Small earthquake in 'Frisco

I don't know if it made the stir outside the United States that it made here, but last Monday night the big headline in the evening papers and on the telly was one that the poor fellow who write headlines must've felt awfully grateful for because most of our problems today it seems are so complicated, so devoid of good guys and bad guys that any conscientious headline writer, who's not out simply to grab circulation, must despair as he settles to his daily trade.

Look at the New York Times for last Tuesday morning, for instance. 'Muzorewa Affirms Positive Elements of Rhodesian Plan – President Pledges to Maintain Course on Economic Policy – New York Petition for Recall Provision Rejected – Bond Rally Facing Test.' 

These don't quite stir the blood like 'Lindbergh Flies Atlantic' or 'Harry for England' or 'Hurricane Devastates New England' but even the New York Times on Tuesday couldn't resist following the lead of Monday night's television shocker. It came out with, 'San Franciscans Stunned as Quake worst in 68 Years Strikes City'. The television lead was 'San Francisco Rocked by Earthquake'. And the first sentence in the New York Times report read, 'The earth rolled, buildings swayed and, for a long moment, San Francisco held its breath today as it waited out the strongest earthquake in more than 68 years.' 

Now that would take us back, if I can count, to 1911. Not the big one, not the historic upheaval – that was in 1906. Still, in a city which rumbles and dithers slightly at least once a year, the worst in 68 years must have been something. 

I have many good friends out there and naturally I was concerned for them. I turned on Monday night's news with some anxiety. How many dead? Had the Golden Gate Bridge split and foundered? How many skyscrapers had toppled into the bay? I recalled, with dread, how vividly and I was told at the time – the mid-Thirties – by an old gaffer, who'd been alive and kicking in 1906, how vividly and truly MGM represented the beginnings of that awful tremor. Some of you may remember Clark Gable dancing with Jeanette MacDonald, everybody very festive and petticoats foaming and jewels glistening, and then the camera panned up to the ceiling of this Nob Hill mansion and a chandelier started very slowly to shiver and swing. And, in no time, there were screams and lurching rooms and the sidewalks splitting open into miniature Grand Canyons. And then back to the main message of that dreadful day which was, whatever had happened to Jeanette MacDonald and would Gable, staggering heroically all over town, ever find her? 

Well, the television news coverage of the last one was reassuring, certainly after a headline like 'Quake Rocks City'. The man said no buildings had actually been damaged, no stones fell, nobody was hurt. The worst place was a hundred miles or so south of San Francisco, in Salinas, and it was there that the cameras rushed to show the damage. And what we saw was the aisle of a supermarket and a welter of merchandise on the floor and, in the background, a young woman in glasses was kneeling and looking things over in a philosophical way. So, the worst earthquake in 68 years had thrown soup tins and packets of detergent off the shelves. That was it. 

Next morning I put in a couple of calls to San Francisco. The first was my regular golf partner out there. 'Well,' he said, 'I was on the fifth tee and for a moment there I thought my swing was on the blink. But it's always on the blink so I didn't give it another thought till I got back home and turned on the news and the man said, sure enough, "San Francisco Rocked by Quake". I'm still looking for somebody who was rocked.' 

I then called a couple I know who live on a peninsula that juts into the bay and looks across the city. They chuckled indulgently at my alarm rather the way people in Britain used to respond in the late 1940s when 'kindly' Americans read 'Britain Pinched for Food' and they'd put in transatlantic calls and asked what sort of emergency packages they should send. I told the wife of this couple about the picture we'd seen on television of the woman in the supermarket at Salinas. I felt better, I told her, when the same, still picture appeared next morning in the New York Times. And she said, 'You mean Lydia Tocal? Old Lydia Tocal?' 'That's the lady,' I said. 'Same here!' she said, 'The same picture's in the San Francisco Chronicle.' We chortled together and moved on to real things like, how are the gas station queues? 'There aren't any,' she said. 'Same here,' I said. 

That photograph took me back many years to a time when the government under Franklin Roosevelt was trying to dramatise the plight of the so-called Okies, the farmers of Oklahoma and West Texas who'd been driven from their homes by fearful dust storms following on a long drought that turned their land into a whirling desert. The Department of Agriculture put out a photograph, a beautiful, terrifying photograph. It showed a wasteland of rolling sand dunes on what had only recently been a fertile farm and in the left-hand corner of the photograph was the skull of a steer, all that was left of a once-healthy animal. It was a very moving picture. 

A few months later, the same picture was circulated and widely printed again – or not quite the same. The same rolling banks of sand, almost the same but, this time, a steer's skull was in the right-hand corner. An alert and gamey newspaper man, a waspish critic of the administration, ruined everything by noticing this discrepancy and immortalising the steer's skull by calling it 'the administration's portable prop'. Well, Lydia Tocal, the kneeling lady in the Salinas supermarket, looked like the news agencies' immoveable prop – their one blessed proof of disaster. The picture, I hear, was printed all over the country. 

Still, the scientific fact is that last Monday's earthquake registered 5.9 on the Richter scale. The scale came to be named after Charles Francis Richter who's retired and lives cheerfully enough in – where do you think? – California. Five point nine was the highest register since 1911. The 1906 monster registered 8.3 and ruined the city. Now the difference between 5.9 and 8.3, for simplicity's sake let's say the difference between 6 and 8, is a good deal more and worse than 33 per cent. The scale measures the motion of the ground from one to ten on a seismograph. Each unit, one number, represents not just as much motion again, in other words, two doesn't mean twice as much as one, it means a ten-fold increase. It would give us a more accurate idea of the progressive hazard if they numbered the units, one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand and so on. 

Anything over five can cause a lot of damage and today the seismologists are marvelling that nothing much happened apart from some broken water pipes, cracked ceilings and shorts in power lines. A register of six means a motion ten times as severe as a five. So the 1906 earthquake produced a ground motion roughly a thousand times as bad as the one that 'rocked the city' on Monday and tumbled the soup tins off the shelves of Salinas. 

So the doom watchers are going to have to wait for that blockbuster which evangelists and other gurus have been predicting is going to flatten some city along the notorious San Andreas Fault one of these days. 

The seismologists say that it's impossible to predict when the next earthquake is going to come and how severe it's going to be, though the Chinese are doing a lot of research on the behaviour of animals hours, and even days, before an earthquake happens. 

Well, all facetiousness aside, I must say that many hundreds of people who'd not been in an earthquake before were terrified for a minute or so. It's a... a very creepy and absolutely helpless feeling. There was one, I remember, during the organising conference of the United Nations in 1945. There we all were, the delegates of the founding 50 nations and thousands of newspaper and radio reporters and thousands of hangers on, all tucked up in our hotel beds. And suddenly you wake up and next thing I knew I was on the bedroom floor. 'That's all right,' you say, 'A nightmare, I simply fell out of bed.' But then, the bed lamp shivered and I had the weird sensation that the floor was a sort of very gentle wave. Then a door banged and it was all over. 

Everybody got dressed like mad and boasted about their earthquake experience, the way people talked about their famous bad night during the London Blitz. One chief delegate from a Central European country didn't take time to boast. He booked a fast plane and was on his way home. 'Very nervous type', we thought, till it came out that the earthquake had shaken not only him out of bed, but alongside him the chambermaid. His aide or deputy delegate came running in from next door and the man, frantic that the word would soon be on the wire to Budapest or Athens or wherever it was, took no chances. He beat it back to the wife of his bosom. 

Well, by contrast with the rocketing headlines about the earthquake, there were no headlines, practically no story even and even in the New York Times, about Governor Carey's grave announcement that he was calling a summit of British and Northern Ireland delegates to see if he couldn't, as he solemnly put it on television, find some solution to a problem that has been going on for 700 years. This beautiful gesture was announced casually, without comment, on the evening news of one New York local station not, so far as I know, on any national network. After all, somewhere across this country, some governor, senator, mayor or other magnifico is announcing a plan to solve the energy problem, inflation, the nuclear arms race or night baseball. 

The thing was so plainly preposterous, the notion of a governor about to summon a conference without checking with the White House, with Mrs Thatcher, with the Prime Minister of Ireland, with the pope, that it drew no attention whatsoever. Until on Wednesday morning, the New York Times was surprised to report that the governor's move had riled London. No need to get riled, I should think. Governor Carey would like to be re-elected. He has, like Senator Kennedy, like Speaker O'Neill, a huge Catholic constituency. He was simply doing, however fatuous, what comes naturally.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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