Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
By the 1880s, then, the bureau's volunteer network was buzzing with
activity. it was supported, however, almost exclusively by local officials.
After the army's takeover of the weather service in 1870, the cooperatives
were neglected at the federal level.
61
Moreover, the absence of consistent
time zones before 1883 meant that comparing reported times of shocks
across state lines was still a Herculean task. indeed, little progress toward
a national earthquake service was made in the two years after American
scientists met in Washington in 1884. Systematic earthquake reporting in
the Reconstruction era would therefore be a strictly local enterprise, where
it was attempted at all.
62
Southern Discomfort
Consequently, not a single seismograph was in operation on the east Coast
when disaster struck Charleston on 31 August 1886. The shock killed an
estimated eighty people in the Charleston area. it was felt clear across the
eastern half of the country, from the Gulf of Mexico to northern Michigan,
and from Arkansas in the west to around five hundred miles beyond the
Atlantic coast. The disturbed area measured 774,000 square miles, on par
with that of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
63
The city of Charleston lost
25 percent of the total value of its buildings.
64
Yet not even this disaster could convince Washington to organize a seis-
mological network. The Geological Survey furnished Charleston residents
with crude seismoscopes, but locals stopped paying them any attention
within a few months. Although an estimated three hundred aftershocks oc-
curred in the thirty-five years after 1886, a scientist searching for press reports
of them in 1914 complained that seismic disturbances had lost their “value
as news items as far as South Carolina newspapers were concerned.”
65
Several east Coast scientists descended on the stricken region to inves-
tigate. Some found the event well suited to Mallet's architectural methods
of investigation, since it had thrown down walls, gables, and chimneys of
many of the graceful wooden houses in Charleston and neighboring Sum-
merville.
66
But the chief investigator, Clarence Dutton of the Geological
Survey, considered Mallet's methods to belong to “the outermost pale of
scientific philosophy.”
67
Dutton was on his way to becoming the foremost
proponent of instrumental seismology at the survey. However, of necessity
and nearly despite himself, he founded his investigation of 1886 on a novel
use of noninstrumental reports.
it was the first time that American scientists were pursuing the style of
