Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Cascadia Subduction and Denial
I know. “Cascadia Subduction and Denial” sounds like the latest twist on PC college campus sexual consent forms, but this is actually about the way we think about risk … and don’t.
I remember watching an online video of the 2011 tsunami coming ashore in Japan. How easily, almost casually, the ocean reached in and swept everything away. And not the rice paper houses that insular or merely wilfully unknowing Americans might have wanted to imagine, but objects of recognizable solidity; big buildings, parking structures, shopping centers, highways, 18 wheelers. Picked up, tumbled, tossed away, gone.
The planet has its own clock that ticks away its own time. Occasionally, inevitably, a geologic hour is struck, and the inevitable happens: the earth’s surface shudders, buckles and cracks apart. Solid rock drops abruptly out from under whatever it was bearing up: trees, hills, cities, the ocean. The ocean reacts by forming itself into gigantic waves that move outward from the center, lifting boats, birds, our plastic debris and carrying all along until it flops itself down upon the land.
If human beings aren’t around to record it, or if modern human beings don’t take the testimony offered by pre-literate cultures seriously, we can’t know that the geologic clock was, as of that moment, re-wound and set once more to ticking. And you and I will probably be around when one such hour is struck; there is one coming, and it’s overdue. If you want to read all about it, the July 20th issue of the New Yorker has an essay about it called “The Really Big One,” by Kathryn Schulz.
She begins by telling us how we know what we know about the eventful plate tectonic history of the Cascadian Subduction zone, and how seismologists came to reconstruct that history, including its most recent cataclysm, and why they now warn of an imminent, full-margin rupture that “will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent.” Our continent, that is.
“It doesn’t speak well of European-Americans that [Native American] stories counted as evidence for a proposition only after that proposition had been proved.” Schultz writes.
Still, the reconstruction of the Cascadia earthquake of 1700 is one of those rare natural puzzles whose pieces fit together as tectonic plates do not: perfectly. It is wonderful science. It was wonderful for science. And it was terrible news for the millions of inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. As [Oregon State University paleoseismologist Chris] Goldfinger put it, “In the late eighties and early nineties, the paradigm shifted to ‘uh-oh.
For those who need to know, there is only one very tiny obligatory reference to climate change in the essay, since earthquakes (a few fracking-induced tremblers aside) are still not considered Our Fault.
Nor are they talking about the famous San Andreas fault: the “Cascadia subduction zone” runs for seven hundred miles off the northwest coast from Cape Medocino, California to Vancover Island in Canada. When this sucker lets loose, it will shake the mountains and liquefy the land and it will cause an enormous tsunami. Kind of like 2011 in Japan … only more so, because while Japan was the most seismically prepared nation on earth, the Pacific Northwest is almost completely unprepared for what is very likely to come.
I, for one, had never even heard of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Had you?
” … FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings, more than three thousand of them schools, will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers … [minimum estimate ] of twenty-seven thousand inured, almost thirteen thousand dead… one to three months to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water…” Halfway through my reading, I realized that if the article had been discussing a disaster waiting to happen in Maine, I would be resisting the implications strenuously.
Oh, well, they’re always predicting something-or-other…I’ve been hearing about the San Andreas Fault my whole life, and California still hasn’t fallen into the sea…
Maybe I just would have quietly closed the magazine and turned my thoughts determinedly elsewhere. After all, what am I supposed to do? Abandon my house and life, move to Iowa? Today? When the sun is shining, the birds are singing?
The ground remains unmoved beneath my feet and, so far as I know, lies still and seemingly solid beneath the feet of my Oregonian and Washingtonian friends and relations.
“The science is robust … we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three.”
What do we do with this?
Published in General
I just exchanged e-mails with a friend about this. As background, oh yes, have I heard about the Cascadia subduction zone. I’ve been writing about seismic risk for a very long time, and also worked with feverish intensity on what I hoped would be a successful grass-roots seismic risk mitigation projects in Turkey — a country which is at huge risk. My project wasn’t as successful as I hoped, but it’s possible that what we did will save a few lives. I hope I never find out.
I very nearly lost my family in the Haiti earthquake, which my brother wrote about here.
To repeat what I wrote to my friend: The risk to the Pacific Northwest is huge, and I’ve known this for a long time. But I lost all confidence in promoting seismic risk mitigation when I went back to Seattle some time after the quake in Haiti — and after I’d been working for years in various ways to try to coax people to nail their heavy items to the wall in Istanbul — and saw my mother’s home. She’d taken none of the precautions any sensible person would, and none that I’d been urging on everyone in eyesight, and this after nearly losing her son and grandson in Haiti, and this after years of hearing me talk and write about seismic risk mitigation to the point of being known as “the earthquake bore” by all of my friends.
Heavy bookshelves unsecured, paintings unsecured, rare musical instruments (worth a fortune) unsecured … no emergency plans, no idea what to do in the event. When I tried to discuss it with her, she waved her hand and said, “Oh, Marty [my stepfather] says not to worry about that.” When I tried to discuss it with Marty, he became extremely cross, and said that “In his line of work they make decisions about risk rationally, and it wasn’t a rational thing to worry about.” We had this discussion standing by a bookshelf that outweighed us both by a good 300 pounds and was completely unsecured; had the ground started shaking, we’d have been buried by it (or struck in the heads by flying volumes of Sleisenger and Fordtran’s Gastrointestinal and Liver Disease: Pathophysiology/Diagnosis/ Management).
My mother was in any event correct (although not rational). She died of cancer, first.
What I don’t understand is how the insurance markets work in the Pacific Northwest. Their home was insured. Why would anyone issue a policy to people who are the home-owning equivalent of heavy smokers with heart disease? I have to assume that if they took no precautions, no one in Seattle does. The only remedy I can envision to this (at least, the only one doesn’t involve massive and intrusive government coercion) is through what I would have assumed the natural mechanism of the insurance markets. Yet it didn’t seem to be working, as of about three years ago. And “Turkish fatalism” did not seem to account for the phenomenon.
The answer to “What are we to do with this” is prepare. The article mentions some of the major ways. But above all, houses are the weapon of mass destruction, when the ground shakes, and must immediately be retrofitted, with the highest priority going to schools and hospitals, which for structural reasons are both the most prone to collapse and the most apt to cause damage too unbearable to imagine when they do. Non-structural seismic risk mitigation is the next step. Securing heavy items; having emergency provisions, a plan for finding family members when communications go down, knowing what to do during a quake and training to do it. Tsunamis, as the article mentions, are a much harder problem, but even then there have been major improvements in early warning systems since the 2003 Pacific Tsunami, and these should immediately be put in place.
I could quote my good friend Josh, circa 1999, “I should get a 9mm that way it will be easier to get ammunition from the bodies.”
In all honestly, there really is nothing that can be done except abandon the place to nature, which is a highly unlikely course of action.
Less seriously, if it costs me my own life and that of my family, a case could be made it’s a small price to pay to be rid of Seattle and Portland.
The article in question. It’s a good read, but I couldn’t get the NPR voice out of my head while reading it.
No! There’s a lot that can be done, and it should all be done. The degree to which cities plan for this is the difference between the number of deaths in Port au Prince and the number in the subsequent Chile quake.
I do find it funny how the article breathlessly details the threat of tsunami to Seattle as if the entire Olympic Peninsula (and Kitsap!) didn’t sit between it and the Pacific Ocean. Hint: it’s a several hours drive from Seattle to the ocean. How a tsunami would behave inside the Puget Sound is an interesting question though.
If “the really big one” hits and the ground liquefaction occurs there really is no preparation which can help. If the Nisqually quake, which was only a 6.7, did this kind of damage, then the city cannot survive a 9+ shake without being entirely rebuilt before hand. This place can’t even dig a hole right, what makes you think they could prepare for “the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent”?
I was 3 miles from the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake at 4:31 am on January 17, 1994. Due to the upward thrust gravity restricting my movement for 40 long seconds I felt I was going to die. There must be a physiological explanation for when a person accepts that this is their last moment on earth.
One has to assume there will not be any first responders, power, water or telecommunications for at least 3 days after an event.
From what I understand, due to the geology of a subduction zone, the Northwest would also be subject to massive tsunamis.
Anyone in the Pacific Northwest who isn’t prepared is asking for trouble.
If I lived in this region with my family, I would relocate inland — beyond the reach of a tsunami — and I would opt for a building constructed with an eye to what earthquakes can do. If I were single and the age I am, I would not bother. The grim reaper will someday come no matter what I do.
I just don’t know what preparation would prove worthwhile. The type and amount of damage predicted with “the really big one” would basically put the entire region off grid for an extended period of time. Other than already being off grid I don’t see a realistic method of preparing.
Yes: I heard about the Cascadia Subduction Zone for the first time in early 2009. As a result, we have taken the recommended steps to prepare and plan, both at home and at work.
A lot of it would. As you say, preparing to be off the grid for a while, but also seismic retrofitting to reduce the chances of your home collapsing on you, and non-structure seismic risk mitigation to reduce the odds of being injured.
Ahhh—thanks for making a link, KP.
Wait—I think I read something you wrote about this re: Turkey!
It’s an odd phenomenon—the refusal to confront and take even minimal steps to prepare for something that is fairly likely to happen. The problem seems to be that we aren’t designed for the risks we actually face. We’re designed for lions and wolves, not two-hundred-and-forty-years-in-between earthquakes. Well, until very recently we weren’t able to predict such things, so why evolve to care about them?
You’ve got the… what are they called? Preppers? But they seem to be more concerned about human attacks (or maybe zombies) rather than a sixty-foot wall of water. We’re evolved to fear human beings, not moving earth.
Plus, as with so many human decisions to act (exercise, put a senile granny into a nursing home, stop smoking) the problem isn’t knowing what to do, it’s knowing what to do today.
Your stepfather would have to get out of bed one morning saying “Today I’m going to drive to Home Depot where I will buy clips, braces, Bungee cords or whatever, and then I’ll come home and secure those bookshelves. And I’m going to do this instead of mowing the lawn, e-mailing the president or re-reading Sleisenger and Fordtran’s Gastrointestinal and Liver Disease: Pathophysiology/Diagnosis/ Management .
And, en route to Home Depot, he’d travel over all these vulnerable bridges and roads, past schools and hospitals that would collapse or be inundated in the event. Maybe perishing in a libroclasm would then begin to seem like the best case scenario?
I read the article the other day and was horrified. You can’t insure against all possibilities like liquefied land, but I would think there are a lot of possible precautions. I wondered the same about Tsunamis, KP. It was fascinating how they figured out when the last earthquake was by using the tree rings and tracing Japan’s “orphan tsunami”.
I wonder if an earthquake of this magnitude and the slipping plates might trigger the caldera under Yellowstone. THAT combo sure sounds like the end times!
Emergency food rations (enough for 10 days for only $100 at Costco), water filters, water, batteries (any left after an event will be gouged), a wind up radio, camping/cooking gear, etc.
Okay people, the first thing we do is take a deep breath and chill out. Yes, we are overdue for a giant earthquake…….but we are also overdue for a giant volcanic eruption. No, I am not talking about the cascade range I am talking about the Yellowstone Supervolcano! A circle around Yellowstone with about a 1,000 mile radius will be covered in 10 feet of ash! How’s that one for sleeping at night? Does it make you want to move Dr. Rahe?
Listen there is no place on earth that is safe from mega-catastrophes. These kinds of things happen all the time (geologically speaking). The best course or action is to prepare as best as you can and then live your life.
I was horrified, too. And there’s something especially frightening about an event that is both massively powerful and essentially unpredictable.
Want to get worried? There is always the Yellowstone Caldera which could take out most of the life on earth and was until recently showing an abnormal amount of rise until a few years ago…..
I have Dear Friends in Portland Oregon I have know for 25 years, they were good conservatives when they moved out there. Now I have seen the locals slowly twist and infect their judgement.
I find myself ashamedly nodding to KP Sodom & Gomorrah reference in comment #3. Some lessons of the indifference that Gaia has of us need to be relearn every few generations.
By the same logic, should every American citizen be required to own a gas mask for when the super-volcano beneath Yellowstone erupts sometime in the next few centuries?
Having spent much of my life on the Gulf Coast watching for hurricanes, the choice to live freely under the threat of sudden ruin seems reasonable to me.
Local communities can each decide for themselves which possible preparations are worthwhile to protect current and future generations.
This was addressed by local seismologists here, #4.
HAH three posts about the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Great minds think alike!
You beat me to it! It am to slow to post…
Puget Sound tsunami simulation. Tsunami isn’t a threat for the I-5 corridor.
Oh, that’s tempting. And of course, it’s true: life sucks and then you die, whether by falling books, crashing cars, metastasizing tumors or a stray virus. Why worry?
I mean, I’m willing to go with deep breath, chilling out or even (dare I say it) prayers along the lines of “not my will but yours” but Japan took its particular vulnerability seriously enough to prepare. Thousands of people survived because of it. Fatalism doesn’t seem like a particularly responsible attitude for say, the City of Portland to bring to this?
Uh-oh–I’ve annoyed any scientists here by bringing up this possibility, that has zero chance of happening! Apologies!
The article quotes the Region X FEMA director as saying “Everything west of I-5 is toast.”
King Prawn, maybe you should come live with us in Maine? Ryan too (bring the family) and let’s see, who else…
You missed the end of my post. Prepare as best you can and live your life…..and Portland has been preparing. Millions have been spent on earthquake retrofitting. I have my bookcases bolted to the wall. I don’t have anything heavy about my bed. I have food and some water. However, if the truly big one comes there isn’t much we can do. A lot of us will die by the year on year risk of it happening is vanishingly small. It isn’t something people should be working themselves up into a tizzy about.
In the words of Winston Churchill: Keep buggering on.
Ryan and I are really far inland. Prawn might not be as safe………but seriously Kate even Maine has a risk of an earthquake. No place on earth is safe from geology.
Whatever you do, don’t annoy the scientists by questioning them. They hate that. And then they go getting all science-ey on you. Nobody needs that.
I really doubt if the FEMA director realizes that there is nothing west of I-5 except the Kitsap (where I live) and Olympic Peninsulas. Here’s a picture (click to embiggen.) There’s a lot of dirt (about 100 miles worth) and some reasonably sized mountains (Olympic Range) between Seattle and the sea.