In 1974, China's National Earthquake Bureau made two crucial decisions: that a major earthquake would hit the country within the next two years, and that strange animal behavior and other weird phenomena could be a useful predictor a coming earthquake. Over 100,000 "honorary observers" were trained to be on the lookout for animals behaving as though scared or anxious, for well water that suddenly clouded and bubbled, and for random lightning strikes in clear skies, among other things.
Shortly after a minor earthquake in December 1974, reports started flooding in reporting all these events, and after a string of more small tremors in February 1975, Chinese officials made the decision to evacuate the people of Haicheng, a northern city with a population of over a million. The day after the evacuation, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck, and experts have predicted that over 150,000 people would have been killed or injured if the government had not stepped in at precisely the right moment.
It's considered the only successful earthquake prediction in history, although it's still debated whether the officials were acting on the unusual signs, the swarm of minor quakes, or a combination of the two. This kicked off a minor buzz of renewed excitement for earthquake prediction among seismologists, and the U.S. National Research Council even issued a report in 1976 that short-term earthquake prediction would be a reality within ten years.
But even this doesn't have a happy ending. On July 28, 1976, a pair of 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit the northern Chinese city of Tangshan, and this time there was little to no advanced warning. The earthquake left about 250,000 people dead and another 164,000 seriously injured. For all the good their prediction methods had done in Haicheng, they had been useless in Tangshan, leaving it an open question whether the initial "success" was just a spectacularly lucky coincidence.
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