What will happen to Seattle and Portland when it hits?
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.”
…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.
As she notes, the only question is when, not if. I hope it’s not any time soon; I’ll lose a lot of friends.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a key point:
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 is also why it’s easy to persuade people that extreme weather events aren’t normal, and can be attributed to “climate change.” People have either not experienced, or don’t recall similar ones from the past, when the CO2 levels were lower.
A bit over a decade ago the CA company I worked for moved to WA. It was a bit funny during the earthquake listening to these old hands estimating its magnitude. I most enjoyed watching a string of light poles swaying along the street outside my office window.
The big one doesn’t sound like it would be as much fun.
It’s gonna really suck eggs for those who happen to be there on business or vacation/holiday but live and work (normally) in Nebraska. Those left alive in Nebraska to breed should also buy lotto tickets… Aren’t some of the country’s biggest insurance actuarial companies also in Omaha? Hmmm.
There’s simply no way to move people any significant distance in 15 minutes after a big one hits. So instead they should start building submersible steel and concrete shelters in the inundation zone, with external hatches like a submarine’s, along with a higher exit because the lower entrances will be clogged with debris one the tsunami has subsided.
I’ve been thinking along the same lines, bomb shelters designed to handle nuclear attack could, as long as they’re located in areas that ain’t going to get dug out by water, prove pretty safe refuges.
They might make shelters that resemble submarines, but if the government built them, they’ll probably have screen doors.
There’s also the matter of Mount Rainier. It is in itself a potential disaster of similar magnitude. But I would also expect a fair chance of a major eruption, should a magnitude 9 quake hit the area.
“long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line”
Um, Portland and Seattle constitute a civilization? Who knew!
In Seattle going online you can get the latest movie releases mailed to you for free and you send them back in the same mailers also for free. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. Does that count for civilized?
I meant to say from the public library (what a brain fart.)
Perhaps designs similar to the fall-out shelters from the 50s? Some of the backyard designs had a buried steel cylinder with long tube with right angle turn leading from basement to shelter. Cylinder included a circular opening at the top, large enough for an adult to pass through, which was covered by a plate anchored with steel nuts accessible from inside the shelter. Idea being that if your house collapsed and blocked the main entrance you could escape by unbolting the cover from the inside and using a shovel to dig your way up back into your yard. This is no fiction, I’ve seen the Civil Defense plans for these (standard design) and have been inside one as well. You should include a wrench (spanner for you folks across-the-pond) capable of unscrewing the nuts holding the plate in place as well as a shovel as part of your shelter tool-set.
George your description brought this to mind. Excellent idea BTW. There is just not enough time to get away. I’d include ways to determine if the hatch is still under deep water before opening it. Anything underground is likely to get crushed tho. Something anchored into the beaches or slightly offshore? Modified semi-tractor-trailer tankers or modified railcar tankcars in open spaces?
The Navy once looked at concrete submersibles, which are great under pressure because concrete is strong in compression. Modern ultra-high performance concretes, which use quartz, silica fume, high range water reducers, and fiber reinforcement, have excellent compressive strength and good tensile strength (29,000 and 7,000 psi in the link, with some good to 40,000 psi). They are also impermeable to water, which is probably irrelevant on a short dunking. But even regular concrete would do fine.
Building such shelters using re-usable molds should make them quite cheap. I suppose the trick, though, is that they must come through an Earthquake undamaged yet also be anchored so the tsunami doesn’t pull them out to sea or batter them against a building. I suggest putting them on a soft bed of some sort, perhaps sand, where they’re free to shift side-to-side, with some horizontal steel beams to keep them from tipping or rolling. To keep them from washing out to sea, anchor them with large steel cables that have just enough slack to allow riding out the Earthquake. Keep them packed with water and MRE’s, and perhaps add some kind of door latch to keep kids out which automatically snaps off in the event of a big one.
But of course what Oregon and Washington will actually do is spend more money on renewable energy to stave of climate Armageddon, arguing that a few inches rise in sea levels will make the tsunami much, much worse.
You could also anchor them to bedrock either directly or by those cables. I wouldn’t worry too much about the shelter surviving a big earthquake. If it’s durable enough to withstand having part of a building fall on it or being submerged under ten meters of water, then it’s durable enough to withstand the earthquake itself.
“Modern ultra-high performance concretes, which use quartz, silica fume, high range water reducers, and fiber reinforcement, have excellent compressive strength and good tensile strength”
Seattle has proved repeatedly that any use of any actual engineered concrete anywhere in the state will be substituted for the lowest grade of crud that will almost support its own weight. See: WSPPS nuclear cooling towers unable to sustain the -water-, 1963 state route 520 floating bridge (substandard concrete requires pumps in the pontoons), and the just-finished-crossing-the-water 520 floating bridge, primarily constructed to avoid the maintenance on the old ‘water problem’ … and they’re having problems with “the pontoons sinking”. Sigh.
On the upside, if everything west of I-5 is toast, then Washington will become a deep red state overnight.
Unfortunately no. The lunacy of Dolezal was brought to you by our friends to the left in Spokane who wield a lot of power in the area. Spokane went for Obama in 08 but not in 12 and the city proper has a large infestation of progressives that want to inflict all manner of nonsense on the populace.
Some of us are waiting for the Big One to hit, just so that we can post links to this Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXJmfd3cmg
Being in a shelter closer to the water / beach front is probably preferable. No time for the wave to have swept up much debris, with the exception of the occasional trawler, or container ship, should you be so unlucky… It just has to deal with water overpressure and be capable of withstanding that to maintain structural integrity. But any shelter would be preferable to being out in the open in the inundation zone.
Maybe time to invest in companies like this:
http://survival-capsule.com
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who have enough of a grasp of statistics to see why this is a ridiculous way to make the point, and those who don’t.
The average interval tells us nothing without some knowledge of the distribution: what’s the standard deviation?
Until someone gives m that number, and unless it’s a good deal less than 315, I give it the Nelson Muntz treatment.
I’m guessing you only read the part Rand quoted, and not the entire article. The author addresses this point:
“Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and eleven, but also of eighteen and two.”
That’s not a bad summary of standard deviation, but in layman’s terms rather than mathematical jargon.
This reminds me of Heinlein’s infallible defense against nuclear weapons “don’t be there when it goes off”.
‘This is also why it’s easy to persuade people that extreme weather events aren’t normal, and can be attributed to “climate change.”’
It’s made worse by the fact that generational turnover and major climate movements are about the same length – roughly 30 years or so. This leads to a resonance condition, whereby each succeeding generation grows progressively more alarmed by perfectly normal climate activity.
The local authorities actual -plan- appears to be summed up by the fact that that their advertising is “3 Days, 3 Ways!” That is “Our job is to convince -you- that you need to have 3 days of cruft.” While I don’t object in principle, 3 days is mighty short considering every single logistical link -into- Seattle is weak.
North side: Variety of antique bridges “retrofitted to deal with a common quake, but unlikely to survive even a mild Big One”.
South Side: Two main roads, one right in a valley that’s pretty much Mount Rainier’s outlet in that direction, one clinging to the side of a long ridge.
West Side: Is the port. Every single aspect of the port is built on ‘fill and sand’.
East Side: Two floating bridges. Not sure about the one, but the other needs continuous power to pump water out of the pontoons to avoid sinking at a substantial rate. Regardless: Lake level is maintained by a lock system … an antique lock system that managed to be mildly damaged in the ‘6.8-but-distant’ Nisqually quake of 2001. No earthquake proofing, and not going to help the floating bridges to be ten feet lower than where they are.
The rail lines proceed along under bluffs – and have problems staying open in regular wet seasons. Yes, I know, it’s most always wet season.
Then there’s the people. It will make Katrina look like a Church social.
“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
Unlike, apparently, the FEMA director, I’ve been to Oregon. There’s a range of hills 50 miles wide, hundreds of feet high between I5 and the coast. Coastal villages will get hammered, other places – not so much.
Ever assuming the wave comes upriver, it’s a hundred miles or so of twists and turns – people in Portland will have plenty of warning and time to get to high ground, away from a much attenuated surge.
I’m not saying it isn’t a huge issue, that needs addressing, but I suspect FEMA isn’t the answer.
A while back, I would sit in on public emergency management meetings and for a major Mt St Helens eruption they assumed that not only would the Seattle area be devastated but all of the transportation links would be severed beyond repair. For ordinary disasters, it is easy enough to bring in outside resources and we do a pretty good job dealing with wildfires and things like that but large portions of the state could be covered in pyroclastic flows preventing aid from the east side making it to the west.
For the big ones, you are not going to be driving anything anywhere. That leaves air transport as one of the only other alternatives and I am not sure they have spent too much effort on that one. Not sure what resources Fairchild AFB has but they do work with local emergency responders on HAZMAT type stuff so hopefully there is a foundation of a relationship to work from.
We have the next disaster tv series… a thousand or so families build shelters to survive the big one. They get ridiculed as modern Noahs. Big one hits. They then try to reconnect with the outside world.
Look at the bright side: no more Microsoft.
Microsoft is Skynet… they would live on in the form of cockroach lawyers. “All your software belongs to us.”
This $300 laptop even comes with a ham sandwich! Along with a load of other crapware that periodically gets reinstalled because you no longer get an install disk and Ghost no longer works.
Thought 2.
What if instead of trying to survive under the tsunami, you went over it with a rocket escape system and a parachute, possibly aimed to land outside the inundation zone, or some kind of rapid inflating balloon?
Given the threat, there might be some funding for developing such a bizarre escape system.