Russ,

You should plan to stay on the coast for awhile.

One just never knows....

:-)



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101 is an absolutely spectacular drive.

Getting the roadtrip itch....


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Thanks for the link, Dagney.

Very interesting - and very sobering for anyone (including myself) who lives in the Cascadia subduction zone. We currently live about 40 miles inland from the coast but will be moving about 25 miles from the coast in September.

Some of the scenarios presented in the link, downright scare me.

Madin estimates that up to a hundred and fifty thousand people visit Oregon’s beaches on summer weekends. “Most of them won’t have a clue as to how to evacuate,” he says. “And the beaches are the hardest place to evacuate from.

Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one. 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. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.

OSSPAC 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.


I can only hope that this does not happen for another 50 years or so (I should be dead from old age by then!) or that when the earthquake does come, it will not reach this far north. Mind you, we are only 120 miles north of Seattle, so distance wise, that does not inspire any confidence...

Teslin -- odds favor those who aren't strolling on the sand at the time. :-)

I'd still gladly trade DC for BC or Washington state, Oregon or northern California.

Best wishes on your move -- I'm confident you'll be among the best equipped to survive anything...



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Actuaries and statisticians can tell you with a good degree of certainty how many traffic accidents of varying severity will happen today, and how many people will fall down stairs, and how many will drown at the beach. If they couldn't, insurance companies would never know how much to charge for a policy. In other words, as pointed out by Laurence Gonzales in his book Deep Survival, some disasters are 'normal.'

The probability of a quake here is 100% if you wait long enough. If we knew for a fact that it would happen in, say, ten years, we would spend many billions of dollars to prepare for it. The problem in weighing the risk and the amount of preparation arises with low probability (in the immediate future) events that have incredibly high consequences. It isn't a 'normal' disaster.

If I were planning on spending 20 - 30 years retired in an area with the potential for a very high consequence event, I personally would reconsider.

To expand upon brandtb's point, I won't live anywhere that I can't buy flood and earthquake insurance.