1963: A long bus ride through the Hindu Kush

I began my engineering career in the early 1960s, an era  when big was beautiful. This was also a time of great rivalry between the US and the Russians. As often as not this required demonstrations of who was the bigger man. Edward Teller, who will make a guest appearance later in this story, had designed and tested his hydrogen bomb on a Pacific island a few years before; the stolen Russian version inspired rational terror in us all in the following year. My first experience with a nuclear weapon was as a young army lieutenant in 1961 -- a later post for this blog -- and the Berlin blockade, followed soon after by a near miss of war in the Cuban missile crisis. There was a good deal of talk of Atoms for Peace too. The Bay Area Vallecitos plant, said to have been assembled from the innards of a Russian submarine,  was commissioned in the late 1950s, and by 1963 PG&E, having failed to build a plant at Bodega Bay near San Francisco, had purchased a lonely coastal site at Diablo Canyon, even securing an endorsement from the Sierra Club that this would be a good site for a 2000 Mw plant.

Afghan "terrorist" country today,  
peaceful in 1963 when I took 
my  long bus ride through the 
Hindu Kush

In those days my fondest dreams were about building big dams. I try now to recover that feeling. Was it fear or bravery that drove us to these things? The Russians had talked the Egyptians into letting them build the Aswan dam. One of my jobs, just out of the army, working for a famous engineering firm of the distinguished old fashioned partnership type, in New York City was to engineer a way to save the temples of Abu Simbel from the destructive rising waters behind Aswan. But we had some big dam tricks too, embodied in the great Tarbela Dam in Pakistan, which created an enormous 300 foot deep reservoir on the Indus River, then and now the biggest dam in the world and producer of almost twice as much power as Diablo Canyon.  MIT engineer John Lowe was in charge of that project,




 and for a while he favored me as a young apprentice over the huddle of Hungarian engineers that made up the staff of his Park Avenue firm. Would the great hydraulic pressures beneath that reservoir, nearly a Megapascal, blow a hole in the floor of the reservoir, destroying the dam, not to speak of an entire riverine civilization below? I was supposed to figure that out.

A couple of years later, in 1963, free to roam for a month with some jingle in my pocket, I made a kind of On-the-Road trip through that region, so dreaded today, taking a little bus packed with the devoted from the city of Peshawar, up to Tarbela. I wanted to meet the geologist whose work of field investigation had inspired me in New York. An odd and solitary duck, this geologist had coldly asked me "what I wanted there" when I finally found him in a little office overlooking the great Indus canyon. He didn’t seem impressed with my effort to meet him or particularly happy to be there. Thus dismissed lunchless (“I have no idea, perhaps you can find something to eat in some village on the way back”) I travelled by small bus through the great and rugged Beluchistan mountain chain into Afghanistan, living on sweet tea and nan which became increasingly delicious. as my hunger increased. Our real needs are not great; I found my concrete slab bed wonderfully comfortable after the third night in the This monastery, Suan Mokkh.

We had a vague idea at that time that the dam setting in the Hindu Kush was earthquake country. We knew there would be earthquakes and put accelerographic recorders on the embankment, top and bottom, and sure enough in 1974 accelerations of .03 and .01g respectively were noted by Dr. Ambraseys who visited the site and announced  that the area had been affected by earthquakes duly noted in the annals since Alexander the Great passes through there in 379 BC. But we didn't anticipate another factor of scale with the great weight of the reservoir affecting the seismicity of the region, which it did. This generic hazard became most widely known three years later in nearby Koyna India where a big dam had apparently caused a magintude 6+ earthquake which killed 200 people. The following year I studied soil mechanics under Bishop in London and learned how induced seismicity might -- and might not -- work. Over the years the subject of errant underground waters became an interest, played out in such projects as the Baldwin Hills dam failure investigation, and more recently an interest in the connection with rising or tidal sea levels on coastal seismicity. This is a subject of a future post.

The Irish Hills, site of Diablo Canyon. 
More than a skin deep resemblance

I conclude this post with a Google Earth view of the terrain I travelled through on that little bus between Peshawar and Kabul 50 years ago.

Which may be compared with a remarkably similar shot of the Irish Hills, behind the DCNN, shown earlier above.

I will claim that the resemblance is more than skin deep though at a vastly different scale and suggest in another post how a comparison of the Irish Hills with the Hindu Kush may be profitably developed to shed light on Central Coast seismicity.