Cascadia's Fault (45 page)

Moments later the tsunami roars into Humboldt Bay, smashing the waterfronts of Eureka and Arcata. PG&E's old nuclear reactor has been replaced by a conventional, fossil-fueled power generator. When cold seawater hits the boilers, they explode. Two minutes later Cascadia's wave hits the boat harbor at Crescent City, demolishing everything that wasn't already trashed by the earthquake.

Fifteen to twenty minutes later, the same scenario plays out again and again as wave after wave comes pounding across the sand, blasting like some massive, demonic fire hose through the streets of coastal towns like Newport, Cannon Beach, Seaside, and Astoria in Oregon; Ilwaco, Long Beach, and Grays Harbor in Washington; Ucluelet, Port Alberni, Tofino, and Victoria on Vancouver Island. And dozens of other towns and villages in between.

Nearly all the twisty, two-lane highways that connect the coastal communities to the outside world have been buried in several places by mountain rockslides and huge trees. Local fishing harbors, marinas, and docks have all been severely damaged. Only the handful of boats that happened to be at sea this rainy spring morning escape undamaged. Many others get crushed against their docks and capsized, or they drag anchor and grind against the rocks. People who have chosen to live on the edge of this ocean paradise are well and truly on their own now. It may be a week or more before outside help can get here.

The westbound tsunami waves, meanwhile, continue to hurtle across the Pacific, fanning out in wide arcs that will make landfall with sledgehammer force in hundreds more coastal villages, towns, and cities. Hour by hour as the waves get closer, alarms sound in more than a
dozen languages and dialects. Hawaii, Midway Island, Alaska, and the Kamchatka Peninsula are among the first to be struck. Although physical damage is heavy, the loss of life and injuries are kept to a minimum because NOAA's computer model has accurately predicted exactly how big the waves will be, which beaches will be hardest hit, and when the tsunami will arrive. The evacuations are largely successful.

Roughly nine hours after the quake, Cascadia's first wave hits Japan's eastern seaboard. Here most people have moved to higher ground in time. But the damage to waterfront homes and villages, and especially to high-tech container shipping docks, is extensive. Some of the busiest high-volume, high-value commercial shipping terminals in the world are dealt a severe blow and knocked out of business for who knows how long. Much of Japan's export trade is essentially crippled.

The same thing happens again and again as Cascadia's waves crash ashore in the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. After that it's onward to Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and the western shores of South America.The waves, like those generated off Sumatra in 2004, actually turn corners at the bottom of the planet. Eventually the tsunami dies, exhausted, in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and on the frigid shores of Antarctica. Before the day is done seven of the world's largest insurance companies file for bankruptcy. There's absolutely no way they can pay all the claims.

 

Back in 2005 a group of scientists, engineers, and emergency planners from the United States and Canada, along with representatives from key industries in the Pacific Northwest, formed a committee called CREW—the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup—to study the magnitude and severity of problems posed by the coming event. Their official disaster scenario states that the rupture of Cascadia's fault “could be catastrophic . . . It will be a long-term event, affecting the economies of the US, Canada, other Pacific countries, and their trading partners for years to come.”

In my own, hypothetical version of this day of reckoning, they were absolutely right. Although nobody has ventured an official guess at how high the death toll will be worldwide, most experts agree that Cascadia won't kill as many as Sumatra did simply because not as many people live right on the beach. Generally speaking the homes and cities of the Pacific Rim are built a bit more solidly than their counterparts around the Indian Ocean. But the cost of repairing or replacing the damaged or destroyed infrastructure of the Pacific Rim will probably be many times higher. Modern cities cost more to build in the first place and much more to fix when they get smashed. So the economic consequences of a Cascadia quake will be like nothing we've ever seen. Some say it will take a decade or more to dig ourselves out of the rubble. From a purely dollars-and-cents perspective, the whole world will feel our pain.

But CREW 's conclusion is not entirely bleak or defeatist: “A Cascadia earthquake will seriously affect our region, but it won't destroy us. We will rebuild our cities, our neighborhoods, and our businesses. The time it takes us to recover will depend largely on what precautions we take before the earthquake.” Here again, I think they've got it absolutely right.

Survival and Resilience, a State of Mind

Since I began work on this book, tectonic events have made scary headlines five more times. A team of seismologists in Italy has been threatened with charges of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake that they allegedly saw coming. After several tremors were detected in March 2009 the nation's Major Risks Committee, a scientific advisory group like the “six wise men” in Japan, met to discuss whether anything in the data could be classified as a reliable precursor to a quake.

After the meeting a government official told reporters the scientists had concluded there was “no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy” being released by the small tremors. Then on April 6, 2009, an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 struck the city of L'Aquila, killing more than three hundred people and injuring sixteen hundred others. The threat of manslaughter charges against members of the advisory committee caused an uproar among earthquake researchers around the world.

As of September 2010 almost four thousand scientists and engineers had signed a letter to the president of Italy calling for an end to what some termed a witch hunt. They urged the government to spend
more resources on “earthquake preparedness and risk mitigation rather than on prosecuting scientists for failing to do something they cannot do yet—predict earthquakes.” Barry Parsons, an earth scientist at the University of Oxford and one of those who signed the letter, explained that “scientists are often asked the wrong question, which is ‘When will the next earthquake hit?'The right question is ‘How do we make sure it won't kill so many people when it hits?'”

In Haiti on January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake destroyed huge sections of the capital city of Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people. The island of Hispaniola sits on the rim of the Caribbean plate, which is being shoved westward by the North America plate as it dives underneath. But here again the real story was about the exposure to risk caused by poor construction quality. Buildings collapsed and people died not for lack of warning but because poverty and shabby construction practices made the tragedy inevitable.

Little more than a month later, on February 27, 2010, another big subduction earthquake struck the coast of Chile. At magnitude 8.8 it released approximately five hundred times more energy than the Caribbean shock yet it killed far fewer—roughly seven hundred lives were lost in Chile compared with the 200,000 in Haiti. Observers commented that construction quality in Chile was definitely better because building codes have been strictly enforced ever since their last big quake in 1960—at magnitude 9.5 still the largest rupture ever recorded.

The February jolt occurred on the same fault, twenty-two miles (35 km) beneath the sea floor, and apparently picked up right where the last one stopped. It ripped the next four-hundred-mile (640 km) segment of the subduction zone and probably relieved most of the remaining stress built up in the system. That was the good news. But there was more.

Because the 1960 quake did not rip the entire fault, scientists expected the next segment to go at any time. So several groups of researchers had installed an extensive array of GPS monitors to keep track of the strain
build-up. Computer models (including one by Kelin Wang at PGC on Vancouver Island) then made predictions of how much the fault would move when the last segment finally did break.

On February 27 the predictions turned out to be right on the money. Almost ten feet (3 m) of nearly instantaneous horizontal motion was measured by GPS instruments at Concepción. The land lurched sideways nearly nine feet, just like Wang's model projected. Which is the same kind of movement Herb Dragert and Mike Schmidt expect to see in Victoria when Cascadia rips loose. Scientists can now be fairly confident in predicting which part of a fault is likely to break, how far it will move, and how large the jolt will be.

But in Chile other positive factors were at work as well. One of them was a higher level of public awareness. Because enough people remembered 1960, they knew what to do when the ground started to rumble. Those living in danger zones near the beach immediately ran to higher ground without waiting for someone in authority to issue an evacuation order. According to Kelin Wang, “Numerous lives were saved by this kind of self-evacuation . . . The importance of educating the public far exceeds that of warning buoys.”

 

 

 

 

And then it happened again. On Tuesday, February 22, 2011, a strike-slip fault near Christchurch, New Zealand, ruptured in a magnitude 6.3 earthquake that killed more than a hundred people outright and buried hundreds of others in rubble. This time two tectonic plates ripped past each other horizontally, like the San Andreas plates had done. So it wasn't a subduction quake like the ones in Chile or Alaska or Cascadia (no heaving up of the ocean floor and no tsunami), but it was a rupture in another corner of the Pacific region's infamous Ring of Fire.

Less than a month later, on Friday afternoon, March 11, 2011, another segment of the Ring of Fire tore apart in a magnitude 9
earthquake that did jack up and shift the ocean floor off the northeast coast of Japan near the city of Sendai. The shockwaves lasted between three and five minutes and caused skyscrapers in Tokyo—231 miles (373 km) away—to sway like trees in a strong wind. The tsunami was seen around the world almost instantly, covered live by Japanese television crews in breathtaking and heartbreaking detail for hours on end. We were all able to witness immediately the apocalyptic extremes of seismic chaos.

Rolling balls of flame and thick smoke billowed from ruptured tanks at an oil refinery. A farm family's home burned furiously as it was carried away—floating atop a tangled mat of splintered lumber and logs, twisted sheets of metal from busted barns and sheds—all of it swept across the coastal lowlands on a thirty-foot (10 m) wave, a churning tsunami gumbo of black soil and seawater. Large commercial fishing boats were torn from their moorings and tossed against concrete breakwaters. The boats bounced off the breakwaters and then slammed like battering rams into the walls of nearby buildings. Hundreds of cars and trucks were carried away on this roaring tide of muck, right before our eyes. Were there people inside? How could there not have been?

Mud-spattered survivors looking stunned and forlorn wandered through rubble in search of family and friends. Hundreds of people sprawled, exhausted and in shock, on the floor of a school gymnasium, nesting in rucked-up blankets, their coats and shoes and “grab-and-go” bags gathered around them like imaginary walls to fend off the ongoing nightmare.

Food store shelves were stripped bare and long lines of cars appeared at gasoline pumps, the fuel supply running dangerously low. And still, somehow, all of this post-quake scramble was happening in a relatively organized and orderly manner, presumably because the Japanese had experienced many smaller quakes and tsunamis before and knew this was coming. They had planned and drilled and rehearsed. The atmosphere
seemed amazingly calm and eerily quiet. I sincerely doubt it will be this peaceful when the same thing happens to North America.

But if pride comes before a fall, then the construction of nuclear reactors near an active fault zone has to rank among the most dazzlingly optimistic—or stunningly foolish—things that modern nations have ever done. Not just in Japan, but in California and many other places around the globe. Until we watched those plumes of gray-white smoke rising across the Japanese coast as the roof and outer walls of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex began to vaporize and then collapse—until we saw it with our own eyes—the horror of a nuclear meltdown seemed like the last thing a quake or tsunami survivor should have to worry about. Scientists, engineers, and government officials have led us to believe that nuclear plants are built to withstand seismic shocks. Now I guess we know better. For those living on North America's own locked and loaded segment of the Ring of Fire, the question now must be: are we next?

 

Even though seismologists still cannot predict when Cascadia's fault will break, pretty much everybody who has lived out west for a while knows deep down inside that a megathrust quake will eventually happen. Sure, on any given day the mathematical odds of a magnitude 6 or 7 under downtown Seattle or Vancouver are higher than for a magnitude 9 from Cascadia. Smaller quakes do happen more often than big ones. That's why most emergency managers have been told the local rumble is still their worst scenario. And for any given point on the map, that's absolutely right—the local quake may cause more intense damage to that particular city than Cascadia would.

But Cascadia's fault is going to cause damage to
all
the cities and towns along a swath more than 800 miles (1,300 km) from north to south and as much as 125 miles (200 km) inland. So the cumulative damage will be far greater than the impact of any local quake on any single city. The enormity of what's about to happen in the Pacific
Northwest is almost inconceivable. And that's only part of the reason why Cascadia is not yet as infamous or worrisome to many people as the San Andreas already is.