years.
Farther north we shot pictures of the ruptured earth at places called Little Salmon River, Mad River, and McKinleyville. These were even harder for our untrained eyes to notice because today they are camouflaged by a veneer of human civilization, the streets and homes, schoolyards and shopping malls of Eureka and Arcata, California. Who
would notice that the nice little house on what looks like a landscaped terrace is in fact perched on the edge of an active, still-moving fault, a fractured wedge of crust that is being shoved upward by the force of plate tectonics?
Native people who have lived in beachside villages along this coast for thousands of years tell stories they learned from their elders of horrific ground shaking on a winterâs night long ago, followed by a killer wave that wiped out entire communities. For the most part, though, the tide of white settlers who began arriving here in the 1850s to homestead and log the redwood forest were unaware of, or simply uninterested in, the local knowledge of Aboriginal people. After 1906, they knewâthe whole world knewâabout the deadly San Andreas, but the concept of plate tectonics and the fact that a moving block of ocean floor could cause an even larger shock was still unknown.
The scientists and engineers who in the early 1960s drew up plans for an atomic power plantâCaliforniaâs first commercial reactorâto be built on the shore of Humboldt Bay assumed there was no major seismic threat to worry about. Ironically, building the reactor would help scientists discover the reality of Cascadiaâs web of faults.
Â
Around the corner and up the coast from Cape Mendocino, the side-by-side beach towns of Eureka and Arcata were inhabited in 1963 by an uneasy mix of loggers, commercial fishermen, and back-to-the-land idealists who would soon be labeled hippies and environmentalists. The biggest construction project in decadesâthe atomic power station at Humboldt Bayâwas coming to an end and the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) was about to deliver a sixty-thousand-kilowatt jolt to the local economy.
Even though terms like meltdown and China syndrome had not yet colored the vocabulary, a tide of negative opinion had already derailed another nuclear plant downstate, so the residents of Humboldt County were aware of the potential for controversy and had mixed feelings
about the promise of âpower too cheap to meter.â Work at Bodega Head, about fifty miles (80 km) north of the Golden Gate, had been delayed by vigorous opposition for six years. Construction workers had managed to dig a deep hole for the foundations when geologists confirmed that the San Andreas fault ran right beside (some said directly underneath) the reactor site. Eventually, PG&E decided to abandon the project.
Perhaps because the San Andreas veered out to sea at Cape Mendocino, state officials agreed with PG&E that seismic risk would not be an issue on the north coast at Humboldt Bay. With no large earthquakes in the areaâat least not since the 1850s, when white settlers started keeping written records of local historyâproject managers at the utility and engineers who were designing the reactor were convinced the level of risk was within acceptable limits.
The federal Atomic Energy Commission, which would eventually license the plant, defined an active fault as having had one âeventâ (earthquake) in the past 35,000 years. Or more than one in 500,000 years. AEC regulations in effect at the time specified reinforced, anti-rupture reactor vessels only when an active fault came within a quarter of a mile (0.4 km) of a plant. But with no detailed information available about the quake history of nearby faults, and with little understanding of the newly discovered Mendocino Triple Junction or the implications of plate tectonics, any seismic threat seemed distant and hypothetical. Not a problem at Humboldt Bay.
âThe plans for
Farther north we shot pictures of the ruptured earth at places called Little Salmon River, Mad River, and McKinleyville. These were even harder for our untrained eyes to notice because today they are camouflaged by a veneer of human civilization, the streets and homes, schoolyards and shopping malls of Eureka and Arcata, California. Who
would notice that the nice little house on what looks like a landscaped terrace is in fact perched on the edge of an active, still-moving fault, a fractured wedge of crust that is being shoved upward by the force of plate tectonics?
Native people who have lived in beachside villages along this coast for thousands of years tell stories they learned from their elders of horrific ground shaking on a winterâs night long ago, followed by a killer wave that wiped out entire communities. For the most part, though, the tide of white settlers who began arriving here in the 1850s to homestead and log the redwood forest were unaware of, or simply uninterested in, the local knowledge of Aboriginal people. After 1906, they knewâthe whole world knewâabout the deadly San Andreas, but the concept of plate tectonics and the fact that a moving block of ocean floor could cause an even larger shock was still unknown.
The scientists and engineers who in the early 1960s drew up plans for an atomic power plantâCaliforniaâs first commercial reactorâto be built on the shore of Humboldt Bay assumed there was no major seismic threat to worry about. Ironically, building the reactor would help scientists discover the reality of Cascadiaâs web of faults.
Â
Around the corner and up the coast from Cape Mendocino, the side-by-side beach towns of Eureka and Arcata were inhabited in 1963 by an uneasy mix of loggers, commercial fishermen, and back-to-the-land idealists who would soon be labeled hippies and environmentalists. The biggest construction project in decadesâthe atomic power station at Humboldt Bayâwas coming to an end and the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) was about to deliver a sixty-thousand-kilowatt jolt to the local economy.
Even though terms like meltdown and China syndrome had not yet colored the vocabulary, a tide of negative opinion had already derailed another nuclear plant downstate, so the residents of Humboldt County were aware of the potential for controversy and had mixed feelings
about the promise of âpower too cheap to meter.â Work at Bodega Head, about fifty miles (80 km) north of the Golden Gate, had been delayed by vigorous opposition for six years. Construction workers had managed to dig a deep hole for the foundations when geologists confirmed that the San Andreas fault ran right beside (some said directly underneath) the reactor site. Eventually, PG&E decided to abandon the project.
Perhaps because the San Andreas veered out to sea at Cape Mendocino, state officials agreed with PG&E that seismic risk would not be an issue on the north coast at Humboldt Bay. With no large earthquakes in the areaâat least not since the 1850s, when white settlers started keeping written records of local historyâproject managers at the utility and engineers who were designing the reactor were convinced the level of risk was within acceptable limits.
The federal Atomic Energy Commission, which would eventually license the plant, defined an active fault as having had one âeventâ (earthquake) in the past 35,000 years. Or more than one in 500,000 years. AEC regulations in effect at the time specified reinforced, anti-rupture reactor vessels only when an active fault came within a quarter of a mile (0.4 km) of a plant. But with no detailed information available about the quake history of nearby faults, and with little understanding of the newly discovered Mendocino Triple Junction or the implications of plate tectonics, any seismic threat seemed distant and hypothetical. Not a problem at Humboldt Bay.
âThe plans for
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