 |
According to Chris Goldfinger, a professor in OSU's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and lead author of the study, the southern margin of Cascadia
has a much higher recurrence level for major earthquakes than the northern end and it is overdue for a rupture. However, that doesn't mean that an earthquake couldn't
strike first along the northern half, from Newport, Oregon, to Vancouver Island. Major earthquakes tend to strike more frequently along the southern end - every 240
years or so - and it has been longer than that since it last happened. The probability for an earthquake on the southern part of the fault is more than double that of the
northern end. Cascadia earthquake sources (USGS) |
February 1, 2016 - PACIFIC NORTHWEST - 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.
Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy
for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which
killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars' worth of
damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A
thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A
minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered
the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four
minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.
When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three. The
conference was wrapping up for the day. He was thinking about sushi. The
speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his
talk. The earthquake was not particularly strong. Then it ticked past
the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The
shaking intensified. The seats in the conference room were small plastic
desks with wheels. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought,
No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. At a minute and a
half, everyone in the room got up and went outside.
It was March. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries,
but no snow on the ground. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on
the ground. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. It was,
Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with
no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in
high seas. The quake passed the two-minute mark. The trees, still hung
with the previous autumn's dead leaves, were making a strange rattling
sound. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just
vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The building
itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body
of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its
foundation. Goldfinger lurched over to take a look. The base was
lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the
yard. He thought better of it, and lurched away. His watch swept past
the three-minute mark and kept going.
Oh, shit, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in
amazement. For decades, seismologists had believed that Japan could not
experience an earthquake stronger than magnitude 8.4. In 2005, however,
at a conference in Hokudan, a Japanese geologist named Yasutaka Ikeda
had argued that the nation should expect a magnitude 9.0 in the near
future—with catastrophic consequences, because Japan's famous
earthquake-and-tsunami preparedness, including the height of its sea
walls, was based on incorrect science. The presentation was met with
polite applause and thereafter largely ignored.
Now, Goldfinger realized as the shaking hit the four-minute mark, the planet was proving the Japanese Cassandra right.
For a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake
science. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool,
because Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in
Kashiwa knew what was coming. One of them pulled out a cell phone and
started streaming videos from the Japanese broadcasting station NHK,
shot by helicopters that had flown out to sea soon after the shaking
started. Thirty minutes after Goldfinger first stepped outside, he
watched the tsunami roll in, in real time, on a two-inch screen.
In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent
tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast
Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an
estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. The shaking earlier in
the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in
the nation's recorded history. But for Chris Goldfinger, a
paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world's
leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a
kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come.
Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the
San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is
perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing "the big one." That
rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every
fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length
and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the
most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world,
that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because
the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the
2011 event in Japan.
Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known
as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the
coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino,
California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating
around Vancouver Island, Canada. The "Cascadia" part of its name comes
from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the
same course a hundred or so miles inland. The "subduction zone" part
refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding
underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of
mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth's
continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow,
harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where
they meet, it is not.
Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching.
Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which
bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One
World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand
represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square
miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction
zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the
Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America.
When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you
were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It
is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.
Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they
point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck
edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the
rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty
millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as
continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively
elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so
indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable
mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America
will rebound like a spring.
If, on that occasion, only the
southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two
fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere
between 8.0 and 8.6.That's
the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that
seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be
somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That's the very big one.
Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again.
When
the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent,
from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades,
will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to
the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it
has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath
the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your
fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward
into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west,
toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile
liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen
minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased
and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth
Murphy, who directs FEMA's Region X, the division responsible for
Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, "Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast."
In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover
*
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 Francisco's 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 I'm hoping all the science is
wrong, and it won't 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
danger—or, 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 America's 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 continent's 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 region's
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 cosmic—to 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.
The first clue came from geography. Almost all of the world's most
powerful earthquakes occur in the Ring of Fire, the volcanically and
seismically volatile swath of the Pacific that runs from New Zealand up
through Indonesia and Japan, across the ocean to Alaska, and down the
west coast of the Americas to Chile. Japan, 2011, magnitude 9.0;
Indonesia, 2004, magnitude 9.1; Alaska, 1964, magnitude 9.2; Chile,
1960, magnitude 9.5—not until the late nineteen-sixties, with the rise
of the theory of plate tectonics, could geologists explain this pattern.
The Ring of Fire, it turns out, is really a ring of subduction zones.
Nearly all the earthquakes in the region are caused by continental
plates getting stuck on oceanic plates—as North America is stuck on Juan
de Fuca—and then getting abruptly unstuck. And nearly all the volcanoes
are caused by the oceanic plates sliding deep beneath the continental
ones, eventually reaching temperatures and pressures so extreme that
they melt the rock above them.
The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its
coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland,
the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca
plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the
Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, "all the right
anatomical parts." Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a
major earthquake—or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By
contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally
and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why
are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend
a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a
lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had
them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver. The question facing
geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction
zone had ever broken its eerie silence.
In the late nineteen-eighties, Brian Atwater, a geologist with the
United States Geological Survey, and a graduate student named David
Yamaguchi found the answer, and another major clue in the Cascadia
puzzle. Their discovery is best illustrated in a place called the ghost
forest, a grove of western red cedars on the banks of the Copalis River,
near the Washington coast. When I paddled out to it last summer, with
Atwater and Yamaguchi, it was easy to see how it got its name. The
cedars are spread out across a low salt marsh on a wide northern bend in
the river, long dead but still standing. Leafless, branchless,
barkless, they are reduced to their trunks and worn to a smooth
silver-gray, as if they had always carried their own tombstones inside
them.
What killed the trees in the ghost forest was saltwater. It had long
been assumed that they died slowly, as the sea level around them
gradually rose and submerged their roots. But, by 1987, Atwater, who had
found in soil layers evidence of sudden land subsidence along the
Washington coast, suspected that that was backward—that the trees had
died quickly when the ground beneath them plummeted. To find out, he
teamed up with Yamaguchi, a specialist in dendrochronology, the study of
growth-ring patterns in trees. Yamaguchi took samples of the cedars and
found that they had died simultaneously: in tree after tree, the final
rings dated to the summer of 1699. Since trees do not grow in the
winter, he and Atwater concluded that sometime between August of 1699
and May of 1700 an earthquake had caused the land to drop and killed the
cedars. That time frame predated by more than a hundred years the
written history of the Pacific Northwest—and so, by rights, the
detective story should have ended there.
But it did not. If you travel five thousand miles due west from the
ghost forest, you reach the northeast coast of Japan. As the events of
2011 made clear, that coast is vulnerable to tsunamis, and the Japanese
have kept track of them since at least 599 A.D. In that
fourteen-hundred-year history, one incident has long stood out for its
strangeness. On the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year
of the Genroku era, a six-hundred-mile-long wave struck the coast,
levelling homes, breaching a castle moat, and causing an accident at
sea. The Japanese understood that tsunamis were the result of
earthquakes, yet no one felt the ground shake before the Genroku event.
The wave had no discernible origin. When scientists began studying it,
they called it an orphan tsunami.
Finally, in a 1996 article in
Nature, a seismologist named
Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the work of Atwater and
Yamaguchi, matched that orphan to its parent—and thereby filled in the
blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny specificity.
At
approximately nine o' clock at night on January 26, 1700, a
magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden
land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean,
lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly
fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the
Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the
ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the
eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku.
Once scientists had reconstructed the 1700 earthquake, certain
previously overlooked accounts also came to seem like clues. In 1964,
Chief Louis Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British
Columbia, told a story, passed down through seven generations, about the
eradication of Vancouver Island's Pachena Bay people. "I think it was
at nighttime that the land shook," Nookmis recalled. According to
another tribal history, "They sank at once, were all drowned; not one
survived." A hundred years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah
tribe, recounted a similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the
water had receded from Washington State's Neah Bay, then suddenly poured
back in, inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found
canoes hanging from the trees. In a 2005 study, Ruth Ludwin, then a
seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine
colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of
earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough
information to estimate a date range for the events they described. On
average, the midpoint of that range was 1701.
It does not speak well of European-Americans that such stories counted
as evidence for a proposition only after that proposition had been
proved. 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 Goldfinger put it, "In the late eighties and
early nineties, the paradigm shifted to 'uh-oh.' "
Goldfinger told me this in his lab at Oregon State, a low prefab
building that a passing English major might reasonably mistake for the
maintenance department. Inside the lab is a walk-in freezer. Inside the
freezer are floor-to-ceiling racks filled with cryptically labelled
tubes, four inches in diameter and five feet long. Each tube contains a
core sample of the seafloor. Each sample contains the history, written
in seafloorese, of the past ten thousand years. During subduction-zone
earthquakes, torrents of land rush off the continental slope, leaving a
permanent deposit on the bottom of the ocean. By counting the number and
the size of deposits in each sample, then comparing their extent and
consistency along the length of the Cascadia subduction zone, Goldfinger
and his colleagues were able to determine how much of the zone has
ruptured, how often, and how drastically.
Thanks to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has
experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten
thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two
hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia's recurrence interval: the
average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan
is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to
unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent's worst
fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the
earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a
two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
It is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are
averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and
eleven, but also of eighteen and two. It is not possible, however, to
dispute the scale of the problem. The devastation in Japan in 2011 was
the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and
what the region was prepared to withstand. The same will hold true in
the Pacific Northwest—but here the discrepancy is enormous. "The science
part is fun," Goldfinger says. "And I love doing it.
But the
gap between what we know and what we should do about it is getting
bigger and bigger, and the action really needs to turn to responding.
Otherwise, we're going to be hammered. I've been through one of these
massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If
that was Portland"—Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his
head before he finished it with words. "Let's just say I would rather
not be here."
The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a
compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional
waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and
certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt.
They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since
they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety
seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake
early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to
automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down
railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors,
alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the
general public can take cover.
The Pacific Northwest has no
early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will
be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended,
what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are
slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and
side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.
Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely
everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens
at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory,
those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and
relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But,
lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most
people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will
shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors
and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down:
bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry.
Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and
toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines.
Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or,
rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations,
together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the
undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.
Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail.
Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in
the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake
until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were
constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of
Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five
per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a
major Cascadia quake.
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, and two-thirds of railways and airports;
also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and
two-thirds of all hospitals.
Certain disasters stem from many small problems conspiring to cause one
very large problem. For want of a nail, the war was lost; for fifteen
independently insignificant errors, the jetliner was lost.
Subduction-zone earthquakes operate on the opposite principle: one
enormous problem causes many other enormous problems. The shaking from
the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region—up to
thirty thousand of them in Seattle alone, the city's
emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process
called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like
a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen per cent
of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care
centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people.
So is Oregon's critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of
Portland through which flows ninety per cent of the state's liquid fuel
and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas
terminals. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger
fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material
spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original
earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them
definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the
shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will
continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the
real destruction will begin.
Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being
completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be
there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the
first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible.
For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia's inundation
zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster
ends and before another begins. They will be notified to do so only by
the earthquake itself—"a vibrate-alert system," Kevin Cupples, the city
planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, jokes—and they are urged to
leave on foot, since the earthquake will render roads impassable.
Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to
get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending
to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching
for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan.
"When that tsunami
is coming, you run," Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety
Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC), says. "You protect yourself, you
don't turn around, you don't go back to save anybody. You run for your
life."
The time to save people from a tsunami is before it happens, but the
region has not yet taken serious steps toward doing so. Hotels and
businesses are not required to post evacuation routes or to provide
employees with evacuation training. In Oregon, it has been illegal since
1995 to build hospitals, schools, firehouses, and police stations in
the inundation zone, but those which are already in it can stay, and any
other new construction is permissible: energy facilities, hotels,
retirement homes. In those cases, builders are required only to consult
with DOGAMI about evacuation plans. "So you come in and sit down," Ian
Madin says. "And I say, 'That's a stupid idea.' And you say, 'Thanks.
Now we've consulted.' "
These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out.
Twenty-two
per cent of Oregon's coastal population is sixty-five or older.
Twenty-nine per cent of the state's population is disabled, and that
figure rises in many coastal counties. "We can't save them," Kevin
Cupples says. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it and say, 'Oh, yeah, we'll
go around and check on the elderly.' No. We won't." Nor will anyone save
the tourists. Washington State Park properties within the inundation
zone see an average of seventeen thousand and twenty-nine guests a day.
Madin estimates that up to a hundred and fifty thousand people visit
Oregon's beaches on summer weekends. "Most of them won't have a clue as
to how to evacuate," he says. "And the beaches are the hardest place to
evacuate from."
Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one.
A
grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an
hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it
arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast,
from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a
Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking
from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking
land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore.
It
will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder
blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once
constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.
To see the full scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you
would need to be in the international space station. The inundation zone
will be scoured of structures from California to Canada. The earthquake
will have wrought its worst havoc west of the Cascades but caused
damage as far away as Sacramento, California—as distant from the
worst-hit areas as Fort Wayne, Indiana, is from New York. FEMA expects
to coördinate search-and-rescue operations across a hundred thousand
square miles and in the waters off four hundred and fifty-three miles of
coastline. As for casualties: the figures I cited earlier—twenty-seven
thousand injured, almost thirteen thousand dead—are based on the
agency's official planning scenario, which has the earthquake striking
at 9:41 A.M. on February 6th. If, instead, it strikes in the summer,
when the beaches are full, those numbers could be off by a horrifying
margin.
Wineglasses, antique vases, Humpty Dumpty, hip bones, hearts: what
breaks quickly generally mends slowly, if at all. OSSPAC estimates that
in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the
earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking
water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major
highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities. On the
coast, those numbers go up.
Whoever chooses or has no choice but
to stay there will spend three to six months without electricity, one
to three years without drinking water and sewage systems, and three or
more years without hospitals. Those estimates do not apply to the
tsunami-inundation zone, which will remain all but uninhabitable for
years.
How much all this will cost is anyone's guess; FEMA puts every number on
its relief-and-recovery plan except a price. But whatever the ultimate
figure—and even though U.S. taxpayers will cover seventy-five to a
hundred per cent of the damage, as happens in declared disasters—the
economy of the Pacific Northwest will collapse. Crippled by a lack of
basic services, businesses will fail or move away. Many residents will
flee as well. OSSPAC predicts a mass-displacement event and a long-term
population downturn. Chris Goldfinger didn't want to be there when it
happened. But, by many metrics, it will be as bad or worse to be there
afterward.
On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of
space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes
made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also
present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old,
but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average
individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our
lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an
indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our
own.
This problem is bidirectional.
The Cascadia subduction zone
remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough
into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not
thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a
problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia
fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you
are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West
Coast this summer in Brad Peyton's "
San Andreas," while, in
neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by
other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens,
plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios,
including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of
escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we
stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert
them.
That problem is not specific to earthquakes, of course. The Cascadia
situation, a calamity in its own right, is also a parable for this age
of ecological reckoning, and the questions it raises are ones that we
all now face. How should a society respond to a looming crisis of
uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions? How can it begin to
right itself when its entire infrastructure and culture developed in a
way that leaves it profoundly vulnerable to natural disaster?
The last person I met with in the Pacific Northwest was Doug
Dougherty, the superintendent of schools for Seaside, which lies almost
entirely within the tsunami-inundation zone. Of the four schools that
Dougherty oversees, with a total student population of sixteen hundred,
one is relatively safe. The others sit five to fifteen feet above sea
level. When the tsunami comes, they will be as much as forty-five feet
below it.
In 2009, Dougherty told me, he found some land for sale outside the
inundation zone, and proposed building a new K-12 campus there. Four
years later, to foot the hundred-and-twenty-eight-million-dollar bill,
the district put up a bond measure. The tax increase for residents
amounted to two dollars and sixteen cents per thousand dollars of
property value. The measure failed by sixty-two per cent. Dougherty
tried seeking help from Oregon's congressional delegation but came up
empty. The state makes money available for seismic upgrades, but
buildings within the inundation zone cannot apply. At present, all
Dougherty can do is make sure that his students know how to evacuate.
Some of them, however, will not be able to do so. At an
elementary school in the community of Gearhart, the children will be
trapped. "They can't make it out from that school," Dougherty said.
"They have no place to go." On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a
wide, roadless bog. When the tsunami comes, the only place to go in
Gearhart is a small ridge just behind the school. At its tallest, it is
forty-five feet high—lower than the expected wave in a full-margin
earthquake. For now, the route to the ridge is marked by signs that say
"Temporary Tsunami Assembly Area." I asked Dougherty about the state's
long-range plan. "There is no long-range plan," he said.
Dougherty's office is deep inside the inundation zone, a few blocks from
the beach. All day long, just out of sight, the ocean rises up and
collapses, spilling foamy overlapping ovals onto the shore. Eighty miles
farther out, ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea, the hand
of a geological clock is somewhere in its slow sweep. All across the
region, seismologists are looking at their watches, wondering how long
we have, and what we will do, before geological time catches up to our
own.
*An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the area of impact. -
The New Yorker.
