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:
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.
Ironically enough, the architecture of the French Quarter in New Orleans is exactly an example of this. The way it was explained to me the French used wood until a mayor or some such proclaimed that all new buildings would use stone because the Spanish inspired buildings were the only ones left standing each time the city burned down.
As for relatively fire-resistant wooden buildings? I suspect that it's easier to "just" use less wood.
Although note that there are a couple of things that do help. A steel roof as opposed to a shingled one. Having proper screens in the roof vents. Having fire-resistant siding. Tile floors (or something else that's non-flammable) as opposed to carpet or wooden ones. Not having gas lines to be ruptured by an earthquake. Having proper (read: not likely to catch something on fire in the case of an earthquake) electrical connections.
Lots of people predict lots of catastrophes. The trick is identifying the correct ones ahead of time. This is much more difficult than you are implying.
I think it's still very simple. We can view it through the concept of discount rate [0], basically people don't value a future event as much as a present one.
The world ending in 50 years is not worth making drastic efforts now, at least for most people. If your prediction is too costly on the short term, as accurate as it can be most people won't act on it.
There is also something called the "critic's lament" that goes like this:
If you describe a situation in too dire terms, people will conclude nothing can be done about it and do nothing. On the other hand, if you describe a situation in too rosy terms, people will conclude it will work itself out... and do nothing.
I think the parent means something else. You can find people predicting all kinds of disasters for the next 5 years and maybe some of them are right. But it's very hard for governments to know which one are right. Especially considering some are of the form "there's more than 50% possibility something bad will happen". In this case even if the bad thing doesn't happen in 5 years, you are still not sure if you should disregard the warning.
I suspect this is in part a side-effect of the Anglo-American (maturity-mismatched) banking system, which keeps long-term interest rates artificially low, leading to higher time preference.
Lower interest rates increase your relative propensity to spend by lowering the opportunity cost of consumption. For example, if you have $10K and can get only a 1% annual return, you might as well take that trip to Vegas. If you could get a 15% return, though, you might rather stay home and rake in the interest.
OK, you basically have to compare your own internal discounting rate of consumption with the public rate of interest offered on savings.
If your own internal rate is higher than the public one, then indeed you should borrow to consume (or put off saving).
Companies only care about the public rate---if they have a higher rate of reliable return internally, they can keep borrowing money to invest until there's an equilibrium. A low interest rate makes companies more forward looking.
In this case that observation is unwarranted. There are some disasters which are difficult to predict and uncertain. There are others which are blindingly obvious or inescapable. Warning people that if a large hurricane hit a particular heavily populated city would be disastrous is not exactly extremely insightful when that city happens to live in one of the most heavily hurricane prone regions of the entire planet. As it turned out, Katrina was not even the worst case scenario, as it was not a Cat-5 when it hit New Orleans. Had it been, things would have been vastly worse. Similarly, a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake is not a question of whether it will happen but when. It absolutely will happen, and on a timescale similar to the age of the United States. That demands prudent planning and mitigation efforts.
If you live in Japan you can't merely shrug and say "oh, who can predict when an earthquake will come? nobody knows", no you live in an earthquake prone area, you need to plan. Similar if you live in tornado alley in the US you can't shrug and say "nobody can predict a tornado". You need to prepare.
I tend to look at the insurance company's take on these kind of things for a more clinical rational analysis. Compare rates and try to ferret out why they are what they are. Yes, its come to that..
I'm starting to think about ditching earthquake insurance.
I'm in a modern home, so I'm not making much of a claim if there's a smallish earthquake. But if there's a big one, I assume the insurance company will just go under, leaving me out the premiums and with no recourse.
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.
The problem is that you can't really simulate the systemic effects of a really major quake (like a scenario where Mountain View is out of power for weeks).
The DiRT drills include the simultaneous loss of whole offices, including the complete obliteration of the Bay Area. Participants are instructed to pretend that they've been eaten by zombies and not communicate with anyone in a remote office, and that's backed up (as described in the article) by cutting the network links to & from the Mountain View corporate office.
Now, there may certainly be larger systemic effects over long time periods caused by eg. the death of the company CEO, the loss of new product development, or the complete destruction of the company's market (in, for example, a global thermonuclear apocalypse that sets us back to the stone age). But the tests absolutely do simulate the simultaneous death of 15,000+ employees, destruction of the Mountain View headquarters, and loss of all datacenters, data, and power in the Bay Area, and verify that remote teams can continue the day-to-day operations in such an event.
What happens if Google goes down for a while? Is it really that bad? Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.
The data could be lost. Part of DiRT is ensuring that the result of losing N data centers is not "oops we lost 20% of GMail users data permanently".
On the scale of devastation this article is describing, none of Google's servicing being obliterated really matters but I'm personally pretty glad Google is prepared for multiple, massive scale disasters to happen at once.
The financial disaster would be horrendous. Look at the number of companies using google for email.
When the towers went down in 2001, the first business priority of many companies was getting email back online. It's an incredibly important part of a business.
Reminds me of when I was doing some consultancy for large oil/energy trading company in London. There was huge DR initiative going on at the time, and one thing they realized after surveying the business is that, if worst came to worst, they could still conduct business if they lost every other business system, as long as e-mail was available.
If Google App Engine goes down many sites will stop working. OAuth services will also start to fail. So will custom search provided to 3rd party sites (ok that may not sound too bad but you never now). Then there is cloud storage which in many cases is used as a backup mechanism. And how about the gazillion of sites that load js libraries from Google's CDN? Sure, a day or two is bearable, but make it a week and then the shit hits the fan.
The one thing you should bear in mind about earthquakes is that in many cases the aftershocks make more damage than the main one, because damage accumulates. Which means that critical infrastructure could take weeks to become fully operational.
>I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine
The search engine that holds the vast majority of the worlds traffic? The search engine that everyone is going to call on minutes after the earthquake to get news, but isn't going to be there so all the other search engines slow to a crawl. If Google search just disappeared for a week there would be a considerable number of businesses go out of business. You see it now in one off cases where a site is delisted and its traffic drops 99%.
That said, Google has datacenters around the nation and the world so that scenario is unlikely.
I wonder how it would play out if all the major search engines went down. I think people would start communicating on whatever sites they knew the URL for that were still up. Probably some ad-hoc manually curated indexes would pop up in comment threads on various sites and then a few people would probably aggregate these and host them on their local boxes.
> Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.
Perhaps you can, but how many companies are now wholly dependent on Google for their groupware functionality? What happens if you're one of the gaggle of people who make a living off YouTube?
In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of businesses use Apps for their email, but I'd hazard a guess that you're still looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in losses if that were to suddenly disappear.
It's the cascading service failures and related economic costs that would be the most damaging (and hardest to really quantify until a scenario really happens).
Wow, I had no idea that Google Apps were about 15% of Google's revenue. That is a way bigger than I would have guessed. (Hundreds of millions x 2 orders of magnitude is >= 10B, total revenue in 2014, 66B)
Maybe Google is distributed enough to stay up, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft and Amazon are not, and I doubt Google has the spare capacity to handle Azure load, much less Amazon load.
Utilization and availability are not directly related. Much of their utilization is probably not super time critical and could be proportionately shed or suspended in an emergency situation like the one in question.
I bet Google could absorb 100% of the emergency evacuation of AWS in a pinch. Remember also that not 100% of services will be moved, and those that are will not be running at 100% capacity - everyone would be suspending their batch/analytics/warehousing jobs that week (or month).
EDIT: Also, lock in would stop all the redshift/dynamo/etc users from migrating, and would limit people to just what they could throw up on GCE/GAE.
Most large companies do/have done exactly that. Arguably 9/11 was the big catalyst for DR planning.
There were Wall St firms that literally had to get the military to escort them into Lower Manhattan in the days after to rescue servers, tapes, etc and cobble something together in a satellite office.
No one wants a repeat of that, and you'll notice subsequent disasters like Sandy have barely been a blip for most as a result of policy changes.
At this point basically any major company will/should have procedures in place for "perfect" DR, the ability for everyone to work from home indefinitely (and alternate offices/infrastructure waiting for the few people who need something special, like the special needs of a trading desk), as well as obviously having back up data centers with full replication.
Sure you can. Just look for the keys to the main breakers to those buildings. Of course, paying for that amount of vacation for 15 days is probably not entirely feasible for any company.
The Microsoft campus in Redmond would most likely not be knocked over by the tsunami: a rather hilly Seattle is in the way, then there's the large Lake Washington, and then Redmond is another ~40 feet above the lake on the far side, plus another ~2 miles inland. A fair amount of the energy of the tsunami is going to be expended by the time the Microsoft campus gets salted. (Kirkland is west of Redmond, adjacent to Lake Washington, so it's a similar-but-somewhat-less-optimistic story there. Fremont is adjacent to Seattle and slightly inland, so it will be worse there.)
Of course, the infrastructure of the greater Seattle area is going to be trashed, but chances are good that the Redmond and Kirkland campuses of Microsoft and Google respectively would be intact.
Link to the inundation zone predicted for a magnitude 7.3 earthquake on Seattle: http://wa-dnr.s3.amazonaws.com/Publications/ger_ofr2003-14_t... This isn't even "the big one" as the OP describes, much less "the really big one", but it's a rough description of where the flooding will happen. Downtown Seattle (up and left of the word SEATTLE on the map, with streets in a dense diagonal grid) won't be strongly affected, because downtown Seattle is a hill. With an 8.5 or 9.0 earthquake, of course, Seattle will be much worse off, but there's still some hope that Redmond and Kirkland won't get too damaged.
Downtime of major internet services could also cause deaths elsewhere, as more industries become reliant on cloud services.
I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi companies have gone out of business.
Of course all this stuff is supposed to have clean failover, but not all of it has had its mettle tested.
Man. In times like these—the northwest falling into the ocean or whatever—it's unimaginable to think about the sheer amount of data loss that could occur. I'd probably be really worried about that loss of data or, worse, the loss of services if millions of people suddenly died.
I read the whole thing in gripping detail with Mt St Helens out my office window... I was imagining the horror of not being able to blog about my death as the Tsunami was approaching...
Then you'll realise the human impact was mentioned repeatedly in the article - population in the affected regions, elderly people, school children, estimated death counts by different organizations. That was one main focus of the article - how many people such an event would kill.
Why is it necessary to prefix/suffix a comment on the article, with an "of course, people will die and that's obviously bad, we don't want people to die, is this enough mentioning of the people dying that we can say something else without you passive aggressively implying I don't care about the people dying?"
Just seemed like horrific lack of perspective. The infrastructure supporting transient internet technologies is way way down the list of importance if the Cascadia Subduction Zone slips.
I grew up in Central Oregon which is surrounded by fresh (geologically speaking) lava fields. I wonder if the Native Americans that were around when Mt Mazama was turned into Crater Lake worried about the disruption of their Obsidian tool making business.
I believe you are giving reasons why our computational infrastructure needs to be further distributed. We should not be dependent on a small number of companies who wish to locate their resources in continental subduction zones.
That does seem likely, though as far as I know, AWS's biggest zone is located in Northern Virginia. And, I'm sure the AWS people have planned as much as they can for this eventuality. (Um, I hope.)
I doubt the datacenter's locations matter. The services at the bottom of the stack need constant ops to stay alive. With most of the engineers out, I expect barely a few days to go by before one of the essential services needs servicing.
For companies that size, the really important services probably have a distributed ops team, with a team in Europe/Asia alternating 12 hour oncall shifts with a team in North America. In an emergency, the non-North American team could take 24 hour shifts to keep the infrastructure alive.
Though of course if headquarters was really wiped off the map, there'd be huge problems with communication, tribal knowledge that only existed in the heads of senior engineers in Seattle, and so forth.
AWS West in Oregon are somewhat further inland from I-5. It would probably be impacted, but not to the same degree as the datacenters in other cities like Tukwila.
i think the datacenters will get soon to the status of national strategic infrastructure objects similar to bridges, power plants, etc... Given the distributed nature of the services i'd suppose the main threat though isn't from physical effect like earthquake, instead i think the main threat is introduction of something like StuxNet into say AWS (or highjacking the backdoor access that services like NSA already have there)
Sure, the AWS us-west datacenters would go down (Oregon and NorCal), but us-east (VA) is still the largest of all AWS regions. While Amazon is headquartered on the west coast, I sincerely doubt a failure of even both us-west regions would take out the others.
Ultimately it's up to the user: if they're going to put all their eggs in a us-west basket, they're out of luck if the west coast ends up under water.
People talk and talk about how The Cloud is about decentralizing things but really at the end of the day it's about centralizing everything with about a dozen vendors. And of course when price sensitivity causes attrition that will turn into 4 or 5 vendors.
I'm not sure I see how that really counts as 'more robust'.
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
The viaduct's collapse in the next big earthquake and the ~80 lives it'll take is the _reason_ we're building something as a replacement! Granted, Bertha is a huge fuckup.
A MBA in my python night class said that one approach to the viaduct problem would be to: fund a "victims of the viaduct" fund, today, with a couple million. And then pass a law that the compensation for families of the victims is limited to what's in the fund. It is appealing in a weird evil way.
>A MBA in my python night class said that one approach to the viaduct problem would be to: fund a "victims of the viaduct" fund, today, with a couple million. And then pass a law that the compensation for families of the victims is limited to what's in the fund.
That's what I assumed, but I didn't (and still don't) see how setting up a limited liability fund for future victims would prevent what is shown in that simulation.
I don't know if this is what the MBA was going for, but the idea might be -
Setting up the compensation fund cements the idea that the disaster is a 'when', not 'if'. Putting a small cap on compensation signals to people - if you're a victim, you might only get this amount of money. The overall effect being that people are actually motivated to vote for measures to fix the problem. e.g., I know I'll only get compensated for a small amount, thus, I want to make sure it's less likely I'm victimized.
Except that every time even one direction of the viaduct is closed during rush hour (due to an overturned semi or whatever) traffic grinds to a complete halt throughout the entire city.
Yes. Japan engineers tunnels -- one longer than the Chunnel -- to survive 9+ earthquakes and they do. BART was undamaged by the Loma Prieta quake that brought down the Bay Bridge and the Oakland freeway.
The length of the tunnel doesn't have much to do with earthquake survivability, beyond the obvious linear scale factor. What the tunnel is tunneling through has a lot to do with it.
Seattle's geology is somewhat different from any of the usual cited examples, as we've learned by watching everyone from journalists to politicians to engineers stand around with dumbfounded looks while the Bertha saga unfolds.
The purpose of the tunnel is to provide a better view of Puget Sound for real estate development, not to provide any sort of substitute for the viaduct. We will lose significant traffic capacity and downtown accessibility when the viaduct comes down, tunnel or no tunnel.
Engineers have told us that the tunnel will be safer in an earthquake, but then, essentially everything those engineers have told us has been straight out of the Brothers Grimm.
I don't think a tsunami is going to flatten the city. A wave has a lot to go through (peninsulas, narrow straights, etc) before it could reach the city, all of which would likely lessen its impact significantly. Where the area will get hit hard, though, is liquifaction and landslides.
There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound, though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast. Everything is going to shift 30 to 100 feet west over the course of a couple minutes - the water in Puget Sound is going to slosh around like crazy.
Large parts of downtown and the area between Queen Anne and Capitol Hill ( where the Amazon campus is ) are built on fill, and are likely to be subjected to liquefaction in a major seismic event. It's entirely possible that whole sections of Capitol Hill could slide into downtown too.
The hills shake and the mountains dance, and then comes the tsunami; this sounds much more exciting to read about than live through.
Yeah, and the Elliot Bay tsunami hazard map[1] is a nice reminder that most of Seattle is up some steep hills (including flat areas like SLU). The hazard map models a 7.3 earthquake on the Seattle fault, which is tiny compared to a 9.0 in the subduction zone, but also doesn't have to travel through all those narrows straits and turns.
The viaduct will collapse even in a fairly moderate earthquake. A magnitude 7 quake that was closer to seattle might easily bring it down, for example.
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.
...the raw data we are looking for? That data looks to have a mean of 530 years, and a standard deviation of 262 years, although it isn't very normal looking (well there are only 18 samples after all, so maybe it isn't too bad). See the histogram I plotted at:
I would say overall the situation looks ... not great, in the medium term.
"Perhaps more striking than the probability numbers is that we can now say that we have already gone longer without an earthquake than 75 percent of the known times between earthquakes in the last 10,000 years," Goldfinger said. "And 50 years from now, that number will rise to 85 percent."
I am really interested to learn how they calculate the probability of 1/3. I think there is a legitimate question here about the methods used. In technical terms: what is the sample space and what set are you looking for within that sample space? How strong is the justification to treat the sequence of earthquakes as a sequence of independent identically distributed random numbers? Leaves me scratching my head. I looked at Professor Goldfinger's papers and couldn't find a reasonable answer. Perhaps it is more fundamental knowledge (e.g. something one would find in geology textbooks)?
A magnitude 2 earthquake releases ~30x the energy as a magnitude 1 earthquake. A magnitude 3 releases ~900x the energy of a magnitude 1. You can see where this is going. (Note, the "shaking intensity" of the earthquake doesn't increase as quite as rapidly as the amount of energy released, but the relationship depends on a lot more than the earthquake's size.)
Let's say we were to trigger many magnitude 5's. We'd need to trigger 810,000 of them to equal the energy released in a Mw 9.0 earthquake.
Interestingly, though, there are other types of earthquakes that _do_ release accumulated elastic strain over large areas. Cascadia is actually where they were first noticed.
Every ~11 months, the cascadia subduction zone has a magnitude 6 or 7 earthquake. You'll never notice in Seattle, though, because it occurs over about a month.
These "slow earthquakes" _do_ release significant amounts of accumulated strain. Sometimes they trigger "normal" earthquakes and vice versa. We don't really understand the details. The most interesting part (and the part most relevant for seattle) is that the same fault can have both these "slow earthquakes" and a full on >Mw 9 "normal" earthquake.
This is one of the "hottest" topics in earthquake seismology and convergent margins research at the moment.
So, my understanding from what you wrote is that it may indeed be possible to slowly release the accumulated pressure, but we don't really understand how that occurs naturally yet, let alone how to trigger it artificially.
Given the regularity of previous large quakes, and the fact that the described magnitude 6 quake takes place over a month, it would take longer to relieve the pressure via month-long magnitude 6 quakes than we have until the next large quake. Best case scenario - you could put it off for a few dozen years.
Even if you could relieve some of the pressure, you could theoretically make the big one less intense. It sounds like we're not even remotely close to being able to do it in practice though. (Although if we were, there's no reason why the described magnitude 6 over a month would be a limit.)
Making the big one less intense may or may not be possible. There may be some threshold pressure that needs to be reached. If there is a threshold, then it will either happen or not, depending on the rate at which we relieve pressure with smaller quakes.
I imagine the difference is what we can do vs. what is far beyond today's ability. And triggering a quake is fine even if it releases full force assuming the payoff is we get (for example sake only) a 7.1 quake today and avoid a 9.1 in 100 years.
On the Richter scale, the difference a full step (7.0 to 8.0) is about a factor of 32. So if we're trying to mitigate an 8.0 earthquake every 100 years, you're talking about a magnitude 7.0 every 3 years to release the same amount of energy.
Most engineering structures on the west coastare built to withstand a 6-7. When a magnitude 8 comes (and it will come, and in some sense we're coming out of the stress shadow from the 1906 quake just now) the devastation will be horrendous.
*Editting to add:
The structures on the west coast are engineered to withstand a SINGLE 6-7 magnitude event. Not one every 3 years.
And even if they were built to withstand a mag 7 earthquake every three years, the things inside of them likely won't be. Imagine the engineering that would have to go into designing every single item in your house to withstand a deadly earthquake on a regular basis. No more popping out to Ikea to grab the same furniture everyone else uses. Your TV stand is on springs. Your TV is on springs connected to the TV stand on springs. Your cupboards have notches where your dishes can lock into them so they don't slide. The cupboard doors have latches that let them open when pulled slowly, but resist opening when sudden force is applied. Your refrigerator bolts to the floor and is filled will elastic pockets that hold every item individually.
Its either that, or spend a significant amount of time every few years packing all of your items into boxes to ensure they won't be damaged when it's earthquake time.
My mom's strategy for the biggest items: lash them to the walls so that they don't topple or walk out of position. This doesn't solve the problems of falling plates, but it does mitigate death-by-cabinet.
That said 80% of the benefits are in location. If you're on flat bedrock, located away from the coast, you just don't feel the most intense shaking, and you won't face a tsunami.
We already know through fracking that injecting fluid into subduction zones can trigger quakes.
I wonder about injecting a very strongly non-Newtonian fluid (a super-high tensile version of oobleck, maybe with nanotubes) into subduction zones. At high shear the fluid would be very viscous and might allow gradual release of energy.
It's something that most seismologists have thought of before. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing how much stress has already been accumulated. We also don't know nearly enough about earthquake triggering to be able to do it in a controlled fashion once, let alone repeatedly.
You'd have to do this thousands of times (log scaling, remember!), in a new location each time, to produce enough small earthquakes to relieve the stress accumulated on a locked subduction zone fault: Large earthquakes produce relatively similar magnitudes of stress drop to smaller ones; this stress drop is just spread over a much larger area. So you'd have to basically tile the fault with drill holes and then do whatever to produce earthquakes. And hope it doesn't cascade. Thousands of times.
I wouldn't call it work yet. "Long-term research" already is somewhat of a compliment.
One problem is that experimentation is risky. If you do an experiment, and a tsunami follows, you are likely to be sued, even if it happens months later. Conversely, there's no way we know of to prove that a man-triggered magnitude quake prevented a more destructive one a few years later. So, you couldn't even prove that that quake with a few billion dollars of damage and a few hundred deaths relatively speaking is a good thing.
Dreamers even envision extracting energy from tectonic plates. Small-scale, that is trivial (you can easily stretch a rubber band a few centimeter a year across a fault line). Large-scale, it could be a huge energy source.
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...
Imagine the life-raft bundled around a central high powered air pump and heating unit which could deploy in seconds and heat enough air to generate the lifting power to get 6-10 adults/children (plus raft/heater/pump) in the raft to 15 meters in air within the remaining time before the wall of water/debris crushes you all. You would only need to maintain that altitude for long enough to get a tow from a helicopter (or drone) to safety or for the waters to recede.
It's doesn't seem like an easy engineering problem and I didn't even do any back of the envelope calculations to see the power required to lift 1000-1500lbs 15 meters in 10 minutes, but my gut says it's totally within the realm of our current engineering capabilities.
If we could build such a device that could be mass-produced for a reasonable cost and deployed en masse to schools and other highly populated areas within the subduction zone, it could potentially save thousands of lives that would otherwise have 0 chance of survival.
The problems that would need solving and the potential life-saving potential has me kind of excited and my brain is already getting ahead of itself thinking Kickstarter. So if you or anyone else would like to talk some more about this, I'd be more than game to start getting technical.
If anyone sees a glaringly obvious problems in this, please don't hesitate to call it out rather than just rolling eyes and moving on... wish I'd put this up when it was still on the front page.
Running in the opposite direction and toward high ground is sufficient. In the case of Japan's tsunami in 2011, there was 25 minutes of warning, which is enough time to get clear of most inundation zones if you indeed do start moving immediately.
This isn't a catchall solution (old folks, the disabled, children), but it would work for a lot of downtown people.
It depends on how far away the high ground is. There are islands where it’s hundreds of miles away (and putting out to sea is by far the better idea) but even miles away would be too far to run for me.
I used to live in Seattle — I used to bike up Yesler to go home from work — but I was talking about tsunami zones in general, especially the Pacific Northwest mentioned in the New Yorker article, not just Seattle. Maybe you replied to the wrong thread by mistake.
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.
I am hitting their pay wall by occasionally clicking links from HN. I never read the full articles, but I skim roughly 4x the amount of information provided before the pay wall. It's not worth the full price for me. I'd like a happy medium.
That killed me when I subscribed to the NYT online. I was paying $15/mo and seeing as many ads as I would expect from a free site. I love the NYT journalism and am willing to pay for it, and I understand they have bills to pay, but it's a lot of money to be sitting on ads. In fact I canceled my subscription (not a quick or easy process) and have the same amount of advertising on their NYT Now app whether I subscribe or not. So what's the point?
This is how dead tree magazines and papers work. You pay for a subscription and you still receive ads. Why would they think the web should be any different?
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.
I'm not sure it's possible. I'd guess that drilling deep enough into an active subduction zone would likely encounter temperatures above what any nuclear bomb could sustain long enough to detonate.
I think the other problem with your idea is that people won't behave as if it's inevitable, because they'll know that there's at least the possibility of having the event postponed or canceled. Worse, the more people who refrain from preparing, the better the odds are of getting a postponement or cancellation.
I like the idea, though. I proposed something similar in another earthquake-related HN thread a while back. If you can't stop or predict natural disasters, make them predictable by causing them yourself!
I like the idea, though. I proposed something similar in another earthquake-related HN thread a while back. If you can't stop or predict natural disasters, make them predictable by causing them yourself!
We already do a certain measure of that in terms of wildfires. Regular "controlled burns" to reduce fuel load (among other reasons) are a routine part of forest management practices. See, for example: http://ncprescribedfirecouncil.org/newsletter_stories/Spring...
Hydraulic fracturing is now known as a way to cause earthquakes. What if we start fracking around the NW fault zones to cause one? Of course, how do you lubricate it just enough to cause a small quake but not the giant one?
Fortunately, Oklahoma, with their anti-science "we don't believe in global warming and we are against figuring out what is causing these not seen for 100 year earthquakes" is testing out exactly how to cause them.
Thanks Oklahoma! (this should replace thanks Obama in the lexicon).
From what I've read about seismology you are on the right track. It is likely simpler to create an earthquake by water injections along a fault then it is to make 'boom' and hope something works. The big issue here is the control portion. If a fault has been building pressure for hundreds of years it is unlikely that we will have any certainty on what needs to be done to trigger only a earthquake of size X. Most likely we can start a quake, but if there is enough strain on the crust already the shaking will feedback into the crust causing further slippage down the fault.
Idea is fascinating. Aside from the political unfeasibility (people won't be convinced an earthquake will ever happen here), I'd be worried about technical execution.
Could we really cause an earthquake? How many nukes would it take? How much would the operation cost? What if someone steals a nuke while they are installing it (add some more to security cost)? What if we can't predict how it will react and end up causing more damage?
Could go on and on with these questions for an hour. And each of these questions means more time / money to come up with solutions.
The easy, stupid, and probably correct answer is... let nature sort it out. Our species is great at surviving and rebuilding. Better to worry about stuff we can control and fix than try to attempt to control things wildly beyond our means.
If I was sitting anywhere other than Victoria, BC, (right in the middle of the danger zone, on an island that is already difficult to get off of) I'd agree.
This idea is fantastic. However, we can do one better. We can control the quake such that we use a sequence of low energy quakes distributed across many years to eliminate the need for the large quick entirely.
We can even do better than that and harvest the potential energy stored, rather than simply dissipating it as heat and motion. How to do this is left as an exercise to the reader.
Politically it could never happen, but what's stopping a high minded mega genius ultra billionaire who doesn't mind getting labeled as a super villain?
From a technical perspective, it's useful to keep in mind that the closest humanity has come to drilling to the appropriate depths offshore is... Deepwater Horizon.
I'm not really sure why there should be tsunami walls etc built, since the howevermany scores of nukes it takes probably will leave large parts of the pacific northwest uninhabitable (either de facto or by choice) for a while.
So, it would be easier, cheaper and safer (but equally infeasible) to simply force resettlement of the population somewhere without a crack in the crust.
Underground nuclear explosions are fairly well contained; done at the depth required to deal with a fault, they'd probably be unnoticeable. Also, perhaps impossible, but that's a different story.
"Cannikin was detonated on November 6, 1971 51°28′13.20″N 179°6′40.75″E, as the thirteenth test of the Operation Grommet (1971–1972) underground nuclear test series. The announced yield was 5 megatons (21 PJ) – the largest underground nuclear test in US history.[24] (Estimates for the precise yield range from 4.4[36] to 5.2[37] megatons or 18 to 22 PJ). The ground lifted 20 feet (6 m), caused by an explosive force almost 400 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.[38] Subsidence and faulting at the site created a new lake, over a mile wide.[3] The explosion caused a seismic shock of 7.0 on the Richter scale, causing rockfalls and turf slides of a total of 35,000 square feet (3,300 m2).[24] Though earthquakes and tsunamis predicted by environmentalists did not occur,[33] a number of small tectonic events did occur in the following weeks, (some registering as high as 4.0 on the richter scale) thought to be due to the interaction of the explosion with local tectonic stresses.[39]"
Because if you wait for it to happen on its own time, there will only be ninety seconds of early warning, and then only half an hour before the tsunami hits. Not much time to escape. If you set it off on schedule, everyone knows where they ought not to be that day and will have had plenty of time to make other plans.
My point is that you can perform all of those optimizations and still not make the quake happen (since all of the optimizations seem to be occurring before the quake).
A good chunk of the optimizations are timing related, though. Low tide, summer, mid-day, etc. Not inducing the quake gives all of those up (not to mention the moral hazard of lying about it mentioned by others).
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.
Where do you get the helium needed to make it fly through the air? If you're just pumping air, at best you would float on water, which still leaves you vulnerable to being killed by something else that is floating (possibly a pickup truck, a growler of Rogue Dead Guy Ale or maybe the Space Needle).
You'd get helium from a tank. But you'd need a regulator with a huge heat exchanger to get fast inflation. Maybe use a high-volume whitewater kayak as the "basket".
Basically put a high-powered airpump and heating element in the center of a life raft with a balloon designed to lift a bunch of people above the tsunami wall
Helium is too expensive and rare to be deployed for this purpose (imo) and hydrogen is too reactive to be stored where these life rafts would need to go
As for the dangers associated with anything that could go wrong in flight or putting down somewhere dangerous... I think most people would rather take those chances than just be instantly crushed to death.
I love this idea. Like a reverse parachute. It would be great for both the earth quake AND the tsunami assuming you could get high enough fast enough and stay up long enough. If I was rich I would just buy a cheap helicopter but your idea is more affordable and would be accessible to more people.
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).
Fortunately, the tallest tsunami was from a rockfall in a fjord[1], not from a subduction zone earthquake. They are typically ~10 m, and it's really the wavelength, not the amplitude, that is a problem because there is so much water that the inundation is more like a flash flood than a quick slap from a breaking wave.
Second, I don't believe tsunamis from subduction zone earthquakes on the Cascadia trench will impact Seattle that much, because (as you may be able to see from your location) the Olympic peninsula is in between you and the trench. The wave coming through the Strait of Juan de Fuca will spread outward into Puget Sound and mostly dissipate against Camano and Whidbey Islands.
The big tsunami hazard for Seattle itself is the from an earthquake on the Seattle fault[2].
There's a seiche hazard in Seattle, though. Lake Washington will slosh back and forth in resonance with the shaking. Basically every natural feature in the Pacific Northwest has some exotic way of killing you.
IANAS[1], but I believe one of the reasons why the Lituya Bay tsunami was so big was simply that the water had nowhere to go but up. In a more lowlandy situation the water would spread over much larger areas at a lower elevation. Also, considering Seattle's geographic position (away from the Pacific) I would be surprised if any big tsunami would hit Seattle directly.
A little bit of Googling found this[2]. The largest known tsunami to hit Seattle was 16ft, 1100 years ago.
That said, heading for the hills is probably a good choice anyway.
Out of curiosity, I looked up estimates of what I would guess might have been the largest tsunami in recent history--the one associated with the KT event 65 million years ago. And, yes, it created tsunamis much larger than we've ever seen.
To put it in perspective, it seems like a 10km asteroid would cause a 1.5km tsunami along the nearby coasts if it crashed in the middle of the (contemporary) Gulf of Mexico; a 200m tsunami if it crashed in the middle of the Indian Ocean; and a 100m tsunami if it crashed in the middle of the Pacific.[0]
Some coastal areas would experience this more than others because of geological formations, naturally, even holding distance from the impact site constant.
[0] I'm not sure how much this depends on angle of impact, speed of impact, and composition, if it does at all.
I wish I could find some definitive resources on whether or not a building would be considered safe in a tsunami, and if it would be better to go for higher floors or lower floors.
I imagine that after such a large earth quake, many buildings would be unstable and potentially open to collapse from the force of a tsunami. I'm sure going to higher ground would be a better idea if possible, but say if it was iffy to get there in 10 minutes, should I spend that time looking for a high building instead or just get as far inland as possible?
Remembering a lot of the video from Japan, it looked like most of videos were from people who went into parking garages (concrete)[1]. Regular buildings took a pretty big hit, but I'm not sure how the local building code / materials played in that.
1) I'm going with the logic that surviving video person uploading to youtube is probably a good sample of the "worked" side of the equation.
I suppose parking garages would let a lot of the water flow through the open sides, whereas a regular building would receive a lot of force against the exterior walls.
That's really interesting. I guess when the 'big one' hits, those of us in my Sacramento apartment complex can go hang out next door with our cars in the garage. I wouldn't have thought of that myself honestly.
In addition to the risk of total collapse, there's also the risk that the remaining floors would be impassable.
Debris (furniture, broken walls, etc) can be a dangerous obstacle, especially when you have to traverse several/dozens of flights of stairs, much of which will be wet, muddy/dirty, and possible destroyed in some places. This danger magnifies when you have to evacuate large amounts of people of varying mobility (young, old, sick, or otherwise infirm).
Entrances and exits will be serious obstacles if not outright impassable, due to large amounts of debris and unknown/unstable physical integrity.
Tsunami evacuation and safety policies are outlined for movement and monitoring large groups of people, not just individuals.
With regards of where you should go -- go outside and move to higher ground.
> 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.
Remember any tsunami is going to be 20 min to an hour after the earthquake. If the building is still standing when the water arrives, it probably isn't coming down.
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.
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."
I can't speak for any other cities but I do know that Portland is much too far in land to be hit by a tsunami. The destruction within Portland would come from the earthquake itself.
Also, here are some sources that seem to coincide with what the author wrote.
> 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.
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.
I've lived in the northland for a while and my car generally has an emergency kit that includes some survival stuff. Getting stuck in your car in a blizzard is no damn fun. My Dad always kept $40 hidden in the car, but that was more a "need to pay for gas because these damn cards...." thing.
I would suggest against the suitcase in the trunk more for social reasons[1]. Hidden compartments are illegal in some states[2].
ready.gov has some basic steps. But, they don't have enough emphasis on having clean water, IMO. Having a storage sharing agreement with friends within a day or two's walk could be useful, so if your home is destroyed (along with your emergency supplies) your friend's might still be in good shape. And vice-versa.
Sadly, being well prepared with clean water, food, medicine and shelter does you no good if someone else takes it from you. The very first item on your list should be a powerful firearm & sufficient ammo.
Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle has a pretty good take on the post-apocalyptic chaos & breakdown in society that will likely ensue.
Agreed. But ... California makes that tough. Oregon & Washington are more in line with the rest of the country. Something to check is whether your state restricts carrying when a state of emergency has been declared.
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.
Earthquakes are, for now, impossible to predict so there is little forewarning (and not for the lack of people trying). However, there is a huge interest in the geological/hazards community in earthquake early warning systems in the US, especially focused on California[1][2]. The Napa earthquake last summer was the first real test of the more modern components and was successful. But again, you're dependent on warning the populace after the earthquake has begun, which isn't useful for people near the epicenter.
Tsunami warning systems have been in place for many places for decades; whether people respond is a different story.
In terms of people preparedness, again, California is the leader in the US but there are drills in many places[3], though they're generally voluntary and totally ignored by most.
It takes measurable time for communities miles away from the epicentre to get hit, and in that time you could easily send a warning.
Many of the videos from the Japan tsunami showed people getting alerted well before the quake hit. All TV stations flipped over to a warning screen with information on the quake and a map of tsunami danger areas based on computed projections.
I can see how having the fault line directly under your city is a problem, but this "mega quake" is projected to originate off-shore.
I guess the US solution is to keep watching Twitter.
It's pretty baffling. Japan is the model for earthquake warning systems. Even a few seconds' warning could be invaluable if you are running a major datacenter. But apart from a tiny pilot program in Berkeley I'm not aware of any serious efforts in that direction.
For extra credit, figure out how to trigger the compression wave near the sensors the datacenter depends on to automatically fail masters over to another state.
"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.
As 3JPLW mentioned, the 2001 Nisqually event was in the subducting Juan de Fuca slab, not on the plate interface, and was quite deep (52 km). The Cascadia plate interface itself does have quite regular 'slow earthquakes'[1] at the lower edge of the locked zone, where M~6 earthquakes occur over about a week and a half, and don't produce much shaking. We just found out about them by watching patterns in GPS data from fixed locations.
Regardless, Goldfinger is still correct on all the statements that you've quoted. In addition to the scientific content, it still is possible to spend several lifetimes in the PNW (which does extend beyond King County) in between the 1700 event and the 2001 event. Granted, there was the 1872 event near Lake Chelan [2], which was the biggest PNW quake since 1700, but still... there were multiple generations of people born in between 1872 and 2001.
I wonder if they discounted this because it was (as wikipedia lists it) an "intraslab" earthquake. I'm not a seismologist, but that reads to me like it wasn't an earthquake from the fault line directly, but rather a secondary artifact of the subduction zone.
I agree this is very misleading, but as they tell it through the historical lens, this earthquake also hadn't happened before they realized there could be earthquakes or that they could be big.
Wikipedia (sorry), has a nice diagram that shows the different categories; the "crustal" and " deep" earthquakes being different from the subduction zone earthquakes that this article is specifically about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#/medi...
They are contrasting what they describe as weekly small quakes in Japan with long periods of inactivity in the Pacific Northwest. A significant quake in one city in the region 14 years ago doesn't invalidate the claim that you could spend a significant time in the northwest without feeling a tremor.
Maybe you could, as long as those lifetimes don't happen to contain that one 6.8 event. I don't think the point was to look back several lifetimes from right now, but rather to talk about the overall frequency of earthquakes in recorded history. (Caveat: I know nothing about the seismic history of the Pacific NW, this is just how i read the statement.)
It's certainly not the only earthquake I've felt in the 15 years that I've lived here, just the biggest. Which is definitely different from not feeling a quiver in many lifetimes.
I live north east of Vancouver and have lived my whole life without even a shake. Most of my friends (from all over) have never felt one either. He didn't say "everywhere", just "many places".
I was in Vancouver for that one. I didn't feel a thing. There seemed to be a fairly even mix among my friends depending on where they were. Some felt it quite strongly. Some didn't notice it.
I agree. There are regularly 4.0-5.5 earthquakes along the oregon coast, and the seismologists that report on these say that they are a result of the Cascadia Subduction... I was interested until I got to this point as the local reports on earthquakes are counter to what the article suggest. I mean there was even a 4.2 in Springfield, OR within a week. just check the US geological data. Claims seem dubious without having a full text report of what the difference between the types of quakes are, and difference in areas as related to 'the big one' without this, anyone looking at past earthquake data will say this guy is nuts, because we do have regular quakes in the Northwest, especially coastal.
> I mean there was even a 4.2 in Springfield, OR within a week
I felt that one - I was over in Eugene for the weekend of the 4th, and was... uh... seated, when it felt like something slammed into the house. Not much shaking, just one short, sharp impact.
I've lived in Seattle for 20 years and the only earthquake I've ever actually felt here was the Nisqually quake in 2001. Contrast that with some parts of Japan where you feel quakes on a monthly basis or more.
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.
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!
At the end of the road through Montaña de Oro State Park there's a warning siren[1] that will go off if there's a problem at the Diablo Canyon facility. Every time I get out there and see it there's a part of me that expects it to start to blare... and I'm totally glad when I'm "disappointed" and it doesn't.
It's worse than that: none of those illustrations appear to be related to humor.
Edit: Looks like we've got a couple of New Yorker cartoon aficionados on HN. I guess I'll have to save my stinging comments for edgier content, such as Doonsbury and Garfield. /s
Remember, we're talking about an organization that apparently employs Andy Borowitz. Possibly his mere existence sucks any humor out of all surrounding content.
It discusses why a big earthquake is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years with lots of flowery language and science. TL;DR: There's a big earthquake that is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years.
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.
San Francisco has been built by the grace of the grace of the 1906 quake. When the big quakes happen, they release all kinds of stress, and make a future local quake much more unlikely. It's called the stress shadow.
The stress shadow of the 1906 quake was (depending on who you ask) about 100 years. SF is coming out of the stress shadow, and is become "due" for a new big one.
WRT the rest of the valley, the main problem is that it's built on sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock slows the seismic waves, which since you need to conserve energy, results in larger shaking. In other words, a small quake further south could result in more damage in the valley.
Food is a technology. Horticulture, breeding, domestication, threshing, plowing, sowing, crop rotation, cooking, drying, pickling, brining, canning, curing, refrigerating, etc.
Modern civilization is massively more efficient at extracting food from a given piece of arable land than our hunter gatherer forebears were able too, all thanks to thousands of years of food technology.
Where are you going to get food (for a population) without oil powered GPS controlled farm machinery, trucks and technological processing plants, information technology controlled distribution, electricity and on a slightly longer timescale, oil based fertilisers?
OK, in a localised disaster you're going to import it. But still, you can grow squash in your back yard, but enough food for all humans means mechanised agriculture, and that's not just tractors. Food is a technology (albeit not a Google one - yet).
#/media/File:Life_raft.jpg){kind=link}
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.