he said. “You want to sell magazines, and there’s some of us around here trying to sell real estate. What’s the likelihood we both will be able to do our jobs?”
         “What are you trying to say?” I replied nervously.
         “People come here planning on spending lots of money for a home or business,” he said. “But they won’t want to do so if they find out it’s sitting on top of a damn earthquake fault….”
         “I’m not writing this article about faults,” I said. “Just the equipment used to measure the faults.”
         “I’d be real interested in seeing some copy before it goes to press.”
         “That won’t be possible,” I said. “But there will be some extra information about the subject on the magazine’s website. The website usually gets updated a few days before the magazine hit’s the newsstands.”
         “And when does this article come out?”
         “This is supposed to be a feature in the June edition.”
         “But what is to be done before then?”
         “What is supposed to be done before then?” I asked.
         “I’m just going to say this,” the man on the phone said in an ever increasing pace. “People are willing to spend lots of money in this valley, but that might change if they find some things out. A geologist wandering around checking out seismic sensors is just the thing that makes a few folks in the higher finance end of things around here a little nervous. You might just want to think about what you write, and maybe replacing a few paragraphs with a couple of glossy pictures of Mount Diablo.”
         “Is this supposed to be some form of intimidation?” I asked.
         “Take it just how you think you should,” he said as I heard the click and then the dial tone. That was strange.

         I thought of calling Sheriff Bosley, but I didn’t want to disturb him at home. He was probably enjoying dinner (or forcing some crazy concoction down his hapless family’s throat…truthfully, I would say, no self respecting straight male in the Midwest would admit to knowing who Rachael Ray or Emeril LaGasse is.) I thought nothing of it. I’ve had some strange calls and visits before while on assignment….only not in THIS country.

         As night fell, I walked down to a nearby Carl’s Jr. and had my favorite, the Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger combo, and then retired to my room to watch a special on the History Channel about the Incas of the Peruvian Andes. I had the front desk put in a wake up call for eight in the morning, so I would be ready to catch up with Peter, who was going to take me into the field while he replaced two damaged sensors near Benicia and Suisun City. Quickly, I forgot about the strange phone call.

         The following morning, Peter Fitzgerald came by the hotel driving his beat up pickup truck, and we drove up the somewhat warped stretch of Interstate 680 to the Carquinez Straits Bridge. This stretch of freeway was somewhat mangled in the Loma Prieata event of October 17, 1989. Nearly twenty years later, there still was a distinct waviness to the freeway surface. After paying the toll across the bridge, we got off the freeway at the first exit, overlooking the fleet of rusty abandoned Naval ships that still stood anchored in the muddy inlet. After finding a wide spot along the road to park, we got out.
         “Grab a couple of shovels,” he cheerfully ordered. “It’s down this trail. Let’s go have some fun!”
         At the bottom of the thistle and anise covered hillside, we came to a black tube sticking about a foot out of the ground. We dug around it until we came to a large black box. He twisted the tube out of the black box and illuminated the hole with a flashlight.
         “There’s our problem,” he said. “This whole damn thing’s got to come out.”
         I looked down into the hole. It was half full of water.
         “Got something to pump it out with?”
         “Nah,” he said. “This whole thing is fucked. It’s all got to be replaced, including the housing. It’s shorted out. That’s about four thousand bucks!”
         He then explained to me how they’d have to reprogram the computers to take into account the gap in sensor covers. “Help me pull this bad boy out,” he asked.
         After struggling for ten minutes against the suction of the mud, we got the four foot plastic box out of the ground. We then shoveled some dirt back into the muddy hole in attempt to prevent someone tripping in it.
         “I think the one up in Suisun is a little simpler of a fix,” he said. “At least I hope.”
         We each took an end of the long wet box and carried it through the thistles and back to the truck.
         The sensor in Suisun, about ten miles up the road just north of Interstate 80 simply needed a piece of coaxial cable replaced between the unit and the small antenna nearby. Twenty minutes later, we were back on our way to the station near Danville.
         “I don’t think it’s salvageable, Malcom,” he said to his partner. “I’ll take it apart and see, but it’s been submerged.”
         “That the Benicia or the Suisun?”
         “Benicia,” he said. “On the hillside.”
         “It hasn’t rained that much,” said Dr. Richardson. “Shouldn’t have that much water in it.”
         “Shouldn’t have ANY water in it!” he said. “The housing’s cracked, as if something shifted into it. Wonder if something’s happening to affect the water tables.”
         “There were some small events south of here, down near Watsonville and San Martin,” he said. “Could have an effect on things, but I have my doubts about that. There’s well over a hundred miles between Benicia and San Martin.”
         “Or something’s getting ready to happen!” said Peter rather emphatically. “I’d like to see how this thing will handle a REAL earthquake!”
         “I was at Candlestick Park during the Loma Prieata,” I said, referring to the 7.1 earthquake that shook the Bay Area that October afternoon in 1989 and tragically flattened over a mile of double decked freeway in Oakland.  “I don’t think we want to go through a test like that.”
         “Don’t think we’re in too much danger of that around here,” he reassured. “Those big things seem to happen closer to the San Andreas.”
         “Whatever,” I said. “But I do remember being in a real hum dinger in Bishop back in 1983. That is quite a ways away from the San Andreas.”
         “The Eastern Sierra faults seem to be just about as vigorous as the San Andreas, but we have such crappy historical record of their activity, because that area hasn’t really developed much population until the last sixty or seventy years. Shit’s been going on there, but there haven’t been that many people over there to keep records.”
         I pulled aside the neck of my shirt to reveal a large scar across my left shoulder, courtesy of a chunk of roof that fell on me during the event. “I think I’ve got record of THAT one! Six point nine!”
         “And you were in the 1989 Loma Prieata? Lucky guy!”
         “I don’t think so,” I answered. “I HATE the damn things! Why do you think I live in the Midwest now? At least with the tornadoes I can see them coming and get the hell out of the way!”
         “The sudden change of groundwater levels is something of concern, though,” said Dr. Richardson. “That is a common theme in this area.”
         “That, and I’ve noticed a few more ads in the paper looking for lost cats,” Peter finished. “And my neighbor just asked me this morning if I had seen his Newfoundland Retriever. Seems he let her out to go do her business this morning, and she never came back.”
         Although the science seems a little spotty, there is much anecdotal evidence of a connection between animal behavior and seismic activity. For a week prior to the Loma Prieata event, the San Francisco Examiner had nearly four times the ‘Lost Pets’ ads in the classified section. I took a quick peek at the Walnut Creek paper and noticed that there were quite a few ads as well, but then again, there was a lot of things that could explain that. The growth in this area meant a lot of people were coming and going, and in the confusion, ‘Fido’ or ‘Kitty’ might be lost in the shuffle. I thought nothing more of it.
         “We’re going to a conference in Berkeley tomorrow morning after we check the system out in the morning,” said Dr. Richardson. “We won’t be back until about two o’clock in the afternoon, so we’ll see you then. I’ll see if the folks down at Menlo Park can help you out till then, if you’d like.”
         “Oh, I’m sure I’ll need to talk to some folks there, too,” I said. “Have them give me a call in the morning.”

         That evening, I looked at the data from the CD ROM given to me at the monitoring station. I loaded the program into my Hewlett Packard notebook and waited for a few minutes for the installation to finish. Once it was set in my computer, I looked at the images he showed me earlier, and then found some other features which they hadn’t shown me that much about yet. It was absolutely fascinating. I could tell that the science of seismology was never to be the same again.
         Not only did this program show the typical information on the earthquakes, the epicenters, focus, magnitude and the sort, but it also showed another set of images which depicted ground shifts and strain levels. Not only could this new system pinpoint earthquakes and fault zones, but it could show us what was actually happening under the ground. It could show us what effects each event had not only at the epicenter, but on other fault systems as well, as it would show different levels of strain and pressure in varying shades of blue and violet superimposed over a map of the general area. Is more data would be available, it was conceivable that seismologists may be able, quite shortly, to create a computerized model that could help predict events and their severity. It was no wonder why I was given this absolutely fascinating assignment. I called my editor.
         “Just imagine,” I said. “Turning on the news and hearing…Sixty five degrees, chance of rain, and a seventy percent chance of a six point two earthquake epicentered  just east of San Jose!”
         “It’s that good?”
         “Give it a year!” I said. “As they get the whole state wired, and gather more data! I think this one will need some follow up!”
         “ Have you seen this thing actually working?”
         “A little bit,” I said. “A couple of small ones about fifty miles south of here. Not much, but already it was quite a show….”
         Little would I know exactly how much this new system would be put to the test. Or how soon…

         The following morning, I woke up, had breakfast, and made a phone call to the USGS headquarters in Menlo Park. I arranged to meet them, along with Dr. Richardson and his associate there to look at the data that was already gathered and compare it to the old system, which consisted of file upon file stuffed full of seismographs on thermal paper. Until then, I had the morning to myself.
         Curiosity was getting the best of me. The hotel was a Wi-Fi hotspot, so I thought it would be nice to take a virtual tour of my old childhood home which was so proudly displayed on www.century21.com. I found page upon page of other homes in Lafayette, but soon I gave up in favor of checking things out the old way. I drove out there to look a little bit more, and happened to arrive at the same time that the realtor was also in the neighborhood.
         “Anything I can tell you about this home?” she asked.
         “Yeah, did the bullet hole in the small second floor bedroom ever get patched?” I asked.
         “Uh, what bullet hole?” she asked. “And how would you know about…”
“I admit, I was working on a jammed trigger of a small .22 rifle, and it discharged,” I said. “I was sixteen and slightly dumb….I grew up in this house by the way.”
         “Are you thinking of moving back home?”
         “It’s crossed my mind,” I lied. Actually I was just trying to figure out why there was a four million dollar difference in the price of two similar houses.
         As she opened the front door and let me into the somewhat familiar living room, she inquired about my statistics. She seemed pretty hopeful…I was a magazine writer, owned a home worth almost a quarter million dollars in the north Chicago suburb of Gurnee (which I owned outright without an outstanding mortgage) and had an annual income of about three hundred fifty thousand a year…definitely would qualify for whatever loans I’d need. I felt kind of bad about the fact that I’d be letting her down at the end of the little tour.
         My old bedroom obviously now was occupied by a girl in her early adolescence, as was evident by the collection of stuffed animals on the bed and the Ricky Martin posters on the walls. The den had been turned into a kid’s play room, and the carpeting was changed from the horribly dated green shag to a medium pile taupe. The walls in each room were all two toned, striped, and adorned with stencil designs, as the owners had obviously watched one too many episodes of Trading Spaces.  The kitchen was nicely adorned with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, but the overhead lighting in the dining room had been replaced with the tackiest chandelier I had ever seen.
         One thing did remain the same, and I kept looking back at it. All the windows along the east side of the house displayed an almost perfectly framed image of Mount Diablo. I had so many fond memories looking out those windows for the first eighteen years of my life. In the summer, the monolithic peak stood tall, cloaked in an eerie orange-brown with a dark top, against the hazy light blue skies. In the winter, she’d occasionally be adorned with a snow pack that would glisten in the sun for a few days. In spring, the bare face would be lush green, with patches of shimmering orange cast from the fields of California Poppies that were so common to this area. Sometimes clouds and fog would shroud the slopes, leaving only the top visible. Sometimes vicious forest fires would strike the mountainside, and ominous clouds of black and orange smoke would erupt violently from along its summit ridge. This mountain was a prominent feature in this region, visible from literally hundreds of miles away in virtually all directions. Only Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa could claim to be as visible across such a broad reach of the Earth’s surface.
         “Like to see what they did with the back yard?” the realtor interrupted.
         “Yeah, I’d like to see the pool,” I said. “The easiest way there is through the garage.”
         We went through a small pantry, a laundry room, and into the garage, which at the moment held a Toyota Camry. The garage was capable of holding three cars, or at least two cars and a boat, as it did when I was living there.
         “This home was built with the future in mind,” she said. “Even though nobody heard of an S.U.V. back in 1962 when it was built, somebody had the wherewithal to build a garage that would actually be able to hold one. And it was built with plenty of extra space for workbenches and….”
         She was interrupted by a loud cracking sound.
         “You feel that?” she said.
         I saw a few jars of nails and screws rocking back and forth on the workbench. A couple of them fell on their side, and rolled off the shelf, shattering on the hard concrete floor. Two bicycles which were suspended upside down from the rafters in an effort to conserve floor space began swinging vigorously, until one came dislodged from the broad hook that suspended it and it fell onto the windshield of the sedan.
         The shaking became more vigorous, and it was accompanied by a low frequency rumble. Shelves were dislodged from their brackets, and large heavy cabinets were toppled. Outside, the trees shook, power lines swung vigorously back and forth, and car alarms were triggered. Soon, the rumbling sound became so loud that it was nearly deafening.
         “Is this an earthquake?” asked the realtor loudly.
         “Was that supposed to be a dumb question?” I shouted back. “Is there enough room for both of us under this workbench?”
         Neither of us waited for an answer. We both dove under it and huddled in a fetal position to shield our faces from the glass that was being dislodged from shelves, storage containers and the one medium sized window.
         A large florescent light hung in the garage, and as it swung violently back and forth, it flickered on and off, until, like the bicycles, it too came loose from the chains suspending it from the rafters. It too took a nosedive into the windshield of the Camry. Shortly after that, the garage door opener fell from the ceiling, and after that, so did the garage door. It came down onto the trunk of the car with a deafening crash.
The large Sycamore tree that had been growing just to the west of the house for some decades before the house was even built could no longer hold the strain, and it gave out several loud strained snapping noises before the whole massive trunk fell against the west side of the house and through the roof of the garage, covering the workbench violently in a flurry of broad green leaves. Inside the house, we could hear the painful shattering of items that fell from walls, shelves and tables as they were dislodged and sent tumbling to the floor. The timbers in the walls and the ceilings protested as the shock waves forced them to twist and strain, and caused a few to give and break.
         At first, the vibration was from front to back, but then they seemed to come from side to side. Shortly after that, they came in a vigorous rolling motion, like waves on the ocean. After that, the shaking began to subside, and slowly, so did the failures and collapses in the forty five year old house. The whole experience felt like it had lasted for hours, but it had actually lasted a little less than two minutes.
         “Are you okay?” asked the realtor as she pulled herself from under the workbench and through the twisted mass of thick branches and splintered 2x6’s.
         “I think so,” I said. “This’ll be part of one hell of an article!”
         “We need to get a hold of someone to shut off the gas and electric,” she said.
         “It’ll take hours for PG&E to get here,” I said. “I know where it is. I’ll take care of that!”
         Once I pulled my way out of the twisted mass, we struggled our way through piles of broken brick, fallen branches and the remnants of the Redwood deck to where the utility meters hid conveniently behind a dangerously large Yucca plant.
         “That’s a dangerous place for this,” she said as she tugged at one of the broad fronds which bore a large thorn at the end.
         “Trust me, this damn thing was nowhere near this big when I was here last!”
         I pulled the large lever on the side of the electrical meter, and heard the loud ‘clunk’ as it locked into place. A few feet away, I found the yellow handle affixed to the valve on the copper pipe that fed natural gas into the house. I turned that a quarter turn clockwise. After that, we made our way to the front yard. Sadly, my rental car was now a casualty, as a large Monterey Pine had fallen onto the roof.
         “There goes your rental deposit!” she said.
         “Fuck that,” I replied. “We’re still alive! That’s all that matters!”
         Looking eastward across the valley, we could already see plumes of smoke coming from multiple locations. The sound of sirens filled the air in ever increasing volume. I tried to make some calls from my cell phone, but all I heard was the rapid chirping sound indicative of a failed call. Power lines were down, water mains were broken and spraying all over the street, cellular towers were knocked out of operation, and it would be only a matter of hours before Governor Schwarzenegger would be having Contra Costa County declared as a Federal Disaster Area. Sadly but surely, there would be fatalities. The attractive female realtor and I had joked around a little during and right after the event, but as we both looked across the shattered neighborhood toward Mount Diablo the shock began to set in. It was true that this town had changed much in the nearly twenty years since I had lived here, but even more profound changes had happened in those ninety seconds we sought refuge under my what had one time been my fathers’ old workbench.
         “I’ll try making my way back to the office,” said the realtor somberly as she tried making a call on her cell phone.
         “They don’t work.”
         “I noticed,” she said. “You need a ride back to your hotel?”
         “If it’s still standing.”
         We climbed into the large Ford Excursion and continued down the hill to Olympic Boulevard. The large house near the corner of Reliz Station Road and Olympic, which at one time had been owned by my grandmother, was fully engulfed in flames. I looked briefly, and then turned away. She pulled over onto the side of the four lane highway and broke down in tears.
         Slowly, we went down Olympic and back towards Pleasant Hill Road. We followed it up to Highway 24, where we discovered that it was blocked. The whole westbound deck of the overpass had collapsed, blocking passage.
         “Where’s your hotel?”
         “The Best Western on Linda.”
         “Best way to get there is off of Geary,” she said. “Unfortunately, this is the only way to Geary.”
         “See if you can make a left on Mount Diablo and get across on First Street,” I said. “If not,  see if the El Curtola overpass is still up, and we’ll come behind Acalanes High.”
         “Sounds like you know this area pretty well.”
         “I have a feeling that we’ll find out we both don’t know it well enough now!”
         It took the better part of an hour and a half to find my way back to the hotel in Walnut Creek. Surprisingly, it was still standing, although I saw a number of buildings that didn’t fare so well.
         “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said as we pulled into the parking lot. “All this damage. Some parts of town are just about obliterated, yet some places seem to be standing as if nothing happened.”
         “There’s a number of factors,” I explained, drawing upon several years of study in Geology and several more in the Civil Engineering trade. “A lot has to do with what they’re built on. Buildings built on solid substrate generally hold up better than those built on sand, clay, mud or badly sheared rock.”
         “Like the Mission District in 1989,” she answered.
         “But more and more, we’re coming to the understand how the earthquake waves actually travel through the ground,” I continued. “It’s much like ripples on the surface of a pond. As they travel through the area, they encounter hills, faults, and different rock types. These changes in the substrate reflect and refract the waves, sometimes causing them to double up on one another, thus amplifying their magnitude.”
         “You lost me there….”
         “We saw this quite a bit during the earthquake that triggered the horrible Tsunami in Indonesia a few years ago,” I tried to clarify. “The shock waves travel away from the source of the earthquake, and then they hit a hard layer of rock, like say the coarse sandstone from Mount Diablo and the ridges along the east end of the valley. Some of that energy is reflected back into the valley, where there are waves traveling through in different directions. Where the reflected waves meet those already passing through, they add to one another, and at those points, they cause more damage.”
         “That explains why sometimes things seem to survive through some earthquakes, but then don’t do so well in others….since no two earthquakes quite come from the same place. That means all this energy is going to roll through the ground at different directions, and bounce off different surfaces at different angles, right?”
         “And since there is so much variation in rock facies, tectonic features, even ground water levels, we can’t even create a halfway reliable model to predict where the damage will occur. It drives the engineers absolutely nuts.”
         After giving my new real estate agent friend a brief lesson in the recent geology we just had an experience with, I went to my room. Other than the television being knocked off the stand, my room seemed to survive okay. Even more surprising, the Wi-Fi worked. I sent a message to my editor, and I logged onto the website in Victorville, where I got some more information about the recent phenomenon.
         This event, which was so unceremoniously tagged with the label NC506111, was epic entered somewhere in the neighborhood of Tice Creek, near the Rossmoor Country Club. It occurred at 9:44 am Pacific Standard Time, and measured seven point three on the modified Richter scale, which would make it about three times the strength of the Loma Prieata event (that one was a 7.0). It had a focus of about twenty two miles, which was common for this area, and so far, there were incoming reports of damage from as far south as Mountain View and as far north as Napa.
         Finally, I was able to get a phone to work. The landline from the hotel did make a connection to my office in Chicago.
         “It’s already over the news!” said my editor. “You’re calling, so I assume you’re alright!”
         “Sorry about the rental car, though,” I said. “It managed to find a pine tree. I think Avis will be sending you the bill.”
         “You got in a wreck?”
         “Honestly,” I explained. “The tree hit it! I wasn’t driving….I wasn’t even in the car.”
         “As long as you’re alright,” he said. “But this is a hell of a story! Find out how well this newfangled system worked, and what we’ll learn from it….”
         I was a little disturbed by my boss’ attitude toward the whole situation. The article, the rental car, all of this had taken a position of lower priority at the time. As the air was filled with the sounds of car alarms and sirens and the smell of acrid smoke from the literally dozens of burning homes and buildings, I could only think of what was really going on. Surely, there were fatalities and injuries, probably numbering in the hundreds. Several times over the next hours, the ground would rumble again as the layers of rock miles below readjusted to their new positions and strain levels, events most laymen call ‘aftershocks.’ Some of them were quite vigorous, and caused even more damage.
         I called the Menlo Park office, where I was to meet with Dr. Richardson and post-grad student Peter Fitzgerald after the seminar in Berkeley. I had my doubts if I’d make it down there that day, and wanted to reschedule. I was met with an ominous statement.
         “They never made it here,” said one of the geologists. “In fact, I didn’t see them at Berkeley this morning.”
         “What time was your meeting?”
         “Eight thirty.”
         “The earthquake happened at…”
         “Nine forty four…” he answered. “Go out to the station if you can, maybe they were working on something and lost track of time…”
         “I’ll call the Sheriff.”
         “Better yet, I’ll radio him,” said the voice from Menlo Park. “The phone lines are overloaded, but I have the frequency to the county’s walkie-talkies.”
         I could hear the squawky voice in the background. “I’m up to my armpits in bricks at the car wash near the corner of San Ygnacio and California, so it’ll be an hour….SOMEBODY GOT ANY MORE BODY BAGS?”