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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
Claire & Kate,
You girls seem to like this seismic thing. My sister in Northern California enjoys playing the same game. I don’t care for it personally as there is so little sport in it. A single event possibly decades away. Virtually unpredictable by any ordinary human perception. Where’s the fun in that I ask you?
I live in S. Florida and we enjoy playing the Hurricane game. You see right at this time of year, every year, we get to have lots of fun. Now with the internet and the great weather satellites we can get a new score card every three hours. Place your bets.
Notice at the lower right hand corner of the screen the line of storms coming off the West Coast of Africa. They are lined up line the planes waiting to take off from the airport. They travel West and look like they will graze the Northern edge of South America. But they don’t. They start bending Northward. As they get about half way across the Atlantic the fun really begins.
First possibility, the storms can continue on a very linear path and smack into the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Second possibility, the storm starts to turn slightly to the North and slips between the Yucatan and Cuba. It goes straight into the Gulf of Mexico. This is very dangerous as the the Gulf is very warm and is a Hurricane incubator. The storm is likely to get much stronger and wack Texas or Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama or the Florida Panhandle or even hook back sharply and get the West Coast of Florida.
Third possibility, the storm turns a little more sharply to the North and hammers Cuba. This is bad for the Cubans but doesn’t get anybody else off the hook. Cuba isn’t very big the storm loses some force trashing the island and then might change direction and pick up force over water and hit again.
Fourth possibility, the storm turns even farther to the North. Uh Oh. This puts it on a bee line for me. Florida is a narrow State. A storm coming directly at it will likely keep on going through it and come out the other side. This gives you a choice. If you think the storm will hit dead on or to the North you can run South and get a hotel room in Miami. If you think the storm is going to be to the South you can run North and get a hotel room in St. Augustine. The map comes in handy. It’s released only 3 hours behind the actual data. Now you get the idea. Lots of action with this game.
Fifth possibility, the storm turns more sharply to the North. Now we can see it smack Northern Florida or Georgia or South Carolina or North Carolina or Virginia or Delaware or New Jersey or New York.
Cont.
cont. from #31
Sixth possibility, the storm turns fully North and bends back to the East and misses the North American Continent entirely. We like those best.
Now we should bring you up to speed on evaluating storms.
First thing to know is that a storm is much larger than the part you must worry about the most The highest winds are at the eye which might only be 20 or 30 miles wide. The storm can be 500 miles wide. What this means is if the eye goes by you 60 miles to the North at Cat 1 (~90 mph) you will only experience tropical force winds of 75 mph or less. Why is this important. Cat 1 winds are when the atmosphere starts to compress and harden. This wind is much more destructive. A 75 mph wind will knock some branches down and is nothing you want to be driving in but that’s about it. BTW you can actually hear a Cat 1. When the wind is fluctuating between say 80 and 95 mph you can hear this strange whir.. whir.. whir screaming sound every time it hits 95. Cool huh!
Second thing to know is that you can get serious flooding even if the winds aren’t that high. The storm is 500 miles wide and may not be moving very fast. That is a tremendous amount of water it can dump on you say over a three day period. A super-soaker, we hate those. It can even slowly penetrate your roof. The wind lifts the shingles enough and the water seeps in. After 24 or 48 hours of this your roof can come off. Not cool.
Third, if you are right on the coast itself you must be concerned about storm surge. Here the 500 mile wide storm pushes the water in front of it like a small tidal wave. Actually, it is a small tidal wave. No fun at all.
See girls this game has much more action than just waiting around for a seismic event. Why it’s just about like Baseball season. Only you’d really rather not be in this World Series.
Regards,
Jim
Okay, so that’s King Prawn, Ryan, Mustangman….I’ll start making the beds. Lobster for supper?
Lobster will do nicely! I hear it is cheap in Maine……….I have occasionally considered a Portland to Portland move.
Speaking to no other point in your post except this one:
I would like to point out that most Native Americans I know (I’m related by marriage to a great many) tell me with supreme confidence that Sasquatch is real, and that he is a shape-shifter, which is why we can’t find him. When that proposition is proven true, I will take more seriously the rest of the Native American stories.
Read this article yesterday, at the urging of a friend. It reminds me of the 2001 Scientific American piece that predicted New Orleans would be flooded by a major hurricane. People just blew it off like they blow off the prospect of a Yellowstone eruption today. Sooner or later, it’s gonna come.
A question occurred to me: if the shock of the Cascades fault is great enough, could it also trigger a San Andreas event that would give us the complete “Toast west of I5” effect from Northwest Mexico to British Columbia?
Excellent! And if the Big Storm hits Jim, he can come too. Meet-Up!
To be honest, I’d be a little more concerned about a stray space rock hitting a major city with little or no warning, as in what happened in Chelyabinsk.
Evidently, the local anthropologists agreed. It wasn’t until the geological data was made available that folks started taking seriously the stories about big waves flooding the land then receding, leaving canoes in trees.
At the risk of starting a whole new controversy/thread, I remember going to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum in Key West with my daughter, and standing with a bunch of other tourists in front of a video screen showing Yanomamo people who—the announcer breathlessly declared—actually believe that eating the brains of their dead loved ones will make them stronger! Those silly Yanomamo.
Right next door was an exhibit showing a guy in a robe holding up a piece of bread and the breathless announcer sneered “and these people actually believe that by saying an incantation, this shaman can change the bread into 2000 year old human flesh…”
I regret only that the clowns who designed, got approved, and are trying to construct the stupid waterfront tunnel in Seattle will probably not be inside it when the fill it is in liquefies.
What I love about this video—taken with a dash cam—is that you can hear the car radio going…but the meteorite hits, and the driver doesn’t say anything. No “OMG” or “O [CoC]” Those are some calm people.
I just read an article from NOAA saying there has been a 9 year drought of big hurricanes hitting the US – longest such drought in recorded history. Must’ve been a boring 9 years for your little game.
The article also debunks all of those wild global warming hysterics about hurricanes being stronger and more frequent.
Like KP, I don’t quite get how a tsunami would drench the I-5 corridor, particularly in Oregon. There is a wall of mountains that hug the Pacific Coast that I hardly think could envelop anything beyond it. There is another set of mountains that surround the west side of Portland, adding an additional buffer. Now, not to toss away my Oregon coast fellow citizens, but at least anything behind the Coast Range (the bulk of Oregon’s population) should be safe.
Of course, none of this matters if the ground liquefies. I barely know what that means. How much does earthquake insurance cost, anyway?
You are quite right. Only in this game unlike Baseball you long to be in the cellar not in the series. A very pleasant 9 years yes. However, I learned a few things from the last active time. First, NOAA has no idea what is going to happen year to year. The jet stream air currents seem to control things and they are very unpredictable. Second, within a season, although even I can see a pattern (just keep watching the map), you can never trust a Hurricane. It was very late in the season. We thought it was over. A small storm appears and about 1000 miles out in the Atlantic it turns due North. Well that’s no trouble or so I thought. This mashugganah thing did a 270 degree turn in mid Atlantic and came dead on us, speeding up to a Cat 1.
Never trust a Hurricane.
Regards,
Jim
Basically it means soil particles lose contact with one another and behave more like a liquid than a solid. Fun stuff.
Much less than hurricane insurance in Florida. You have to find the right provider, but it is included in the policy without a huge extra charge. The losses might be big but the chance is vanishingly small.
I remember being a 6’4″ 235 lbs. guy, picked up off my feet and thrown against the wall at Apple Computer.
That was 5:04 PM, October 17th, 1989. Some 300 people died; a freeway collapsed, etc.
It makes you think.
Because the insurance companies are betting they don’t have to pay on the policies. If the disaster is big enough, the American taxpayers will pick up the tab.
I’m with KP on “nothing really to be done” about the cataclysmic event. Remember the F5 tornado in Oklahoma City several years back? There were neighborhoods where only the concrete foundations were left in the ground. Even the blades of grass were sucked out. If you had made it to your basement, you were still a goner. Mother Nature can be a bitch.
People who “prep” are prepping for disruptions, not cataclysms. Potable water and communications are probably the biggest challenges once you have a food and medicine (and ammo) supply. Mormons have a pretty good system. Set up something like that and get on with life.
We humans really stink at accurately assessing risk. We’re (metaphorically) afraid to fly, but don’t think twice about hopping in a car to drive across town. We’re all scrupulous about drinking and eating out of BPA-free plastics (which have never been proven to cause any problems in the decades they’ve been in use), but no one asks about the new compound being used to replace BPA (with which we have little experience and no long term data).
So, yeah, enjoy the great Northwest while ye may. I’ll do the same in the shadow of the Yellowstone Supervolcano here in Colorado.
Realistically, people in the Pacific Northwest should be prepared for earthquakes, just as we in southern California or the Bay Area need to be prepared. You can start on earthquake preparedness right now, as there are many steps that are easy and quick to accomplish:
http://www.earthquakecountry.org/roots/
This is a good idea in the Pacific Northwest, as there are other seismic risks in addition to the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The intraplate M6.8 Nisqually earthquake, mentioned above, was a result of movement along other faults. Other recent, historical earthquakes also occurred along similar faults: the M7.1 Olympia earthquake of 1949 and the M6.5 Seattle earthquake of 1965. Earthquakes of those magnitudes can cause significant damage depending on where they occur. More here:
https://www.eeri.org/lfe/pdf/usa_nisqually_preliminary_report.pdf
Preparation is always a good thing. Really, it’s about increasing your odds. If you have a family, it’s about increasing their odds. I’m not particularly worried about Yellowstone going up any time soon, but if I lived in the Pacific NW, I would try to learn about and prepare for the effects of a possible eruption at Mt. Rainier, or one of the other Cascade volcanoes.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount_rainier/geo_hist_future_eruptions.html
Why did this come out just before the National Review Alaska cruise?
The other thing the Native Americans say is that Mt. Baker will erupt and take out all of the white folks. We’ll have to wait and see…
I have been obsessing about this for days, finally removed my attention to something else, and here it is on Ricochet!
Thanks a lot Kate!
My little girl did an 8th grade science presentation on tsunamis this year. She wanted to show some footage from Japan and Indonesia, but I had to pre-screen it so she didn’t show some of the extremely upsetting footage on YouTube in the classroom. I couldn’t pull myself away all day. There were amazing human stories, fascinating geography, and terrible destruction. It’s a big rock we live on and big, terrifying things happen.
The most gut wrenching bit of the New Yorker piece for me, was the school superintendent describing the impossibility of escape from 3 of the schools in his district, should they be in the path of the wave.
I was 7 miles from the 1989 Loma Prieta Quake when it occurred (Mag 7.1 at 5:04 PM). Its epicenter was 1 mile from the house I had moved away from the previous year. Our house shook for more than a solid minute and things were literally flying off the walls.
There certainly is a little voice in your head screaming, “If you’re going to die, at least do it with some dignity!”
I don’t even blink for anything below a 5.0 anymore.
Just for fun, I thought I’d point out just where I’m sitting as I type this:
I am, as the crow flies, .8 miles from the waters of the Salish Sea (aka, Pugest Sound). All of the reading we’ve done here in the office suggest that given our elevation, we will likely not be affected by the tsunami itself. The earthquake may be another matter. However, much of Bellingham is right down at the edge of the water. So from an infrastructure perspective, we’ll have issues.
For me, this isn’t just a conversation.
We live 300 yards east of I-5 so according to fema, we are outside the toast zone.
nothing to worry about…..
According to the article, most of that land would have subsided into the briny deep, thereby helping generate the tsunami. All other things being equal, a tsunami sweeping into Puget Sound would not be too unlike one sweeping into Tokyo Bay. That is something that is taken very seriously here in Japan because a moderate tsunami of only a few meters would do devastating damage to the capital. So, I wouldn’t be too hasty in dismissing the danger of a tsunami to the SeaTac area.
Where else but Ricochet…
I actually watched several videos on the Cascadian Subduction MegaQuake within the last couple of days.
The best one is the simplest to understand, although the longest. It was produced by the BBC, 48 minutes, and went into what preparations are being made. Well worth your time. (Linked below photo)
They were pretty matter of fact about the case of Unreinforced Masonry Construction (UMC), of which there is a great deal in the PNW: Too Bad, So Sad.
Looks like my nephew’s VERY successful Seattle ad agency might be in for a bit of a shake.
Here’s the Cascadian Quake video:
Sorry, Kim—if it’s any comfort, I’m witlessly obsessing too… though somewhat distracted since Maine also had a multi-victim shooting, though unlike the one in Chatanooga, this one appears to be the more “normal” (?!) domestic variety.
Another explanation for our failure to adequately address relatively remote risks—we’re too busy with the frets of the here and now.
Okay, Spin. I’m putting you down for a bed and a lobster, should you need to evacuate to Maine. (Yes, yes, I know—we could have an earthquake here, too…but we don’t have a huge subduction zone grinding away just beyond our outermost islands…)