Murderland

Chapter 1

The Floating Bridge

Make a pact with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.
-Romanian proverb

Denn die Todten reiten schnell.
For the dead travel fast.
-Gottfried August Bürger, "Lenore"

Once upon a time, you could smell it, the salt water and the accelerants, the creosote, the diesel, and the benzene. Now people call it "Emerald City," unspeakable gall. Back in the day, no one called it an emerald city.

It's dark. At forty-seven degrees, thirty-six minutes north of the equator, Seattle is the northernmost U.S. city with a population of over half a million, north of Boston and Burlington, north of Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, for that matter, and on the same latitude as Zurich, Switzerland. At the winter solstice in Seattle, there are eight hours and twenty-five minutes of daylight. When you're a kid, you're waiting for the bus in the dark and coming home near dusk.

All bridges lead to Seattle, but Seattle is a bit of spume, iridescent, evanescent, an oily bubble blowing atop the waves. It's a sad place in the 1970s, a place no one wants to be. A literal backwater. Someone puts up a billboard on the way to the airport: Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights. The city lacks historical significance, confidence, political power, and pride of place. Its economy is boom and bust: Boeing and Weyerhaeuser, Weyerhaeuser and Boeing. Their contracts are always being canceled.

Its fortunes reflect the weather, a few fickle weeks of summer bracketed by months of overcast, the clouds clamping down, supplying mist and seeping rain and continuous bone-chilling cold. As a boy, my father learns by heart "The Cremation of Sam McGee," a Robert W. Service poem inspired by the Alaska gold rush, and he recites it ever after by the campfire:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

It's a funny poem about freezing to death.


Behold a lethal geography. A river of rock and ice carves the groove of Puget Sound between the mountains, gouging out Lake Washington and its mirror image, Lake Sammamish. Last gasp of the Ice Age, the Fraser Glaciation presses south down the Fraser Valley sometime between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, five thousand feet thick where the town of Bellingham will be, thirty-five hundred feet at Seattle, two thousand at Tacoma. That’s pressure. When the glaciers withdraw, they leave erratics in their wake. Erratics are boulders the size of buildings, calling cards of the apocalypse.

The ice leaves an erratic near what is currently the University of Washington campus, eighty feet in diameter and nineteen feet high. In times past, it was used by Native people as a landmark; later, mountain climbers began using it to train: Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest, once scaled it. It is called the Wedgwood Erratic, and it lies becalmed between 28th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 72nd Street. Something, or someone, has left it there.

East across the mountains from Seattle, across the Cascades, we find a land of hanging valleys, scablands, and coulees, topographical anomalies so bizarre that geologists struggle to explain them. Unimaginable forces have been at work, violating everything known about natural erosion. What made these terrible scars? No one can say.

In 1927, a high school biology teacher in Seattle named J. Harlen Bretz delivers a paper at the Geological Society in Washington, D.C., theorizing that the weird distortions were carved by catastrophic flooding unleashed by the collapse of vast ice dams. His theory is called "preposterous." He is dismissed as "incompetent."

He is, of course, correct.

Fifteen thousand years ago, there was an event so bizarre it inspired scenes in science fiction novels. To the east, an ice dam formed between the mountains, stretching ten to thirty miles, creating Lake Missoula, a prehistoric body of water two thousand feet deep, covering three thousand square miles and holding five hundred cubic miles of water, exerting pressures of unimaginable force. At an unknown time, on an unspecified day, the ice dam failed and the water let fly.

No one alive has ever seen or heard anything like it. If there were hide-wearing humans in the area, pre-Clovis colonizers following their mammoth bliss, they likely did not survive to tell the tale. The hydraulic pressure of the flood ripped out bedrock, scouring the earth, changing the courses of great rivers, scoring the land, leaving massive rents that are still visible. Eddies of glacial silt washed up against mountainsides, still extant. Ice dams formed and failed again. The cycle was repeated dozens of times, perhaps once every half century over several thousand years. Geologists quibble, but they agree on one thing: All dams leak. All dams fail.

Spreading and contracting, glaciers leave the land black and blue, dominated by rock walls and harsh crags, lowlands covered in cedars and firs and primitive ferns the color of bruises. Rocked in the wind, the trees move of their own accord, swaying on unseen currents, lowering, watching, waiting.

The Northwest is biding its time, with five active volcanoes marching south down the Washington Cascades: Mount Baker, Glacier Peak, Mount Rainier, Mount Saint Helens, and Mount Adams. Each is an organic smelter, ready to bring forth gas, liquid rock, and ash. Civilization, such as it is, is erected on the back of this dragon, its bridges and tunnels as delicate as eggshell.

Magma, cataclysms. This is the natural path of the OWL, cutting through Seattle, passing north of Rainier, a forecast of disasters past and future. To the planet, it's all a game, Puget Sound just a "big hole" between two mountain ranges, a trough filled with immense crustal toy blocks. There is a 45 percent probability that over the next fifty years the Juan de Fuca plate, lying offshore beneath the Pacific, will cause a "megathrust," a subduction earthquake of higher than 8.0 magnitude. It will do this by trying to force its way under the Cascadia continental plate.

Beneath us lies basement rock, the lowest layer above the earth's mantle, an unstable mélange, basalt and gabbro. Rock can change its spots. Put pressure on it and it goes through a phase change, compacting, tilting, sinking, deforming.

Geologists compare the slow-motion accident that is the Pacific Northwest to a train wreck or a jackknifing tractor trailer. A block of rock we call "Washington" is hitting the wall, crumpling, folding, and faulting. Something temporarily known as "Oregon" is curling around it in clockwise rotation. A megathrust is expected every two hundred and forty years on average. It has been more than three hundred years since the last one. In the year 1700, there was a great calamity, a movement of the earth and everything upon it that caused the cedars and firs to slide upright off the island I come from. Someday, they may rise again.

"Faulting is complex and not yet understood," scientists say.

Yet we know, don't we.

The earthquake to come is expected to bury the streets of downtown Seattle under eighty feet of broken glass and crack the Grand Coulee Dam, one of the largest concrete structures in the world. It will alter the topography of islands.

It will raise a tsunami to inundate the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and Japan. Rock, air, fire, and water: they will not take no for an answer.

The movement of the earth may or may not be related to melting under the continental crust and the long-expected lahar, in which hot gases and molten lava will flow from Mount Rainier, boiling the glaciers on its face, and mud and lava will pour out to sea, following the routes of rivers to the Sound.

It is more likely than not. The lahar has happened before, some sixty times, and is expected to happen every five hundred to a thousand years. The last time was six hundred years ago. Just a blink. That's when a ragged chunk of the mountain tore off. It still appears to be missing, near the top.

The next time the lahar happens, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources expects it will cost $6 billion and the lives of the 150,000 people living on top of old mudflows in nearby towns in the Puyallup Valley if they are not evacuated in time. Schoolchildren in the town of Orting, on the slopes of Rainier, are trained to run uphill, out of the valley, when sirens go off, triggered by trip wires and sensors.

On a clear day, Rainier is stunning as seen from Seattle: star of picture postcards, a glittering, coveted view, a snow cone of brightest white against deepest blue. Diamonds, sapphires, and platinum. "The mountain is out," people say, self-satisfied, self-confident.

But it is all a facade. The mountain is admittedly "rotten inside." Hollow, full of gas. A place where bad things happen.

Bad things can happen by accident. But sometimes they happen on purpose, and sometimes they are engineered. By engineers.

Every great psychopath wants a floating bridge. In Persia, Xerxes, King of Kings, orders his armies to cross the Hellespont on pontoon bridges made of flax and papyrus. When waters rise in a storm, sending his spans to eternity, he whips the water in retaliation. He beheads his engineers.

Sometime between AD 37 and 41, Caligula plans to ride across the Bay of Baiae by lashing together ships' hulls and laying a causeway upon them. No one today knows whether he built it or not.

Fleeing the Russians, Napoleon orders three floating spans across the Berezina. His Dutch builders tear down the houses of local people to build them, but the improvised pontoons are flimsy. In the chaos of combat, thousands of soldiers and civilians perish in the icy waters.

The Washington State Department of Transportation is no less grandiose. The growing city of Seattle is packed into a narrow north-south strip of land bordered on the west by saltwater of Puget Sound and on the east by freshwater Lake Washington. The city can grow north and south, but a valuable expanse of land lies across the lake, on the east side. In the middle of the lake, a natural stepping stone, is Mercer Island.

A thirty-five-year-old engineer named Homer Hadley dreams of building a concrete floating bridge spanning Lake Washington from Seattle to Mercer Island. After traffic crosses the island, a shorter, conventional bridge on the isle's eastern shore will carry motorists to the east side of the lake. His critics call his notion "Hadley's Folly."

As early as 1920, Hadley is dreaming of his bridge. Concrete river barges come into vogue after World War I, when European cities run short of steel. During the next world war, concrete ships and barges ferry men and materiel across the English Channel on D-Day. They are deployed in the Pacific. Working for the Seattle Public School District's architectural office, Hadley proposes the idea in an earnest talk delivered to the American Society of Civil Engineers. At a time when the population is a few hundred thousand, he's pilloried by city fathers, editorials in The Seattle Times, and everyone who wants to preserve the aesthetic beauty of Lake Washington.

Mercer Island's first bridge, the East Channel Bridge, is constructed in 1923, but Hadley sees this as an insignificant span. Barely eighty feet long and made of wood, it connects the island to the east side of the lake and the rural town of Bellevue. It becomes so rickety that school bus drivers make children get out of the bus and walk on foot, a perilous crossing. "A tragedy occurred in 1937," says a local history, when a boy slipped through the railing and drowned in the East Channel. Until a second bridge across the main channel is built, the structure still leaves islanders who want to get to Seattle having to take a passenger ferry or detour twenty-two miles around the south end of the lake.

Hadley is an outspoken critic of the New Deal and its architect, FDR. Nonetheless, he does not hesitate to pursue federal money, consulting with the director of the Washington State Department of Highways, Lacey V. Murrow. Lacey, the handsome brother of journalist and radio personality Edward R. Murrow, has joined the department as an engineer in his twenties. Dressed in sharp pinstriped suits and a camel-hair coat, his looks are compared favorably to those of Clark Gable. People laugh at Homer Hadley, a squinting, bespectacled man with receding hair, a geek, an egghead, an eighty-pound weakling. They don't laugh at Lacey V. Murrow.

Lacey is put in charge of the construction of two bridges, and they're both dedicated during the first two days of July 1940. This fact tends to be elided in later accounts. Because one of the bridges falls down.

The first to be dedicated is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a suspension toll bridge, thirty miles south of Seattle, spanning the slim arm of the Sound between the industrial city of Tacoma and the western peninsula, hosting Bremerton, a critical naval base. The ceremonial dedication of this crossing begins on July 1, under blue skies. Parades and floats file through downtown Tacoma, and ten thousand people crowd the shores to hear a nineteen-gun salute. The governor pays the first toll, and there stands Lacey V. Murrow, hailed by the press as a Horatio Alger. He stands a little off to the side, jaunty straw hat in hand, his chest bifurcated by the ribbon about to be cut by officials from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. He has just turned thirty-six, although his boss lies about his age. The press believes him to be forty-four. He is looking down, abashed. He should be.

On this celebratory day, Lacey receives a telegram from his younger brother, who's in London reporting on the Blitz for CBS Radio. Ed sends this terse message: congratulations hope you and bridges upstanding.

Ed may well have heard that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge has been fraught from funding to design. This bridge and the Lake Washington Pontoon Bridge are massive undertakings of Roosevelt's Public Works Administration, launched in the teeth of war. The impetus for the Tacoma bridge is military: the need for ready access to the Bremerton Navy Yard. But the original design put forward by Murrow's engineers, calling for heavy twenty-five-foot-deep deck trusses, is estimated to cost $11 million, deemed too high by federal authorities.

An East Coast engineer is brought in to redesign it. He drafts a thrillingly thin, graceful art deco suspension bridge: two lanes floating atop a light, eight-foot-deep deck, cutting the projected cost to $6.4 million. Washington State engineers examine the plan and declare it "fundamentally unsound." Their concerns are dismissed. The first cable suspension bridge of its type in the world, it will be built quickly, in nineteen months, leaving no time for wind tunnel testing. It will become the third-longest suspension bridge in the world, after two far heavier bridges, San Francisco's Golden Gate and New York's George Washington.