General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Franciscos 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. This is one time that Im hoping all the science is wrong, and it wont happen for another thousand years, Murphy says.
In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the dangeror, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.
In May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, together with their Corps of Discovery, set off from St. Louis on Americas first official cross-country expedition. Eighteen months later, they reached the Pacific Ocean and made camp near the present-day town of Astoria, Oregon. The United States was, at the time, twenty-nine years old. Canada was not yet a country. The continents far expanses were so unknown to its white explorers that Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the journey, thought that the men would come across woolly mammoths. Native Americans had lived in the Northwest for millennia, but they had no written language, and the many things to which the arriving Europeans subjected them did not include seismological inquiries. The newcomers took the land they encountered at face value, and at face value it was a find: vast, cheap, temperate, fertile, and, to all appearances, remarkably benign.
A century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of quiet. It took another fifty years to uncover and interpret the regions seismic history. Geology, as even geologists will tell you, is not normally the sexiest of disciplines; it hunkers down with earthly stuff while the glory accrues to the human and the cosmicto genetics, neuroscience, physics. But, sooner or later, every field has its field day, and the discovery of the Cascadia subduction zone stands as one of the greatest scientific detective stories of our time.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
cascadiance
(19,537 posts)... a couple of years ago.
I made a suggestion then after Portland has voted down a number of measures at the ballot boxes that would fix a lot of the aging schools and other public buildings in this area to make them more earthquake proof. I was saying that perhaps their script writers could write an episode where a fictional Vessen had the power to make earthquakes, and then to have that episode project what would really do a city like Portland, who's a lot less prepared for earthquakes than California is. He said he liked the idea and would forward it to the screen writers. The end of that season had a cliff hanger where the new Vessen baby caused the earth to tremble, but the subsequent season didn't have that plot scenario play out. Maybe with this report they might revisit that notion.
I'd like to think that if fiction can show the horror of what could happen, perhaps it could build awareness here in the northwest that we need to do more to prepare for this likely monstrosity when it happens in reality.
RandySF
(59,812 posts)And because it is so important, I want to write all-caps.
AN "EARTHQUAKE PROOF" BUILDING MEANS ONLY THAT YOU ARE LESS LIKLEY TO DIE IF YOU ARE IN IT. NO ENGINEER WILL EVER GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL GET TO USE IT AFTER A MAJOR QUAKE.
cascadiance
(19,537 posts)People in California (I used to live there) are used to ensuring that buildings and other infrastructure are up to code, but like you said, that still doesn't stop people from getting killed in bad earthquakes too. My sister had an officemate down in SoCal talking to her daughter on a cell phone next to her when it suddenly went out during the Bay area quake that took so many and she was one that got killed when the freeway collapsed on top of her in Oakland. One of my customers made the news as having the first baby born right during that earthquake too. Those quakes can be so devastating to so many. Having moved up here, I don't see people as conscious of the need to at least try to minimize the damage as much as possible. At least we can save a lot of people if we do things right, even if we still may lose a lot of people anyway. Having lived in both areas, I can see the different level of consciousness of these problems in both areas. I think that is probably factoring in a lot to what the writer is discussing here.
I think what will take out a hell of a lot of people is near the coastline where there's probably going to be a big huge tsunami coming from the coast off of Seattle, with basically no warning time to allow residents to evacuate safely. With that area so flat and not having a lot of high cliffs like so much of California coast line has especially near the mouth of the Columbia River, you are going to see far more people being killed by tsunamis when people without a helicopter or airplane they can get to quickly have no place to go.
Needa Moment
(56 posts)What cell phones looked like back then 😕
lpbk2713
(42,775 posts)it will probably be just as bad on the east coast in terms of devastation but due to a different cause. With rising sea levels if another Katrina or Sandy or Andrew hits a major coastal city the damage will be monumental. One saving grace may be that populations will be able to evacuate with the advance warning and there won't be as much loss of life. But with the right magnitude storm some cities may not be able to recover.
Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)jhart3333
(332 posts)Bummer
Lizzie Poppet
(10,164 posts)I live in Portland, and I'm on the slope of the ridgeline formed by a faultline running through Forest Park, Washington Park, the Japanese Garden, etc. In a 100-year-old brick building, no less...
So yeah...pretty much fucked.
Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)It was scary things like that that made me decide 30 years ago to move out of S.F. and up to Oregon. Looks I moved for nothing!
Spirochete
(5,264 posts)Dunno if such a destructive force is going to say "well, here's the freeway - i dare not go any further..."
shanti
(21,675 posts)upon your proximity to waterways like rivers. there are so many rivers ending on the coastlines of the PNW. if there was a tsunami, would the water just go up each river? pretty sure it would go up the columbia, it's so huge! how terrifying would that be?
I'm about 3 miles north of the Columbia river, too. There is high ground in between it and me, though...
shanti
(21,675 posts)blindersoff
(258 posts)about 60 miles west of I-5. We'll be sucked down when the plate dives under... yikes
Berlin Expat
(951 posts)OTISBURG??
One of my favorite scenes - for me, Gene Hackman is my favorite Lex Luthor.
davidpdx
(22,000 posts)And there is only one Superman for me and that is Christopher Reeve. RIP
Flying Squirrel
(3,041 posts)At the above link it says the "big one" involving the entire plate happens more like every 500 years on average, while the southern one (Oregon and Northern California) is the one that happens about every 240 years. So that would seem to suggest that Oregon is overdue, but not Washington. If I'm reading this correctly.
Drunken Irishman
(34,857 posts)Ever since I was a kid - one that'll take over 2,000 lives and injure 500,000 or so. But as much as they keep saying it'll happen...it hasn't happened.
pnwmom
(109,025 posts)The "Seattle is toast" line could be hyperbole.
Still, I hope it goes another couple hundred years.
RandySF
(59,812 posts)And Seattle will sustain severe damage from the quake itself.
pnwmom
(109,025 posts)We've always known that Seattle, like San Francisco, faces serious damage from a future earthquake.
Meanwhile, a top climate scientist has recently said the polar ice cap is melting, methane is being released, and the whole world is soup in just a few decades.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)at least it's quicker.
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)that if it falls will cause maybe a 200' tsunami, wiping out everything on the Atlantic coast. Or maybe not.
And there's always that Yellowstone caldera that's due to blow.
At any rate, there's no way we can protect ourselves from something like the Dekkan Traps, subduction zones, supervolcanoes
or comet hits that in the past have wiped out as much as 90% of life at the time.
Except for a few areas, we can't even build sensibly for expected problems, so I don't see worrying about the unexpected to be worth while.
Dyedinthewoolliberal
(15,614 posts)I can't prevent the 'quake and the only thing I can do is move to avoid it, and I ain't moving............. (I live 30 miles north of Seattle).
blindersoff
(258 posts)on the Olympic Peninsula (WA). Hoping not to have to outrace the water from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. As it is, we will most likely be totally cut off from civilization...
mindwalker_i
(4,407 posts)and the Bay Area - not mentioned - is far west of I5 (I live here now).
Rex
(65,616 posts)will be killed by the huge wall of water the quake will cause. All because people bury their head in the sand, because 'things cost money'. Yeah they do. Sorry.
Arugula Latte
(50,566 posts)But, at some point ... well, crap. What can you do but just cross your fingers.
Liberal_in_LA
(44,397 posts)Oneironaut
(5,547 posts)Prepare yourselves! You're all going to die (But probably of old age)!
aint_no_life_nowhere
(21,925 posts)He's absolutely fed up with living near Las Vegas in the desert and is thinking of moving precisely there. I myself was thinking of joining him up there, as I am totally fed up with southern California.
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)Being from Southern California and spending a year in Japan, I'm kinda used to them. I went through the big 6.7 Sylmar quake in '71(we were about 15 miles from the epicenter) which was really scary. And, a pretty big one in Japan.
Now in Washington and about 12 miles west of I-5.
There is no safety in the cosmos. Alan Watts
Hatchling
(2,323 posts)I'm right between I-5 ad I-15. That means I will only get lightly toasted. I hope it holds on until I can move back to La Mesa. I'll only be warmed in the oven there. Who am I kidding: the whole county will be wrecked.