The Really Big One

I was in New Orleans in October 2002, and this guy was on the front page of the main newspaper predicting that within 20 years a category 5 hurricane was likely to whip around Florida and strike the city head on. He said the levies weren't high or strong enough, and that downtown New Orleans would be under 20 feet of water:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html

I remember reading it with interest and then shrugging and moving on with my day. Three years later I remembered that moment and realized that as a society we just don't care that much about our long-term safety.

  Wysopal offered this grim precedent: Cities were once 
  vulnerable to disastrous fires, which raged through dense 
  clusters of mostly wooden buildings. It took a giant fire 
  in Chicago to spur government officials into serious 
  reforms, including limits on new wooden structures, a 
  more robust water supply for suppressing blazes and an 
  overhaul to the city’s fire department.


  “The market didn’t solve the problem of cities burning 
  down,” Wysopal said, predicting that Internet security 
  may require a historic disaster to force change. “It 
  seems to me that the market isn’t really going to solve 
  this one on its own.”

  But here’s a frightening fact: The push to create tough 
  new fire-safety standards did not start after the Great 
  Chicago Fire in 1871, which killed hundreds of people and 
  left 100,000 homeless. It took a second fire, nearly 
  three years later in 1874, to get officials in Chicago to 
  finally make real changes.

Meanwhile the barrier to a proper early warning system for the west coast is a whopping $15.6 million a year, of which California has managed to get a whole $5 million from Congress so far - http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-quake-early-wa...

Honestly, I'm a little unclear as to why we are even going to Congress for this, instead of the governments of CA, WA and OR agreeing to divide up the sum based on population or state GDP or some other obvious metric. The sums involved are so small in budgetary terms as to seem less than the cost of conducting studies and federal lobbying activities.

Hmm, in the spirit of thinking of worst-case scenarios, most of the engineering talent for Amazon and Microsoft is in Seattle and Redmond, respectively. There's even a sizable percentage of Google cloud platform in Fremont and Kirkland.

Even if most of the employees live, it's likely basic infrastructure will be a disaster for quite a while. Maybe Google would be able to offload ops work to Mountain View, but it seems likely Amazon.com, AWS and Azure would go down, possibly for months. I wonder what the effect would be on the global economy.

Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways!

While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itself into making me think that nothing can really be done. It's not going to be realistic to establish safeguards against an 8.5+ if it/or the subsequent tsunami is going to flatten the city west of I-5

FYI, the two-hundred year figure that this article mentions appears to be in dispute. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earth...) includes much more specific, cited information which puts the frequency at 300-600 years between significant quakes with the earthquake of 1700 having occurred after a 780 year lull.

Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?

So how can you escape from a 10-meter tsunami, like the 11-meter Tohoku tsunami that wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi, assuming you have years to prepare?

You could build buildings that could withstand the water flowing around them, as the nuclear reactor center itself did; but windows that can survive not just ten meters of water pressure but also cars and trees being dashed against them by the tsunami are going to be less like windows and more like plastic-filled tunnels to the daylight.

You could ensure that all of your buildings are at least 10 meters tall, built to withstand the tsunami without collapsing, and with adequate escape routes to the upper floors, space therein to ensure that everyone can escape, and emergency supplies (e.g. first-aid kits, food, water, insulin) to keep incidental deaths to a minimum. Then you just have to get everyone up four flights of stairs before the tsunami hits. The bottom floors will fill with water, destroying everybody's TV, and then recede. Maybe make it 20 meters, just in case the tsunami is extra huge, like the Kuril Islands tsunami of 2006.

Or you could build your houses a meter underground. You might lose the top 50cm of dirt cover, and if you illuminate with lightpipes, your lightpipes will fill with silt and other mud; but you should be able to keep your subterranean house well enough sealed that the water itself won’t be a problem. Escaping the house after the water recedes, though, may be a problem if you turn out to be in a sediment-deposition zone instead of an erosion zone. Tunneling out, using a door built to open inwards specifically for this purpose, may be your only option.

Other options are possible; Stapledon’s Star Maker suggests taking flight when the water is incoming, but that would seem to require a sufficient population of evacuation helicopters to evacuate the entire population within the few minutes of warning you have. This is probably not possible for biological humans. And if you have boats, especially if you live in boats, you could take them a few hundred meters offshore and be, in all likelihood, perfectly fine.

How can we engineer human civilization to be robust against natural disasters? The Chile and Haïti earthquakes of 2010 showed that there is enormous scope for doing so; how can we do better? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-earthqu...

For a good read on another somewhat overlooked seismic zone: http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm

Most people don't think of the midwest/great plains states as being seismically active, but they're home to some of the most geologically interesting history in the United States.

"The Cascadia subduction zone stretches from Cape Mendocino in northern California to Brooks Peninsula on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a distance of about 700 miles (1,130 km). All along this zone, which begins beneath the seafloor to the west and extends inland towards the Cascade and Coastal mountains, the subducting plates are forced beneath the North American Plate. At a relatively shallow depth (less than about 20 miles/30 km down), the plates have become stuck. Below this locked zone, warmer temperatures make the plates more pliable, allowing them to move more readily past each other. This freer movement deeper down causes strain to accumulate along the locked zone. Once that strain is great enough to overcome the friction that keeps the plates locked, the fault will rupture: the edge of the North American Plate will lurch suddenly upwards and southwestwards as the subducting plates slip under and northeastwards. With this movement, the deformed western edge of the North American Plate will flex, causing the land along large sections of Cascadia" [0]

Also check the diagram(s) for a better understanding.

[0]http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scen...

As usual, paste this exact url into a google search box to reach a non-paywalled version of the article.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...

I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would work.

Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the uncertainty surrounding its timing. "Maybe it'll be some other generation's problem. Maybe we don't actually need to let it affect our thinking about where we live and what we build." This kind of thinking is expedient and economical right up to the point where it gets absolutely everybody killed.

There's a second, somewhat less fundamental problem: the causality count can depend dramatically on exactly when the earthquake happens. It'll be worse if it happens at high tide rather than low tide (the tsunami will reach farther). Worse if it happens at night rather during the day (darkness is harder for emergency services to cope with). Worse if it happens in the winter rather than the summer (more deaths from exposure), etc.

These problems aside, a 9.0 with a tsunami is eminently survivable. You just need to be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right types of buildings / geology / topography, when it happens.

Anyhow, how do we solve these problems? Stopping the earthquake is out of the question ... but making it happen isn't. So here's what I propose: we announce an exact date and time for the earthquake.

Give everybody, say, 30 years to prepare for it. That's a decent-enough timescale for the sort of population displacements which will need to happen. So we'll have the earthquake in 2045. Let's have it in the mid-summer, at 10AM during a low tide, to minimise all the timing-related casualties. Then, at the appointed time and date -- if the earthquake hasn't happened yet -- we set off howevermany scores of nukes it's been calculated to take, drilled into the subduction zone, to lubricate the fault enough for a full-fault rupture. Shouldn't take too much of a push to get things going.

Over the next 30 years, the absolutely certain foreknowledge of this event would alter the planning, policy, and insurance environments dramatically. Tsunami walls etc. would be built in areas which are planned to be defended. In areas which cannot be defended and must be abandoned, the property prices, development activity, and eventually population levels would gradually crash. Within defended / geological stable zones, buildings which you want to be standing in 31 years would still need to be retrofitted to survive a 9.0 quake; otherwise, they'd be torn down before that point. Finally, on the appointed day of the quake, everybody could gather in the most geologically-stable high-grounds they can find, and just sit back and watch the fun.

Of course there'd be a danger that the quake might arrive at a bad time before then -- but even if it does, the incremental changes in land-use and the built environment, which such a policy would provoke, would result in far fewer casualties than our current trajectory.

Alas, it'll never happen, if only because a policy which results in the intentional destruction of millions of peoples' homes is a bit difficult to sell in a democracy, even if it would save tens to hundreds of thousands of lives.

After watching the Japanese Tsunami, it got me wondering about a weather-balloon-like device.

You strap it on like a life jacket, and you wait for the wave to come your way. As it approaches, you pull the cord. Something that looks like a weather balloon inflates, extends the length of a tether, and then you float a few hundred feet in the air, and then float back down a while later.

Why is this a dumb idea?

Portland has an admirable style when it comes to resilience. At least at the grass roots. It'd be great to see an Apollo program around earthquake preparedness.

There is a carry-heavy loads around the city cargo bike race that's been going on for a few years. http://disasterrelieftrials.com/

I like to think about how I'd react in the 15 minutes I have between the earthquake and tsunami.

How tall would this tsunami be? Quick googling shows the tallest one ever is 524 meters. Assuming the tsunami is that tall, going into tall buildings might not work - tallest building in Seattle, Columbia Tower, is 287 meters (+50m in elevation increase), and is a few blocks from the waterfront . Best bet is to run/bike up the hill to Capitol Hill, which is 100m higher in elevation, and about 2 miles inland (and east of the I5).

Just need some science to figure out how far the wave will go given these hill angles and elevations in Seattle to find a precise safe spot (assuming the tallest tsunami ever, and assuming all other variables like me being able to react instantly and fallen buildings not blocking my path stay constant, which they of course won't).

There are roughly 3 million people in this area. The really big earthquake may cause death of 13,000 people - or about ~0.5% of the population. Chance of that happening over next 50 years is 10%. In other words, if you were living in this zone, your chance of dyeing due to a big earthquake over next 50 years is about 0.05%.

It occurs to me that your chance of dyeing over next 50 years for reasons other than earthquake is 90%. Nevertheless, my hope from this article is that government will invest much more in early warning systems and enact laws to build structures to withstand such natural disasters. As it appears now, government is starving off these kind of projects from funding.

It would be nice if they'd cite their sources. This looks to be one of the main ones:

http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_...

But this is not nearly as dire. For example, "the Pacific Northwest’s largest population centers and ports, including Portland (OR), Seattle and Tacoma (WA), and Vancouver (BC), are not expected to experience any significant tsunami impacts."

Reminds me of the movie quote: "Wiped clean by the wrath of God.", I suspect from one of the movies Indiana Jones.

Right, at

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark

> Brody: However, about a year after the pharaoh had returned to Egypt, the city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a whole year. Wiped clean by the wrath of God.

Outside Magazine did a great article about the Cascadia Subduction Zone a few years ago.

http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-ri...

Apparently it also created the Bridge of the Gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_(land_bridg...

the question I would be asking myself is Am I prepared for such a natural disaster ? Or What steps can I take on a personal level to be ready ? For eg: Always have an evac bag ready to take off Or live out of a suitcase so that I dont have to worry about stuff & data. Or distribute my personal resources (cards, cash) etc in PO boxes across the country. Ofcourse, in such a huge disaster these steps wont matter but in small events, there might be of help.

Worth noting that the state of warning systems there is somewhere between dismal and non-existent and the disaster preparedness of most cities seems to vary between unprepared and comically inept.

Is there anything anyone can do to set up an alert for these sorts of things?

If these predictions are true, there's a good chance that the entirety of Silicon Valley could be utterly destroyed. You'd think people would take more of an interest in preventing that.

"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." This is total crap. There was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Seattle in 2001.

Seems the science on this may not be as settled as the article indicates.

nature.com/news/seabed-samples-cast-doubt-on-earthquake-risk-for-pacific-northwest-1.15655

But I won't fault the author for not getting it quite right on a shifting area of research.

These guys need to do a kickstarter - http://grillo.io/

I can't read the article, says I've read my last complimentary issue. That's in Chrome, I added them to my allowed cookie list. It still doesn't work. I tried Firefox with cookies enabled and it works so guessing something to do with the ad cookies from their site I have blocked.

If I open an Incognito window in Chrome it works.

There's a nuclear submarine base there too :(

So SF is screwed right?

Silicon Valley refugees and people complaining about Bay Area prices, please note that this is 100% true. Portland will be completely wiped out within the next couple years by a giant earthquake followed by a Sasquatch Apocalypse.

Don't move here. You will die. But please visit and enjoy your stay!

Love, Portland

Does the New Yorker just inject random comics into their stories? None of these illustrations appear to be related to the content.

TLDR someone?

A heads up: this peace is 6.3K+ word long and according to my estimate it would take you around 45 mins to finish reading it.

Enjoy!

In recent past, I had this thought that Silicon Valley is sitting on top of, or very close to, potential future fault activity. And I have a hard time believing that the key component of human civilization (technology) is so vulnerable, and was built after the 1906 disaster.

It's one of the factors I would consider when deciding if I really want to move to west coast.

It's interesting to see several articles about this recently. Ever since I was growing up in the 1970's, they've been talking about "the big one".

Here's the 1979 show "In Seach Of" discussing it:

Leonard Nimoy's narration is top notch as always: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs

At the time of the video, they said over 15 million people live along the various fault lines.