This is the most riveting article I have read to-date on the Pacific Northwest's vulnerability to catastrophic damage from a Cascade Subduction Zone earthquake. If this doesn't inspire residents to strap their water heater to the wall, bolt their house to the foundation and do all the other preps the situation calls for, I don't know what will -- except perhaps a full-length feature film.

Wouldn't have to be exaggerated, the scientific evidence is sufficiently horrifying to thrill moviegoers.

The article is from the July 20, 2015, New Yorker magazine.


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

"...By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”



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Dagny -- Thanks for the link, great article.

Excellent, thanks for sharing.

Thank, awesome read!

Wow! Mandatory reading for the Pacific Northwest.

I believe it needs to be read by everyone in the United States. The economic fallout of a catastrophic disaster affects everyone.

Jeanette Isabelle

This excerpt should be somewhat comforting to Californians, unless they live atop the fault (which some do):


"...the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan."


This may be the first such article that I've read twice. The author did an excellent job:

"...The devastation in Japan in 2011 was the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and what the region was prepared to withstand. The same will hold true in the Pacific Northwest—but here the discrepancy is enormous.


FEMA's threat assessments are no less dramatic:

"...FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals."



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Seems like this is the case where "shelter in place" actually means MOVE AWAY FROM THERE BEFORE IT HAPPENS!

Well written article.

Great article. glad I'm in the northeast.

If you have a well-paying job in Seattle, and in your line of work it's hard to find a job anywhere else, will you still try to move away because of the possibility of an earthquake? People in the Northwest are aware a big one is coming, just like people in California know a big one is coming. But it's very hard to pull up your roots, leave your job, your friends, etc., for something that might happen in the next 100 years.

The alternative is to earthquake-proof your region as much as humanly possible, following Japan's example. Why aren't these areas doing that?