Portland Earthquake Rumor Gave Officials The Jimjams

PORTLAND - City and state emergency officials, the U.S. Geological Survey and even the Secret Service were alerted yesterday after a rumor that an earthquake would strike Portland within three days.

Authorities already were dealing with the president, vice president and assorted Cabinet members in town.

And they already were jittery after last week's 5.6 magnitude earthquake, centered about 30 miles south of Portland.

"I don't think it was to a panic stage," said Neil Heesacker, spokesman for the Portland Fire Bureau.

"I think there was real concern about it when we first got the word," Heesacker said. "Verification took time."

In the time that agencies were trying to track down the rumor, it spread like a fire through the forest in August.

"The chief just told me that the Coast Guard basically told us that there was a think tank in Aspen, Colo., that had predicted this earthquake to hit Portland within 48 to 72 hours," Heesacker said.

The Fire Bureau was notified about 9 a.m., after the Coast Guard received a phone call from someone in the Portland area.

"We tracked it back to the alleged real source, which was the group down in Aspen, The Institute for Advanced Studies," said Capt. Jim Townley, commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard Marine Safety Office in Portland.

"From what we've been able to determine, they've made no such prediction," Townley said.

No one answered the phone at the institute's Aspen office yesterday evening.

While the Coast Guard was pursuing the source of the information, the Fire Bureau sprang into action.

"Chief Ron Bender is in charge of emergency management for the Fire Bureau. What he did was call the mayor's office and his list of people he needs to notify," Heesacker said.

"And because Clinton's in town, well, they notified the Secret Service as well," Heesacker said.

Portland hospitals were put on alert from about 1:30 p.m. until 3 p.m., said Marcia Williams, spokeswoman for University Hospital at Oregon Health Sciences University.

"An alert means that we make phone calls to our infrastructure so our administrators know, our emergency and trauma staff knows, our media-relations department knows," she said.

The word also filtered out to the public.

People began calling their friends, the news media, public agencies.

"The real story is that there is a lot of fear out there about the earthquake, given that we had the wake-up call last Thursday," Townley said.

"There were a lot of people here in the Northwest that didn't think it was possible," Townley said.

When the rumors started, Townley said, this time people believed them.

After last week's earthquake, the news media reported that the Aspen institute's claims to have predicted it by measuring electromagnetic signals.

And the institute's Adam Trombley and David Farnsworth said the area would be in for an even larger quake - up to 7.5 magnitude on the Richter scale - within two or three months.

That report apparently resurfaced yesterday with a twist: The quake would be in two to three days.

The U.S. Geological Survey issued a statement yesterday saying it had no problem with the possibility a large quake could occur in the same area.

But "the likelihood of such an event cannot be estimated," the survey said. "Based on the historical record of earthquakes in this region, however, we judge that a higher level of preparedness is not warranted at this particular time."

In other words, you can't predict earthquakes.