Fire Ice

"Hell no, Charlie. Come on up. I was just fiddling around on the computer."

The chief climbed to the second-floor office. "You've done a nice job with the house," he said, glancing around at the well-ordered space with its neatly arranged filing cabinets and bookcases.

"Thanks, Charlie. Wish I could claim credit." He picked up a framed photograph of a handsome middle-aged woman who was smiling directly at the camera from a sailboat cockpit. "Mary knew that I'd need more than lobstering to keep my brain from fossilizing. Setting up my office in the attic space was her idea. You know how she was. She could make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

"She didn't do a bad job of filing down some of your rough edges."

Jenkins laughed. "I consider that a miracle, given the material she had to work with." He glanced out the window again. "Looks like they're making progress down there."

"Getting the harbor cleared out real fast. There was some worry about oil spills from the fuel tanks, but the environmental people from the state got it under control. I needed a break from the press people. Started getting in the way anyhow, with all the insurance guys showing up." He jerked his head toward the computer. "See you've been workin'. Got things figured out yet?"

"Been trying. Pull up a seat and take a look. I could use your detective's intuition."

Despite the chief's folksy language and country ways, he was no bumpkin. Howes had a master's degree in criminal science from the state university. He replied with a skeptical snort, dragged a stool next to Jenkins's chair and squinted into the computer monitor.

"What's that thing that looks like a pregnant snake?" Jenkins raised an eyebrow. "Rorschach would have a field day with you. What do you know about tsunamis?"

"I know I never want to see one again !"

"That's a good start. Let me don my professor's hat, and I'll give you a crash course." He wrote out the words tsu and nami on a pad of paper. "These words represent the Japanese characters for 'harbor' and 'wave.' An international conference adopted the term in 1963 to avoid confusion."

"I always heard them called tidal waves."

"That was the popular term, but it isn't accurate. Tides come from gravitational forces such as the moon, sun and planets. Even we scientists were wrong. We called them seismic sea waves, which implies that earthquakes generate all tsunamis. A quake is only one cause."

"You think a quake caused that mess out there?"

"Yes. No. Maybe." He gri

"You're losing me."

Jenkins thought for a moment. "It's like Joe Johnson, the town drunk, staggering home after a night on the town. Reason he zigzags is because the booze has affected his equilibrium. He has to keep catching himself from going off in the wrong direction. Sometimes he can't stop and slams into a wall and knocks himself out." He frowned. "Okay, it's a rough analogy."

"I get the picture."

"Think of Joe as that column of water and the wall as the Maine coast. Only difference is the wall gets the worst of it not, Joe."

"How come every wave isn't a potential tidal wa – I mean tsunami ?"

"I knew your policeman's logic would come into play. Two reasons. Time and distance. The time between waves hitting the beach is five to twenty seconds. With a tsunami, that time can be ten minutes to two hours. The distance between waves is called the wavelength. Beach waves can be three hundred to six hundred feet apart. With a tsunami, you're talking three hundred miles-plus."

"I've seen some pretty destructive beach waves."

"So have I. But even an ordinary wave crashing on the beach only has a short life and a speed of ten to twenty miles per hour. Your tsunami has had hundreds of miles and hours to build up its energy. The deeper the water, the faster the wave. That's why a tsunami can hit six hundred miles per hour as it crosses the ocean, even though ships don't feel it and you can't see it from the air. Let me give you an example. In 1960, an offshore quake near Chile sent a wave across the Pacific. The wave was no more than three feet high. Twenty-two hours later, when the wave hit the coast of Japan, it was twenty feet high and killed two hundred people. The waved bounced around the Pacific for days, causing damage wherever it touched."

"If it's only a ripple in the ocean, how'd you figure this was going to be a big one?"

"I was lobstering out on the ledge where it's comparatively shallow. The wave slowed down when it hit the shallows and started to peak. It was moving slower, but all the energy it built up was still there. That energy has to go somewhere. When the wave approaches shore, the mousy little sea grows up into a monster. Sometimes it builds up into a great towering wave. It might be a bunch of series of breaking waves, or a bore, like a bunch of steps with a steep breaking front. It might suck out the water and spit it back out."

"That's what happened with us. Like someone pulled the plug out of the harbor."

Jenkins nodded. "Tsunamis are fascinating and very adaptive critters. Reefs, bays, entrances to rivers, can affect the damage, the slope of the beach. The waves can crest to one hundred feet or more, but mostly they just surge. All depends on what's in the way. They can wrap around a headland and cause damage on the opposite side of an island. When they get squeezed, they become really dangerous, because you've got all that intensity built up in a small space." He pointed out the window at a river that fed into the harbor. The high banks were littered with debris. "They can even go up rivers, as they did here."

"Good thing the condos Jack Schrager built on the banks of the river weren't occupied, or there would be a lot of dead people floating around in that harbor instead of scraps of wood. Damned lucky you saw those waves and recognized their threat."

"More than lucky." Jenkins clicked his computer mouse and pulled up a map of the world with arrows pointing to various countries. "In the decade starting in 1990, tsunamis killed more than four hundred people and caused billions of dollars in damage." He tapped the screen. "This one in Papua New Guinea was a real horror. The wave was forty- five feet tall when it hit along nineteen miles of coast. A few minutes later, there were more than two hundred people dead."

He switched over to a simulation. "This is an animation of a quake-generated wave attacking a Japanese village back in 1923. You see a lot of big waves in the Pacific. It's surrounded by the 'rim of fire,' all those tectonic plates that shift every so often."

"Hate to be so parochial, but we're talking the Atlantic, not the Pacific, and the coast of Maine, not Japan. I've lived here all my life and I've yet to hear about a quake."

"You've probably had more minor tremors than you know of, but I agree, that's why I started thinking about other causes. Tsunamis caused by landslides are less common. Then you've got volcanic eruptions and large meteorites."