Buildings of unreinforced masonry are more susceptible to earthquake than any other type, and unfortunately the entire area struck by the quake rejoiced in tens of thousands of brick buildings, most of which were destroyed or damaged. Mobile homes were shaken to bits or pitched off their foundations. Frame buildings fared better than others, though some, in the worst-affected areas, were simply shaken to pieces.
Throughout the area, significant damage was suffered as a result of the failure of foundations. Most basement walls were not reinforced and simply caved in, the house falling atop them. Throughout the region, particularly in areas where the water table was high, houses had been set above the ground on small brick piers. The masonry piers either shattered in the tremblors, or the complex motions of the quake walked the houses off their foundations and dropped them onto the broken earth. Approximately a million people were in their automobiles when the quake struck, most of them heading home from work. In many areas the road systems were destroyed in an instant. Bridges and elevated roadways fell or were mangled; roads were torn across by fissures; right-of-ways were flooded. The roadways were packed with desperate people stranded in their vehicles, far from their homes, away from supplies of food and water.
Rail transport suffered as well. Bridges fell, tracks were torn or wrenched into pretzel shapes, depots were destroyed. The most economical and efficient method of getting food and other supplies to affected areas, by rail, was rendered temporarily unusable.
At airports, runways were destroyed, fuel depots ruined, control towers pitched to the ground, and hangars collapsed on aircraft. Radar installations were wrecked, or lost the ground lines by which they transmitted their data. Entire districts of the country disappeared from air controllers’ screens. Aircraft, stranded aloft when their destinations were turned to rubble, began to call frantically for controllers to find them a place to land.
Following the shattering catastrophe of the quake came the swift catastrophe of fire. Propane tanks spewed their explosive contents through shattered couplings. Unsecured stoves and water heaters marched from their places, spilling scalding water and breaking their gas connections. Underground oil and gas pipelines were broken. Above-ground storage tanks ruptured. The unexpected lightning storm over Swampeast Missouri struck forests and buildings alike. And shattered buildings provided tinder that could ignite a conflagration.
Winds fanned the flames. Shattered communications and inundated emergency communication systems ensured that the fires would go unreported or unnoticed until they had taken hold. Broken water mains meant there was no water available to fight the fires.
Conflagration took hold everywhere in the stricken land, and on every scale. Isolated barns and houses burned, small stores and large, small towns and large towns, and the city centers of St. Louis, East St. Louis, and Memphis. Thousands of people, trapped in rubble or with their retreat cut off by flames, died in terror. Forests and prairie took fire as well, and with the authorities concentrating on quelling fires in cities and towns, there was nothing to stop the flames in the countryside but what Nature provided in the form of rain and flood.
The author Robert A. Heinlein once mocked what he called the wooden fire escapes on Chicago’s apartment buildings, unaware that he was looking not at fire escapes, but at wooden back porches equipped with stairs. But Heinlein may have had the last laugh when M1 shivered a part of the city to bits. Though Chicago, well away from the quake’s epicenter, on the whole survived the quake fairly well, a fluke of geology carried the earthquake’s full power to the northeast district of Rogers Park, and the heavy wooden porches, dry as tinder after years of weathering in the outdoors, turned to flaming deathtraps.
After the shattering catastrophe of the quake and the swift catastrophe of fire came the slow-motion catastrophe of flood. The Mississippi and its tributaries were full with snow melt, and spring rains had saturated the soil. Sand blows and soil liquefaction brought subterranean water to the surface. And when the levees and dams broke, river water had nowhere to go but to spill across country. Flood is a disaster slow enough so that people can normally get out of its way, but in this case broken road and communications systems made it impossible to manage proper evacuations. Flood caught tens of thousands in their homes, and tens of thousands of others were caught in the open, trying to get away from their wrecked homes or their stranded automobiles.
Nor was the flooding confined to the Mississippi alone. The Father of Waters has 250 tributaries, including many that are mighty rivers in their own right: the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Ohio, the Red, the Des Moines, the Illinois. Each of these rivers has its own system of levees, locks, dams, and reservoirs, and each was filled with spring snow melt. The tragedy of the Mississippi, the flooding and destruction and death, was repeated many times throughout the country, from Iowa and Illinois south to Louisiana. And sometimes flood was as sudden as fire. The Carlyle Dam in Illinois failed completely, causing a multimillion-gallon wall of water to roar down the Kaskaskia. Mark Twain Lake spilled through the shattered Clarence Cannon Dam, roared over the town of Louisiana, Missouri, into the Mississippi, where it turned into a wave that obliterated Lock and Dam No. 24. The failure of Dam No. 24 in turn released the millions of gallons it had been holding, and the two united bodies of water spilled south toward St. Louis, already vulnerable due to the shattering of its floodwalls. There were hundreds of little dams throughout the Midwest, many privately owned. Many were simple earthen embankments that held just enough water to support a herd of cattle, or to keep a creek from flooding a field, and others were larger. When the quake came, many of them failed. Though the breaking of these small dams did not cause catastrophic flooding, it nevertheless added to the burden of water carried by the already shattered system.
Perhaps the worst thing, amid all this loss and tragedy, was that for many hours following M1, none of the people in a position to aid the survivors, from the President through General Frazetta and on down the chain of command, were in a position to understand the full scope of the catastrophe, or to mitigate its destructive power in any way.
“We’re fine, General. Shook up, but fine.”
Jessica felt the tension in her neck ease as the words crackled out of her cellphone. The Kentucky Dam, holding back the combined waters of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, was intact. If it had gone, pouring both Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley into the Ohio, it would have created a colossal wall of water that would have turned the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys from Evansville to Memphis into one long, blank, lifeless smear of mud.