Documentary: "Unprepared"

This link below is to an hour-long documentary about Oregon's Cascade Subduction Zone threat, was produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting which aired it this fall. I thought it was very well done.

Much of the data was familiar (having read Oregon's 2013 "resiliency" plan) but video is the most powerful medium for conveying the CSZ peril. The segment on the petroleum "tank farm" near Portland was especially creepy. 95% of Oregon's petroleum and gas supplies come through that complex -- all of which is built on dredged soil which is certain to liquify when the earth shakes. The engineer that narrates that segment said that the gas people have in their tank when the earthquake begins is all they're going to have for at least a number of weeks afterward. Might want to get spare tires for the bicycle....

http://www.opb.org/news/article/watch-opbs-unprepared-documentary-teaser/



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Great reference, of use to those of us who presumably live in "more prepared" regions. I wonder how many Californians have 14 gallons of water stashed?

Just watched the trailer…yikes! Makes me glad I don't live there. I did notice they have a segment on the cargo bike disaster relief trials which I thought was cool.

ETA: Just watched the full documentary. Pretty disturbing, especially the part about the new seismically upgraded hospital being built right in the tsunami zone. That is one building that should be put in the safest area possible given that evacuating a hospital is very difficult and best avoided! Particularly in a situation where there is limited time.

" I wonder how many Californians have 14 gallons of water stashed?"

NONE. Possible exception .. me. I've got quite a lot of H2O.

Won't do any good. the remaining 25 million Californians will just shoot me and take the water :-)

Well, that makes two of us....I won't shoot

It would seem the whole of the Pacific coast, from San Diego to anchorage, is at risk of unprecedented near term seismic activity of colossal scale. How do you engineer infrastrucutre for force 9+ events?

Here is a partial answer from the guys and gals who study this stuff professionally: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/earthq3/safaultgip.html

Not sure it is "unprecedented:" Movement has been occurring for about 15-20 million years.

Political comment redacted.



chaosmagnet

"it would seem the whole of the Pacific coast, from San Diego to anchorage, is at risk of unprecedented near term seismic activity of colossal scale. How do you engineer infrastrucutre for force 9+ events?"

You don't. I suspect that you know this :-)

Here's my thoughts. First, I had a long personal discussion with a seismologist on this topic. Can earthquake faults link up and produce massive quakes? Her answer was No ... this does not happen. The ruptures are mostly small, random breaks at various locations around the world.

I remain skeptical about this. But I do understand that earthquake scientists must GO with the data that they've got. Science is not about speculation. And really, we have not been measuring earthquakes for very long. If our scientists had been collecting quake data for 50,000 years, their knowledge would be tremendously good.

I think that most of the time, the quakes probably are small random events. But I suspect that every once -and-a-while something much bigger can occur. It's just rare, and we haven't seen it yet. If I look at the southern San Andreas, there's a history of quakes every 100-150 years. Quakes in the range of 6.5 to 7.5, something like that. There have been about 8-9 quakes like that, going back over 1,000 years or so. We are now at a situation where the time delay has gone close to 300 years. I would have to go and check that data again. But it is VERY long compared to the normal pattern. There is a LOT of energy stored in the ground. My gut instinct tells me ... is it possible we can see something much bigger happen? Are we at the point where we could see a rare event, that only happens every few thousand years? Yeah - MAYBE. But of course, we don't know.

If a major rupture happens across ALL of California, or maybe part of California and all of Oregon, it will be one big mud patch out there :-)

But who knows?

Pete

Wouldn't be me. I have over 3 times that and looking to take advantage of the upcoming El Nino too.

Bumping this thread as a I stumbled across this article named "The Really Big One" which also goes into great detail of the devastating effects of an earthquake on the coast of Oregon.

There are some very sobering numbers that in a sense, are hard to grasp, understand and imagine and not much different then the video link that Dagney originally posted.

"In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America."

FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.

FEMA calculates that, across the region (Oregon), 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.

SSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities. On the coast, those numbers go up. Whoever chooses or has no choice but to stay there will spend three to six months without electricity, one to three years without drinking water and sewage systems, and three or more years without hospitals. Those estimates do not apply to the tsunami-inundation zone, which will remain all but uninhabitable for years.