“When the next very big earthquake hits, the continent from California to Canada will drop by as much as 6 feet and rebound 30 to a 100 feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries”https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one …
“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 315 years into a 243-year cycle”
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Unlike Japan, “the Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive”
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“Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then”
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“75% of all structures in Oregon are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake”pic.twitter.com/wHeMvxyVg0
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“The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region—up to 30,000 of them in Seattle alone”
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“Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.”
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“When that tsunami is coming, you run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission, says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.”
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“These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out”pic.twitter.com/FVJN48h72s
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“The tsunami height will vary with the contours of the coast, from 20 feet to more than a 100 feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land.”
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“Whoever chooses or has no choice but to stay there will spend 3 to 6 months without electricity, 1 to 3 years without drinking water and sewage systems, and 3 or more years without hospitals”
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“Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them”pic.twitter.com/hzwOz11zMF
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End of conversation
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