When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.
Fascinating, albeit a tad dry, article about how and why the Pacific Northwest is due/overdue for big earthquake. The science is fascinating, but if you can get past that and examine the potential infrastructure, property, and economic damage, you’ll feel the urge to go strap your hot water heaters to the wall and check your supply of freeze drieds.
While I rarely correct others for spellin and grammar n such, growing up my dad was a QA person for a firm that dealt with water softening, home uses etc.
“hot water heaters”
Do not exist. If the water was already hot, why would you need to heat it? 🙂
Neat article though.
I feel the same way about “PIN numbers”…the N in PIN already means numbers.
I was living in a suburb of Seattle when the 2001 Nisqually quake (6.7) hit. I lived 18 miles from my office in SODO (south downtown). On a normal day, it took about an hour to get to and from my house to work then. (the same trip is not 1.5 to 2 hours) On the day of the nisqually quake, it took three and a half hours to get home.
Seattle is built on landfill, cliffs and waterways. There are hundreds of bridges, tunnels and obstacles. If the “big one” does hit, and it hits during a business day, very few people will be able to get home within a day or two. Even walking out will be almost impossible if you live more than a few miles from downtown. This was one of the many reasons we left.
Kerry
There’s a reason I live in the desert and not on the coast….. 😀
I have participated in workshops with FEMA Region 10 and Oregon’s Office of Emergency Management, and know that the article severely understated the consequences of a Cascadia Event. I was talking a few months ago with a geologist who works for OEM. She privately opined that it could be 10 years before a road to the coast from I-5 was rebuilt. The entire western power grid will be down for who knows how long. A third of the residents of northwestern Oregon heat with natural gas from pipelines that will be destroyed and not rebuilt for years. Here’s something that’s REALLY going to hit home. Think what will happen to the internet when all the undersea cable terminals in Washington and Oregon are destroyed.
The greatest limiting factor on human survival in the American West has always been water. Without it, we die. That’s why I live on the coast, and not in the desert. My elevation is well above the inundation zone, and I retrofitted my house’s foundation well into bedrock. I have a great climate, plenty of water, and good libertarian people around me. My lemon and orange trees produce lots of fruit every year, as do my apple, peach, and cherry trees. Trees grow like weeds around here. My garden does too well. Zucchini anyone?
Living in the desert, at least the uninhabitable portion of Eastern Oregon / Washington won’t be much protection. I recently retired from teaching and I used to remind my students that when the ‘Big One’ hits Portland / Seattle etc, the L-waves from that energy release are predicted to be six feet high when they reach the Pendleton / Tri-Cities area of Oregon / Washington approximately 200 miles inland. L-waves (?), earthquakes produce three types of waves p-waves which are compression waves, they travel the fastest and are the first movement you might odetect, s-waves are shear waves that vibrate perpendicular to p-waves and are transmitted more slowly than p-waves, then come the l – waves or waves that travel along the surface like the swells in an ocean. So, imagine you’re sitting in your house in Pendleton when one of those swells goes by, your verticle displacement is predicted to be 6 feet….and, of course, your house will be displaced by the same energy and it is constructed so that it can withstand having one corner lifted six feet higher that than the other…right? Good luck getting under that table or to a doorway before the rest of the house finds it’s way to ear level….
We live in Easter WA near the CA border & I’ve wondered about this. Both our cabin & house are log construction. They withstood the 2001 tremor well, but I don’t know about something more than a tremor. Do elevation & nearness of mountain ranges make a difference?
A six foot swell from where? The Umatilla River?
My wife and I were 55 miles away from the ’94 Northridge quake. The room bed we were in literally moved as did the stairs going down from the loft. What was really strange was as we stood on the building stoop we watched as all the lights in the entire LA basin slowly went out.
It’s all your fault … that I spent far too long today attaching my gas water heater to the wall………..
Hope you feel bad.
Fault… some kind of pun?
IIRC, those L-waves weren’t figured out until after the ’89 Loma Prieta ‘quake. Or maybe that was when they realized that it turned “fill” land into the equivalent of a liquid. I saw that wave effect twice here in Silicon Valley, first around ’80, in Sunnyvale. The second was the ’89 quake, near San Jose. Both times I was looking at a blacktop parking lot, both of them probably built on fill. It is the most bizarre thing to see waves running through the ground. Reminds me of that “Tremors” movie to some extent, except the movement keeps happening. Waves were maybe a foot tall, enough to bounce some vehicle tires off the ground.