Slips & Snap-backs

Awakened one night last week in Berkley, Calif., when his bed began to rock, Henry Koutz, 54, leaped up, rushed for the stairs, stumbled, pitched over a banister, fractured his skull, died.

Jounced awake the same night in a San Francisco hotel was Joseph S. Cullinan, 76, robust, snowy-haired co-founder and first president of Texas Co. which he left in 1913, apostle of rugged individualism, good friend of Herbert Hoover in whose Wartime food administration he assisted. Alarmed, Mr. Cullinan jumped out of bed, caught a cold which turned into pneumonia, died.

In San Francisco and other East Bay towns, the earthquake broke windows, toppled chimneys. So many startled residents telephoned newspapers and police stations that the exchanges were jammed and calls were blocked as long as 15 minutes. Inspectors scurried out on the new Bay bridges to make sure nothing had been jarred loose. Seismologists estimated that the shock was about half as strong as the catastrophic quake of 1906. Dr. Albert Newlin of Santa Clara University said that slippage had occurred along the Hayward Fault, which runs nearly 50 mi. southward from the Bay.

Next day "moderate" shocks visited the Midwest, which, unlike California, lies far outside the world belt of earthquake frequency. In Indianapolis, Miss Lamar Montani was rolled out of bed and iron bars in the Bell Telephone offices were jounced off tables. In a prison at Jackson, Mich., convicts were thrown into a panic. In Anna, Ohio, chimneys knocked down by quakes last fortnight and subsequently repaired, tumbled again. Shaken residents of Dayton heard, or thought they heard, a deep rumble. In parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Ontario, New York, West Virginia and Kentucky, furniture danced, dishes rattled, pictures fell, canned goods tumbled from store shelves.

The California quakes of last week were of a different sort from those that jarred the Midwest. Beneath California the terrestrial stresses and strains that built the geologically youthful Rocky Mountains are still active, and there are huge subterranean faults (rock fractures along which a shearing motion occurs). Subjected, to a continuing strain, the earth gradually bends until the limit of elasticity is reached, then slips suddenly along the fault plane. The quake of 1906 was caused by a horizontal slip of 21 ft. along the San Andreas fault.

The older rocks of the Midwest, on the other hand, made most of their adjustments a long time ago and faults are puny and unimportant. Only 20,000 or 25,000 years ago, however, a sheet of ice a mile thick lay over the Great Lakes region. The tremendous weight of this pressed down the earth, which is now springing back in desultory jerks. Last week's quakes were caused by upward jerks of this kind in northern Ohio. Seismologists declare that the recovery from glacial compression is not yet complete, expect it to continue but never to attain destructive violence. Father Joseph Lynch, S. J., of Fordham University guessed last week that rise & fall of the Ohio River flood may have accelerated the snap-back process. Father Joseph Sebastian Joliat, S. J., of Cleveland's John Carroll University disagreed with him, pointed out that Ohio has had seven tremors attributable to postglacial snap-backs since 1929.

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