Our next journey was from Barrios across to Guatemala City, where we had distant views of such volcanoes as the pure cone of Agua and the sharp peak of Santa Maria, which in October of 1902 had blown out its flank and left a vast hole. The Guatemalan plateau of rich soil and abundant market products rises gradually from the wet banana lands on the Caribbean side to a height of 4,870 feet at Guatemala City. This is on the line of volcano cracks. Then the land plunges abruptly in a precipitous down-faulted slope, to a low flat shelf along the Pacific Ocean. This shelf is covered with the merging of many deltas formed by the streams and torrents which drain the well-watered plateau. Along this line at the top of the precipice is the chain of volcanoes, with rich coffee lands at their feet on the upper slopes. Coffee plantations were destroyed by steam, mud flood, and ash blasts in 1902, and similar destruction was destined to begin again in 1923.
A large model of Central America has been built in a park in the open air in Guatemala City, showing magnificently the upland plateau and its mountains, the flat slope to the east, and the long straight steep plunge to the Pacific coastal shelf. This is one of the best illustrations of the block faulting of a continent, lifted like a huge flat slab along a crack, and tilted away from the Pacific. The Pacific block dropped down.
The same structure is true, on a larger scale, of the line of the Andes, lifted as a volcano-covered slab, down-faulted along the Chilean coastal plain. The upland slopes away to the basin of the Amazon. In these studies we are experimenting with volcanoes on the scale of geography, but the principles involved apply to Mexico and to the Cascade Range in Oregon. They probably apply also to the Aleutian, the Kamchatkan, and the western Pacific arcs, considered as upheaved and eroded ridges. They are arcs because they are ancient calderas.
We traveled by steamer along the Pacific coast to Panama, where the canal was being finished. We were impressed by General Goethals and his associate engineers, and with the marvellous organization of big engineering as the United States could administer it. Yellow fever had been conquered, ships constantly brought dairy products from New York to canal employees, houses were screened and unglazed, and the jungle was cut back to limits of safety from the mosquitoes. We found lively young American college graduates, both men and women, playing tennis in the deep tropics, where earlier hundreds had died of fever. We arrived just at the time when sides of the Culebra Cut were continuously sliding inward like a glacier, to close up the ditch. The ground under a village at the top of the bank was cracking in long crevasses, and habitations had to be abandoned. The only answer was to dig away the hill with hundreds of dump cars, until the slope was flat enough to stop sliding.
An amusing episode occurred at the Pacific end of the canal, where giant monitors, or hose nozzles, were being used to cut away the banks. Engineer Williamson had conceived the idea of mounting these monitors on concrete barges made on the spot. He covered the frames with steel mesh, and sprayed concrete against the mesh until a water-tight hull was produced. Fellow engineers jeered at Williamson and said that a boat made of rock would surely sink. Someone asked Williamson, when his first barge bore up the heavy monitors and was successful, what he was going to name it. He painted the name in large letters on the barge “Ivory Soap, it floats.”
We met in Costa Rica and Panama Arthur Herschel, city engineer of Kingston, Jamaica, who was responsible for the reconstruction of that city after the terrific earthquake of 1907. Herschel invited Spofford and me to stay with him on our way home, stopping off when we passed Jamaica. We did so, were delightfully entertained, and learned about engineering and rehabilitation after the most intense earthquake of all history.
The momentary intensity of the quake had been utterly without warning, as though two mountains had collided, and the masonry of the business section of Kingston crumbled almost instantaneously. A British major was walking along the main thoroughfare, carrying a heavy walking stick, when at the other end of the street, he noticed a commotion and thought it was a negro riot. The disturbance came toward him with a roar, and he saw clouds of dust rise from the street like a tornado and approach him. He felt the ground jolting, raised his stick, and decided to stand and fight it. The buildings right and left simply exploded, and he was fending off bricks and stones and timbers. His feet were half buried in rubble, and he sat down on a steel girder which had lunged out into the street behind him. The dust was suffocating, the noise was a traveling roar which went past him and on down the street behind him. He called to a black man to dig out his feet, but the man rushed by with staring, crazy eyes. He heard screams and saw women running. It was some time before Red Cross stations were established and the army men rescued him.
The lesson taught by this earthquake, more intense than the one at Cartago, was that the wooden bungalows of the hilly suburbs on rocky ground stood the disaster better than even reinforced concrete in the congested waterfront district. The better built government buildings were preserved in part.
The Jamaica law of 1907 had established definite boundaries for wooden construction, limited to the suburbs, and made new and wider streets in the business district. It had also established rigorous fire insurance laws, and a city building code requiring specified construction for all masonry. The result was a marked ring of parkway separating the commercial center from the dwellings in the suburbs. The trouble with such legislation, the effect of which I saw in Kingston twenty-six years later, is that earthquakes are hopelessly discontinuous. With no more big earthquakes as testers, such laws become dead letter, a new generation remembers nothing, and an irresponsible and ignorant native population poses new problems of poverty and vice. Earthquake construction reform becomes an impractical dream. This is part of the unsatisfactory quality of earthquake science, where assistance to humanity is concerned.
So ends my expedition decade, 1901 to 1910, after a succession of studies in the field, which may be called Operation Pelée-Soufrière, Operation Vesuvius, Operation Aleutians, Operation Kilauea-Tarumai, and finally Operation Cartago. I did not think of these at the time as the strategic work of warring with a task force in geographical volcanology; but now as I look back on it, I can see in each expedition the organization of an institution and men, and progress of volcanic geology.