An earthquake could destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest (2015)
newyorker.com> 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.”
I remember when this article came out, my mom called me and said "you'll be okay, you're east of I-5, right?"
"Yeah mom."
About 6 blocks east. Plenty of cushion.
Ha… it’s not like the earthquake will stop at I-5 like it’s a magic shield. If the quake knocks out utilities and services everywhere west of the cascades, this I-5 ‘line’ is meaningless.
I believe they are referring to the tsunami that follows the earthquake, based on evidence from before the Europeans colonized the continent.
At least in Oregon, I-5 is 50 miles away from the coast and separated from it by a small mountain range. I don't think we're too worried about tsunamis getting all the way to I-5. Definitely will get to Highway 101 in some spots, however. But a lot of the coastline is tall enough that you can usually find a safe place nearby if a tsunami warning sounds.
> But a lot of the coastline is tall enough that you can usually find a safe place nearby if a tsunami warning sounds.
I recall driving US-101 in Oregon some years back and kept seeing "Tsunami evacuation route" signs.
https://www.oregon.gov/oem/Documents/Tsunami_Evacuation_Sign...
We have those all along the Pacific coast.
Yep. I only recall seeing them in Oregon though - not California or Washington (Washington has warning signs for everything else though - including no warning signs - https://i.imgur.com/T868pkg.jpg )
Washington has them, it was one of the first things I noticed when I got the motorcycle out for a coastal ride when I first moved here 20-some years ago. Couldn't tell you exactly where, but they're there and within an easy Saturday ride from Redmond. (Westport or Grayland, maybe?)
It's been a few years, but I don't recall them in Kalaloch, La Push, or Ozette... but then that was '09. The picture of the no warning signs warning was on the road to Ozette. It does appear that they are there now, so it might have been me misremembering ( https://goo.gl/maps/ofY3GGHDnuG5GWaZ6 )
Westport, WA:
https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8814889,-124.1041651,3a,75y,...
They've changed them, though. They used to have a person climbing a hill as the wave comes chasing after them. Can't find a good example on image search. I found the old signs to be morbidly amusing. Like my spindly little legs are going to save me.
> But a lot of the coastline is tall enough that you can usually find a safe place nearby if a tsunami warning sounds.
On the bright side, you won't need a siren, If the ground drops by 10 meters over the course of 5 minutes and you can't stand up because of the shaking, you can be sure a tsunamui up to 30 meters high will be there in an hour or two.
You didn't read the article, this is exactly what they are talking about
While some sections of I-5 are probably within the tsunami zone, I think much of it is beyond it. IIRC (I have not read the article since its original publication) this rule-of-thumb encompasses all the posited earthquake's structural and infrastructural damage at a level calling for FEMA-level assistance.
The remark is clearly only intended to give an impression of the magnitude of the worst-case scenario.
They are not—simply the shaking. The tsunami will only be a few feet tall at most in that part of Puget Sound.
separately, there’s risk from lahars from mt. Baker and mt. Rainier. Catastrophic Baker lahars could potentially bury even Renton based on some estimates.
Don't forget Mt. Hood. The Sandy River is named as such because of a lahar from a decade prior.
Eruption-related lahars and sedimentation response downstream of Mount Hood: Field guide to volcaniclastic deposits along the Sandy River, Oregon -- https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vsc/file_mngr/file-59/Pierson%20e...
> The Sandy River was originally named the Quicksand River by Lewis and Clark in 1805 (Moulton and Dunlay, 1990). Expedition members noted that the river (a) was ~275 m wide at its mouth and for several kilometers upstream on the delta (30-150 m wide there today); (b) had a number of mid Channel Islands; and (c) had flow which was turbid and very shallow (resembling the Platte River in Nebraska, they noted). It was given its name because "the bed of this stream is formed entirely of quick sand."
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/old.2000/fs060-00/fs060-00.pdf
> What happened? The answer lay 50 miles away at Mount Hood. An eruption in the 1790's caused a tremendous amount of volcanic rock and sand to enter the Sandy River drainage. That sediment was still being flushed downstream when Lewis and Clark saw and named the river. Since 1806, the river has removed the excess sediment from its channel.
You have transposed a 0 and an 8 and brought the Lewis and Clark expedition 720 years into its past.
Thank you - corrected. For some reason that PDF didn't want to copy and paste.
Lahars from Rainier might bury Renton, but definitely not from Baker :).
the tsunami is almost certainly not going to reach i95. the shaking is the bigger issue for most of WA and OR.
That’s the joke.
True in some ways...but looking at a map of "% of population surviving the initial tsunami" would probably reveal a fuzzy north-south line. That'll be kinda important to FEMA.
(From the tone of "About 6 blocks east. Plenty of cushion.", I'll guess that actual topographic maps don't give adamhi much cause for optimism.)
Yes, but it won't be toast... it will be the hash and eggs that go with the toast!
This made me laugh as I'm about 2 blocks West of Hwy 5 in wa
City blocks, or Minecraft blocks? :D
Aka metres x)
And you never venture West of it, right?
Nick Zentner of Central Washington University did a really good talk about this article and some of it seems overblown, specifically the "west of I5 will be toast."
They've placed GPS sensors throuout the PNW and one of the more interesting things is that Oregon and Washingtons land is working in a spiral, and the land is moving in a circular pattern. Also that the hot spot that creates Yellowstone used to be off the Oregon coast and traveled through Oregon, and Idaho before it reached where it currently is. It's left a trail of calderas that they're only now discovering. The hotspot stays in the same spot, but the earths crust moves over it changing it's position over time.
I have seen many of his talks. that statement about west of i95 being toast is not incorrect. He made a very obvious point of the fact the energy released by this quake will be nearly 3 orders of magnitude greater than a 7. Coastline drops 30' and shifts 50'. 250 miles inland everything will move a foot still. do you have any idea how much fire, flooding, and death there will be?
I stumbled across one of Nick's Volcano lectures on Youtube about a year ago and was unexpectedly captivated to watch the entire thing, which lasted about an hour! As someone who has always held an interest in Geology and Deep History, I really appreciate his efforts to make his University content available to the public.
Yes, I should have said more about the channel. If only we could all have teachers who are so enthusiastic and makes topics very interesting and easy to follow! All of his content is very good and captivating. If anyone is interested in pacific northwest geology, I'd highly recommend watching more of his stuff. He also has his own personal channel separate from CWU here and still making new content: https://www.youtube.com/user/GeologyNick
Nick Z is the king of making it fun and informative to learn about geology. He has dozens of great videos.
>The hotspot stays in the same spot, but the earths crust moves over it changing it's position over time.
I'm guessing this is why the Hawaiian islands look the way they do: a hotspot was underneath and formed volcanoes over time, which turned into the islands we now have, as the crust moved northwest.
To me the big takeaway from the article was that it would take two years to restore electric power in much of the region.
The tsunami will be much more limited, and over quickly. Rebuilding so much cannot happen very fast.
It’s actually closer to every 500 years at the latitude Seattle and Portland are at.
The 300 year figure only applies to the southern Oregon and Northern California portion of the fault, and is based on turbidities and controversial.
Still, this is an under-appreciated risk of living in the northwest. There’s plenty of societies living in subduction zones across the planet. But few with as little awareness of their fault.
I remember talking to transplants to Seattle, I’d say there’s a 50/50 percent chance they were aware the region could produce earthquakes.
On the bright side: while we can never predict this for certain, it doesn’t appear there’s enough energy stored in the northern portion of the fault to produce a mega-thrust earthquake right now.
I transplanted to the PNW back in the 1990s, knowing well about the quakes. Previously I lived up & down the U.S. east coast and also NE Ohio. That latter gets small quakes, too, but mostly we thought it was an heavy vehicle driving by..
https://earthquaketrack.com/us-OH-Cleveland/biggest
4.5 / 23 years ago, 4.0 / 3 years ago, 3.7 /15 ..., 3.9 / 21...
Edit: s/thw/the/
>> It’s actually closer to every 500 years at the latitude Seattle and Portland are at.
Well that would be about every other time the southern end goes. In that case it's still overdue for the big one, but 270 years to go for the next very big one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megathrust_earthquake
An absolutely nuts quote from the article -- "the northwest edge of the continent [...] will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west"
The last several years, every time I consider the idea of someday moving back to Portland, I always think of this "The Big One" article.
(With my mixed luck, the PNW mega-shark-quake-nami is just waiting for me to move back, so that'd really be irresponsible of me.)
Are there not natural disaster risks everywhere? Floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes...
The northeast is pretty damn 'safe', as long as you can handle the occassional downed tree and subsequent power outage.
Except for an occasional mild snowstorm, Antarctica looks pretty safe (as long as you're upwind from Mt. Erebus.)
8-)
Floods, fires, tornadoes, and hurricanes only produce grave threats to the individual towns, cities, and maybe some multi-county regions that they cross. For individual incidents, we're relatively prepared beforehand and we know how to respond afterward.
There's no comparison to having nearly everything in multiple states obliterated to the point that rescue takes weeks or months to arrive. We're not equipped to instantly support millions of refugees in the US. Moving hundreds of thousands of people for Katrina was probably at the upper limit of what we can effectively do (for various definitions of "effectively"). A killer quake out west could have 10 million refugees.
It’s worth reading Ms Schultz’s other articles; if you do, you may come to the conclusion I did, which is that she is a very skilled provocateur, and always finds just that angle in whatever topic she is investigating.
Her hack job on Thoreau demonstrates this [0], in the selections of his writing that she reproduces and her at best inability to read his words (at worst willful misrepresentation them). It is easy to say that the “[Vision of Thoreau as a national conscience] cannot survive any serious reading of “Walden.”” It is much harder to know how to read Walden seriously.
What is Microsoft's contingency plan for this? Or, in fact, the FAANG's and other west-coast tech companies? The effects of a Cascadia earthquake on the US and world economy would be "interesting".
I suppose it depends on data centre locations. Data centre on the west coast? I'd be wary, mostly central and east coast? Less of a worry.
From a cloud perspective, I'd hope everything just carries on.
But from a 'shareholder' perspective I expect the stock markets will go silly at the first sign of shaking.
All the clouds will go down at the same time. The control planes for all them are heavily managed in Seattle.
AWS has lots of engineers in Seattle, but control plane is distributed. I'd personally expect a long delay in getting any fixes to things, but that many sites would be just fine.
For some reason I had the impression that us-east-1 was kind of the flagship for AWS, although actually typing that out seems quite silly.
It is the flagship.
I think you overestimate how resilient any of the cloud providers are to a massive gray failure. Lots of west coast infrastructure will flap. The survivors will have other priorities. I am going to revise my statement, I predict! a partial or nearly complete failure of the internet across multiple continents when this earthquake goes off.
But are all the buildings on the MS campus, for example, "built to code"? (that's the US phrase isn't it). Do we reasonably expect most, let's say, post-80s buildings to survive a magnitude 9+?
Most of the buildings that are more than a few stories tall on that campus are definitely build to modern-ish code. They’ve been slowing replacing the original stack with new office buildings.
Staffing would play a major role as well with their HQs on the west coast.
“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.”
… great point.
Are there studies that analyse the effects of such an earthquake on the world's software infrastructure and thus on global economy?
Adtech will be devastated.
What is the bad news?
How do I coax an earth quake into happening?
I don't know how scientifically reliable this article is, but it gives me an idea. Could tsunami avoidance be an ideal use case for a jet pack? It doesn't need a lot of altitude or more than a few minutes of flight time, just easy rapid deployment without an airstrip. Some startup should be all over this. A combined package with an alarm triggered by an ultrasonic sensor would make a great sales pitch to well heeled customers living in that region. It might even lead to beneficial government policy changes by raising awareness of the danger when everybody who's not rich enough to afford one whinges about it on facebook.
I'm not sure if this is satire? No, a jetpack is not an alternative for a tsunami. You'd have to: 1.) already be outside with it fueled and being worn. Tsunamis come quick if you're close enough to get seriously injured. If you're not then you just have time to get further inland.
2.) someone have a child-version (but what about infants?). Not sure about you but putting my nephews into a jet pack seems like a poor idea, they're fidgety in car seats.
3.) It's a jet pack, and you're flying. How is that possibly safe without regular maintenance and training for what would be a once in 1000 year event?
I agree, because I really want to see some true-believer startup enthusiast going about their normal day with 100lbs of jetpack on their back, insisting it will be the next big thing.
When that article was written, it was 29.6 percent past the average cycle time. Now it is more than 32 percent past. Time just keeps on marching forward. I didn't see any mention of what the distribution of intervals is, but 32 percent past average seems a lot even for a long-tailed distribution.
Don't get too comfortable if you're on the East Coast. Whatever survives sea level rise due to global heating, will be wiped out by the megatsunami caused by the ensuing landslide when La Palma erupts.
The volume of water displacement from a volcanic landslide is orders of magnitude less than that displaced by undersea fault quakes; while it could trigger a "local" tsunami that could impact the African or European coast, it would certainly not be in the same category as a "big one", nor very significant for North America.
Consider that the displaced water from this point event would radiate out in 360 degrees from the Canaries, dissipating with the square of distance traveled.
My East Coast tsunami money is on a submarine landslide. Long odds but what a payout.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=us+east+coast+submarine+landslide
In theory tho, a well placed earthquake could bump those odds https://geology.com/noaa/atlantic-ocean-tsunami/
With the way things are going, this might just get struck off the bingo card.
Didn't La Palma erupt in the last two years?
Isn't that theory from some total nutjob?
No, but the consensus is that the intial modelling wasn’t accurate enough in several areas, which when updated leads to a much lower risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard
It is not exactly a volcanic eruption that is the threat, but the collapse of the flank of the island (which might cause or be triggered by an eruption.) I believe Hawai'i presents a similar risk, and undersea avalanches (such as the prehistoric Storegga slides in the Norwegian Sea) pose a tsunami threat in many parts of the world not noted for their earthquake risk.
What’s the bad news for chicago?
In other news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443017
Yeah this is what reminded me. Figured I'd revive the "mega earthquake" while the news was buzzing about the "mega flood".
Might as well make it a trifecta: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-megadroug...
I remember reading this article when it came out. It's pretty terrifying.
I think the year of publication of this article — 2015 — should be in the title, no?
It is not a big difference in geological time.
>> It is not a big difference in geological time.
When it was published we were 29.6 percent past the 243 year average cycle time. Now we are more than 32 percent past. No, it's not a big difference but we are meaningfully further along than when it was written ;-)
haha true
By the standards, of course, although considering that the topic is about events on a geologic timescale, a half a decade plus or minus doesn't change the relevance much ;-)
The article is from 2015
Only 293 years left :(
Fortunately we've been geoengineering heavily since 2015. If we work hard enough, we can change the planet so much that "the big one" never arrives!
I like the comments, but I was just noting that the original post did not contain the requisite (2015) in the title, but I see that has been fixed now.
eh...the timing is from that quake in 1700, tsunami from which devastated Edo Japan
The timing is actually based on seafloor cores, and finding 41 earthquakes in the last 10,000 years.
My comment was a joke (random intervals don't work that way).