‘ANY DAY NOW’ -FEMA PREPS 9.0 MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE ALONG THE CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE – 13,000 DEATHS IN WAKE OF PACIFIC MEGA-QUAKE
‘ANY DAY NOW’ -FEMA PREPS 9.0 MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE ALONG THE CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE – 13,000 DEATHS IN WAKE OF PACIFIC MEGA-QUAKE
JANUARY 29, 2018
Juan de Fuca tectonic plate rupture. What will happen WHEN – not If - When a massive earthquake and tsunami strike the West Coast of the United States? Experts say it could easily match the catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in scale and might.
JANUARY 29, 2018
Juan de Fuca tectonic plate rupture. What will happen WHEN – not If - When a massive earthquake and tsunami strike the West Coast of the United States? Experts say it could easily match the catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in scale and might.
A 700-mile stretch of coast, from northern California to southern British Columbia lies just off the extremely volatile Cascadia Subduction Zone.
Not only have portable disaster morgues been shipped to four states in what appears to be preparation for a Large Earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic zone.
Now FEMA is also preparing for an Imminent large 8.0 to 9.2 Magnitude Earthquake in the already locked and overdue Cascadia Subduction Zone.
A new report predicts that a mega-earthquake could kill an estimated 13,000 people and destroy a sizable portion of the Pacific Northwest.
Even more disturbing? It’s overdue.
FEMA calculations show these types of earthquakes happen at regular intervals in this specific part of the world, roughly every 240 years.
The last one was more than 300 years ago, in 1700, when a quake there sent a 600-foot wave of water all the way to Japan.
Kaku said Hollywood has “brainwashed” people into thinking that California is where the next massive earthquake will hit.
He added that before the mega-quake actually hits, there is a compression wave that is detected by animals.
“Animals start to act very strange. We’ve seen that happen before earthquakes,” Kaku said. “And then, a minute, two minutes later, boom!”
The massive quake, with a magnitude of up to 9.2, would last about four minutes, according to seismologists, with a wall of water following about 15 minutes later.
Kaku said he’s concerned that many of the 70,000 residents in the potential “inundation zone” have very little knowledge about this risk.
“It barely rates on the radar screen,” he said.
Shep asked Kaku whether he would live in the Pacific Northwest if he had children.
“I’d think twice,” he said, advising residents to educate their children on emergency preparedness and what to do in case of an earthquake.
Shocking Prediction: West Coast MEGA Tsunami & Earthquake
FEMA warns California! Get off the coast! M9 or greater is Imminent! Earth crustal shift, Cascadia Subduction Zone about to slip!
Even the New Madrid has tripled in earthquake swarms! Prepare Now!!
Test will simulate a 9.0 magnitude quake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, followed by a tsunami
A massive earthquake and tsunami is said to occur every 400-600 years, and is now overdue in the region .
READ MORE: MAJOR EARTHQUAKE WARNING:US West Coast Earthquake Warning as Cascadia Subduction Zone Surges
Scientists also detailed plans on how to combat threat at Seismological Society of America meeting in April.
They said new technologies such as camera-bearing drones could send video messages of incoming waves.
The threat of a massive earthquake and tsunami have been looming over the Pacific Northwest for decades.
Now, experts are taking it seriously. This summer the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema) is conducting a large-scale drill to see if it’s ready for worst.
The test will simulate a 9.0 magnitude quake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, followed by a tsunami that could create waves more than 50ft-high.
The #1 Killer In Any Crisis Is Disease And Infection-Even SWAT Teams are Helpless Against This…
A 700-mile stretch of coast, from northern California to southern British Columbia lies just off the extremely volatile Cascadia Subduction Zone.
Not only have portable disaster morgues been shipped to four states in what appears to be preparation for a Large Earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic zone.
Now FEMA is also preparing for an Imminent large 8.0 to 9.2 Magnitude Earthquake in the already locked and overdue Cascadia Subduction Zone.
A new report predicts that a mega-earthquake could kill an estimated 13,000 people and destroy a sizable portion of the Pacific Northwest.
Even more disturbing? It’s overdue.
FEMA calculations show these types of earthquakes happen at regular intervals in this specific part of the world, roughly every 240 years.
The last one was more than 300 years ago, in 1700, when a quake there sent a 600-foot wave of water all the way to Japan.
Kaku said Hollywood has “brainwashed” people into thinking that California is where the next massive earthquake will hit.
He added that before the mega-quake actually hits, there is a compression wave that is detected by animals.
“Animals start to act very strange. We’ve seen that happen before earthquakes,” Kaku said. “And then, a minute, two minutes later, boom!”
The massive quake, with a magnitude of up to 9.2, would last about four minutes, according to seismologists, with a wall of water following about 15 minutes later.
Kaku said he’s concerned that many of the 70,000 residents in the potential “inundation zone” have very little knowledge about this risk.
“It barely rates on the radar screen,” he said.
Shep asked Kaku whether he would live in the Pacific Northwest if he had children.
“I’d think twice,” he said, advising residents to educate their children on emergency preparedness and what to do in case of an earthquake.
Shocking Prediction: West Coast MEGA Tsunami & Earthquake
FEMA warns California! Get off the coast! M9 or greater is Imminent! Earth crustal shift, Cascadia Subduction Zone about to slip!
Even the New Madrid has tripled in earthquake swarms! Prepare Now!!
Test will simulate a 9.0 magnitude quake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, followed by a tsunami
A massive earthquake and tsunami is said to occur every 400-600 years, and is now overdue in the region .
READ MORE: MAJOR EARTHQUAKE WARNING:US West Coast Earthquake Warning as Cascadia Subduction Zone Surges
Scientists also detailed plans on how to combat threat at Seismological Society of America meeting in April.
They said new technologies such as camera-bearing drones could send video messages of incoming waves.
The threat of a massive earthquake and tsunami have been looming over the Pacific Northwest for decades.
Now, experts are taking it seriously. This summer the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema) is conducting a large-scale drill to see if it’s ready for worst.
The test will simulate a 9.0 magnitude quake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, followed by a tsunami that could create waves more than 50ft-high.
The #1 Killer In Any Crisis Is Disease And Infection-Even SWAT Teams are Helpless Against This…
THE THREAT OF ‘THE BIG ONE’
Experts say an event of this kind occurs roughly every 400-600 years, and the area is now overdue for a similar quake that could leave thousands dead or displaced.
Worst-case scenarios show that more than 1,000 bridges in Oregon and Washington state could either collapse or be so damaged that they are unusable.
The main coastal highway, US Route 101, will suffer heavy damage from the shaking and from the tsunami.
Traffic on Interstate 5 — one of the most important thoroughfares in the nation — will likely have to be rerouted because of large cracks in the pavement.
Seattle, Portland and other urban areas could suffer considerable damage, such as the collapse of structures built before codes were updated to take into account a mega-quake.
Tipping Point: Is Your Home Ready For An Earthquake? How To Improve The Safety Of Your Home.
Researchers say such an event of this kind occurs roughly every 400-600 years, and the area is overdue a similar quake that could leave thousands dead or displaced.
The last time the region faced a ‘Big One’ was in 1906 when San Andres unleashed an earthquake that killed roughly 3,000 people.
This summer’s drill, dubbed Cascadia Rising, will test to see how local and state emergency responders, Fema, and a number of military groups work together.
The simulation will run from June, and will use past events to help plan the future response.
In April, researchers speaking at the Seismological Society of America’s (SSA) Annual Meeting, in Reno, Nevada said plans for managing tsunami risk on the West Coast are still evolving.
Meanwhile, geologists are searching for evidence of past tsunamis in the region to help them refine their estimates of tsunami risk.
There is, for instance, the evidence for frequent and large earthquakes and tsunamis occurring within the past 2,000 years in parts of the Eastern Aleutian Islands.
There are signs that these earthquakes have spanned the boundary between the locked and creeping portions of the region’s megathrust fault.
Earthquakes in the area could cause significant tsunami effects across the Pacific, especially in Hawaii and California.
‘Despite the fact that we have learned a significant amount about the earthquake sources for tsunamis, there are gaps in our understanding of past tsunamis, especially prehistoric tsunamis,’ says Rick Wilson, a senior engineering geologist with the California Geological Survey.
‘If we can demonstrate when and where tsunamis occurred in the past, that information will give us a better understanding of the return periods in these areas, and that can go into the probabilistic analyses that help us understand our hazard and risk better.’
Wilson, who also serves as the science coordinator for the State of California Tsunami Preparedness and Hazard Mitigation Program, noted that more than 440,000 people have died worldwide since 1850 as a result of tsunamis.
A powerful earthquake thought to be as large as 9.2 magnitude ripped through the earth in 1700, along the 600 mile stretch of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, causing severe shaking and a massive tsunami. An animation from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center plotted the path of the tsunami as it traveled from the US to Japan.
Experts say an event of this kind occurs roughly every 400-600 years, and the area is now overdue for a similar quake that could leave thousands dead or displaced.
Worst-case scenarios show that more than 1,000 bridges in Oregon and Washington state could either collapse or be so damaged that they are unusable.
The main coastal highway, US Route 101, will suffer heavy damage from the shaking and from the tsunami.
Traffic on Interstate 5 — one of the most important thoroughfares in the nation — will likely have to be rerouted because of large cracks in the pavement.
Seattle, Portland and other urban areas could suffer considerable damage, such as the collapse of structures built before codes were updated to take into account a mega-quake.
Tipping Point: Is Your Home Ready For An Earthquake? How To Improve The Safety Of Your Home.
Researchers say such an event of this kind occurs roughly every 400-600 years, and the area is overdue a similar quake that could leave thousands dead or displaced.
The last time the region faced a ‘Big One’ was in 1906 when San Andres unleashed an earthquake that killed roughly 3,000 people.
This summer’s drill, dubbed Cascadia Rising, will test to see how local and state emergency responders, Fema, and a number of military groups work together.
The simulation will run from June, and will use past events to help plan the future response.
In April, researchers speaking at the Seismological Society of America’s (SSA) Annual Meeting, in Reno, Nevada said plans for managing tsunami risk on the West Coast are still evolving.
Meanwhile, geologists are searching for evidence of past tsunamis in the region to help them refine their estimates of tsunami risk.
There is, for instance, the evidence for frequent and large earthquakes and tsunamis occurring within the past 2,000 years in parts of the Eastern Aleutian Islands.
There are signs that these earthquakes have spanned the boundary between the locked and creeping portions of the region’s megathrust fault.
Earthquakes in the area could cause significant tsunami effects across the Pacific, especially in Hawaii and California.
‘Despite the fact that we have learned a significant amount about the earthquake sources for tsunamis, there are gaps in our understanding of past tsunamis, especially prehistoric tsunamis,’ says Rick Wilson, a senior engineering geologist with the California Geological Survey.
‘If we can demonstrate when and where tsunamis occurred in the past, that information will give us a better understanding of the return periods in these areas, and that can go into the probabilistic analyses that help us understand our hazard and risk better.’
Wilson, who also serves as the science coordinator for the State of California Tsunami Preparedness and Hazard Mitigation Program, noted that more than 440,000 people have died worldwide since 1850 as a result of tsunamis.
A powerful earthquake thought to be as large as 9.2 magnitude ripped through the earth in 1700, along the 600 mile stretch of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, causing severe shaking and a massive tsunami. An animation from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center plotted the path of the tsunami as it traveled from the US to Japan.
WHAT WILL CAUSE KILLER QUAKE?
The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) ‘megathrust’ fault is a 1,000km-long line that stretches from Northern Vancouver Island to Cape Mendocino California.
It separates the Juan de Fuca, a 700-mile chunk in the Pacific Ocean, and North America plates.
For more than 300 years, the two plates have been pushing against one another.
Eventually, the Juan de Fuca will be pushed underneath the North America plate, causing the region to sink at least six feet.
The San Andreas Fault in California, has a quieter, far more dangerous cousin that could make itself known at any moment. Running from Northern California to British Columbia, the Cascadia subduction zone can deliver a quake that’s many times stronger than San Andreas
The deadly tsunamis caused by the 2004 Sumatran earthquake and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake brought increased public attention to tsunami science, warning and preparation.
At the SSA meeting, Wilson will discuss how California officials used state tsunami response playbooks to respond to a tsunami advisory issued after the September 2015 magnitude 8.3 Illapel earthquake in Chile.
The playbooks were created after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, ‘when there was very little consistency between communities [in California] in what they did,’ Wilson says.
‘Some evacuated their entire zone, some just evacuated their beaches.’
The new playbooks offer a variety of action plans depending on the size of the tsunami from a distant source, Wilson says.
The future of tsunami response and preparedness might come from new technologies such as camera-bearing drones.
These could send video messages of incoming waves to convince coastal dwellers to evacuate, says Masa Hayashi, a retired IBM engineer presenting at the SSA meeting.
And there’s also the remote possibility that the trigger for a tsunami might not come from an earthquake, but from an asteroid strike on Earth.
In an SSA talk, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Souheil Ezzedine will share data from a study that models the effects of an asteroid-generated tsunami, on several coastline cities in the U.S., depending on the asteroid’s impact off the U.S. East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and into the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco.
Last month, scientists were finally able to trace the origins of the historic tsunami that struck the coasts of Japan just before midnight on January 27, 1700.
They linked it to a powerful seismic event in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, along the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
‘Cascadia can make an earthquake almost 30 times more energetic than the San Andreas to start with,’ Chris Goldfinger, a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University told CNN.
‘Then it generates a tsunami at the same time, which the side-by-side motion of the San Andreas can’t do’.
The Cascadia could deliver a huge 9.0-magnitude quake and the shaking could last anything from three to five minutes, scientists claim.
‘In this case, three minutes – and I’ve been in a 9 in Japan – three minutes is an eternity,’ said Goldfinger. ‘It is a very, very long time.’
Goldfinger says we’ll lose bridges, highway routes and that the coast will probably be entirely closed down.
As a result it would be difficult to get around, and rescue crews will be overwhelmed.
Federal, state and military officials have been working together to draft plans to be followed when the ‘Big One’ happens.
These contingency plans reflect deep anxiety about the potential gravity of the looming disaster: upward of 14,000 people dead in the worst-case scenarios, 30,000 injured, thousands left homeless and the region’s economy setback for years, if not decades.
As a response, what planners envision is a deployment of civilian and military personnel and equipment that would eclipse the response to any natural disaster that has occurred thus far in the US.
There would be waves of cargo planes, helicopters and ships, as well as tens of thousands of soldiers, emergency officials, mortuary teams, police officers, firefighters, engineers, medical personnel and other specialists.
‘The response will be orders of magnitude larger than Hurricane Katrina or Super Storm Sandy,’ said Lt. Col. Clayton Braun of the Washington State Army National Guard.
The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) ‘megathrust’ fault is a 1,000km-long line that stretches from Northern Vancouver Island to Cape Mendocino California.
It separates the Juan de Fuca, a 700-mile chunk in the Pacific Ocean, and North America plates.
For more than 300 years, the two plates have been pushing against one another.
Eventually, the Juan de Fuca will be pushed underneath the North America plate, causing the region to sink at least six feet.
The San Andreas Fault in California, has a quieter, far more dangerous cousin that could make itself known at any moment. Running from Northern California to British Columbia, the Cascadia subduction zone can deliver a quake that’s many times stronger than San Andreas
The deadly tsunamis caused by the 2004 Sumatran earthquake and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake brought increased public attention to tsunami science, warning and preparation.
At the SSA meeting, Wilson will discuss how California officials used state tsunami response playbooks to respond to a tsunami advisory issued after the September 2015 magnitude 8.3 Illapel earthquake in Chile.
The playbooks were created after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, ‘when there was very little consistency between communities [in California] in what they did,’ Wilson says.
‘Some evacuated their entire zone, some just evacuated their beaches.’
The new playbooks offer a variety of action plans depending on the size of the tsunami from a distant source, Wilson says.
The future of tsunami response and preparedness might come from new technologies such as camera-bearing drones.
These could send video messages of incoming waves to convince coastal dwellers to evacuate, says Masa Hayashi, a retired IBM engineer presenting at the SSA meeting.
And there’s also the remote possibility that the trigger for a tsunami might not come from an earthquake, but from an asteroid strike on Earth.
In an SSA talk, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Souheil Ezzedine will share data from a study that models the effects of an asteroid-generated tsunami, on several coastline cities in the U.S., depending on the asteroid’s impact off the U.S. East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and into the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco.
Last month, scientists were finally able to trace the origins of the historic tsunami that struck the coasts of Japan just before midnight on January 27, 1700.
They linked it to a powerful seismic event in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, along the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
‘Cascadia can make an earthquake almost 30 times more energetic than the San Andreas to start with,’ Chris Goldfinger, a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University told CNN.
‘Then it generates a tsunami at the same time, which the side-by-side motion of the San Andreas can’t do’.
The Cascadia could deliver a huge 9.0-magnitude quake and the shaking could last anything from three to five minutes, scientists claim.
‘In this case, three minutes – and I’ve been in a 9 in Japan – three minutes is an eternity,’ said Goldfinger. ‘It is a very, very long time.’
Goldfinger says we’ll lose bridges, highway routes and that the coast will probably be entirely closed down.
As a result it would be difficult to get around, and rescue crews will be overwhelmed.
Federal, state and military officials have been working together to draft plans to be followed when the ‘Big One’ happens.
These contingency plans reflect deep anxiety about the potential gravity of the looming disaster: upward of 14,000 people dead in the worst-case scenarios, 30,000 injured, thousands left homeless and the region’s economy setback for years, if not decades.
As a response, what planners envision is a deployment of civilian and military personnel and equipment that would eclipse the response to any natural disaster that has occurred thus far in the US.
There would be waves of cargo planes, helicopters and ships, as well as tens of thousands of soldiers, emergency officials, mortuary teams, police officers, firefighters, engineers, medical personnel and other specialists.
‘The response will be orders of magnitude larger than Hurricane Katrina or Super Storm Sandy,’ said Lt. Col. Clayton Braun of the Washington State Army National Guard.
ADVICE ON HOW TO SURVIVE A PACIFIC NORTHWEST EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI
This diagram show the areas where land will be most affected by the shocks, causing landslides or liquefaction.
Last year, scientists outlined their alarmingly unhelpful tips on how to survive the earthquake that will hit the Pacific Northwest.
The killer quake along Cascadia, a fault line which runs from Cape Mendocino, California, to Vancouver Island, Canada, is 72 years overdue, according to peer-reviewed studies.
The ‘Big One’ will hit when Juan de Fuca, a 700-mile chunk of the Pacific Ocean, slides under Canada and America, causing the entire coastal region to sink at least six feet.
When – not if – it arrives, it is unlikely the people of coastal Oregon, Washington and California will be able to escape.
But if they want to try, there are a few tips they should keep in mind.
Run, don’t drive, to higher ground, says Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, in an interview with the New Yorker.
The force of the quake will cause liquefaction, when solid ground acts like liquid, across vast swathes of the porous region.
In the areas that aren’t ‘liquefied’, the highways will likely be crumpled by landslides, with 30,000 avalanches set to hit Seattle alone.
Citizens will have a 20-minute interval to climb to the highest altitude possible before the full force of the tsunami hits, scientists predict.
Their alert will be when dogs start barking.
The first sign the quake is coming will be a set of compressional waves, only audible by dogs. Then there will be the quake, then 20 minutes later, the tsunami.
Geographers estimate that many could survive just by walking – however, they need to be going at least 3.5mph.
If everyone ups their average speed from 2.5mph to 3.5mph, the death toll drops to 15,970. About 70 per cent of them would be in Washington, nearly 30 per cent in Oregon and only 4 per cent in California.
And there is no point being a hero. ‘When that tsunami is coming, you run,’ Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission, tells the New Yorker.
‘You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.’
The only other safety measure is to relocate away from the Pacific north west.
Oregon’s response plan is called the Cascadia Playbook, named after the threatening offshore fault — the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
The plan, unveiled last year, has been handed out to key officials so the state can respond quickly when disaster strikes.
‘That playbook is never more than 100 feet from where I am,’ said Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.
A magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan in 2011 gave greater clarity to what the Pacific Northwest needs to do to improve its readiness for a similar catastrophe.
‘The Japanese quake and tsunami allowed light bulbs to go off for policymakers,’ Phelps said.
Much still needs to be done, and it is impossible to fully prepare for a catastrophe of this magnitude, but those responsible for drafting the evolving contingency plans believe they are making headway.
Worst-case scenarios show that more than 1,000 bridges in Oregon and Washington state could either collapse or be so damaged that they are unusable.
The real question that you have to ask yourself is: would you be prepared?The second most important question is: are you prepared right now to survive such a catastrophe? The 3 Pioneer Survival Lessons We Should All Learn!
The main coastal highway, US Route 101, will suffer heavy damage from the shaking and from the tsunami.
Traffic on Interstate 5 — one of the most important thoroughfares in the nation — will likely have to be rerouted because of large cracks in the pavement.
Seattle, Portland and other urban areas could suffer considerable damage, such as the collapse of structures built before codes were updated to take into account a mega-quake.
The last full rip of the Cascadia Subduction Zone happened in January 1700.
The exact date and destructive power was determined from buried forests along the Pacific Northwest coast and an ‘orphan tsunami’ that washed ashore in Japan.
Geologists digging in coastal marshes and offshore canyon bottoms have also found evidence of earlier great earthquakes and tsunamis.
The inferred timeline of those events gives a recurrence interval between Cascadia megaquakes of roughly every 400 to 600 years, reports the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
This diagram show the areas where land will be most affected by the shocks, causing landslides or liquefaction.
Last year, scientists outlined their alarmingly unhelpful tips on how to survive the earthquake that will hit the Pacific Northwest.
The killer quake along Cascadia, a fault line which runs from Cape Mendocino, California, to Vancouver Island, Canada, is 72 years overdue, according to peer-reviewed studies.
The ‘Big One’ will hit when Juan de Fuca, a 700-mile chunk of the Pacific Ocean, slides under Canada and America, causing the entire coastal region to sink at least six feet.
When – not if – it arrives, it is unlikely the people of coastal Oregon, Washington and California will be able to escape.
But if they want to try, there are a few tips they should keep in mind.
Run, don’t drive, to higher ground, says Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, in an interview with the New Yorker.
The force of the quake will cause liquefaction, when solid ground acts like liquid, across vast swathes of the porous region.
In the areas that aren’t ‘liquefied’, the highways will likely be crumpled by landslides, with 30,000 avalanches set to hit Seattle alone.
Citizens will have a 20-minute interval to climb to the highest altitude possible before the full force of the tsunami hits, scientists predict.
Their alert will be when dogs start barking.
The first sign the quake is coming will be a set of compressional waves, only audible by dogs. Then there will be the quake, then 20 minutes later, the tsunami.
Geographers estimate that many could survive just by walking – however, they need to be going at least 3.5mph.
If everyone ups their average speed from 2.5mph to 3.5mph, the death toll drops to 15,970. About 70 per cent of them would be in Washington, nearly 30 per cent in Oregon and only 4 per cent in California.
And there is no point being a hero. ‘When that tsunami is coming, you run,’ Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission, tells the New Yorker.
‘You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.’
The only other safety measure is to relocate away from the Pacific north west.
Oregon’s response plan is called the Cascadia Playbook, named after the threatening offshore fault — the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
The plan, unveiled last year, has been handed out to key officials so the state can respond quickly when disaster strikes.
‘That playbook is never more than 100 feet from where I am,’ said Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.
A magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan in 2011 gave greater clarity to what the Pacific Northwest needs to do to improve its readiness for a similar catastrophe.
‘The Japanese quake and tsunami allowed light bulbs to go off for policymakers,’ Phelps said.
Much still needs to be done, and it is impossible to fully prepare for a catastrophe of this magnitude, but those responsible for drafting the evolving contingency plans believe they are making headway.
Worst-case scenarios show that more than 1,000 bridges in Oregon and Washington state could either collapse or be so damaged that they are unusable.
The real question that you have to ask yourself is: would you be prepared?The second most important question is: are you prepared right now to survive such a catastrophe? The 3 Pioneer Survival Lessons We Should All Learn!
The main coastal highway, US Route 101, will suffer heavy damage from the shaking and from the tsunami.
Traffic on Interstate 5 — one of the most important thoroughfares in the nation — will likely have to be rerouted because of large cracks in the pavement.
Seattle, Portland and other urban areas could suffer considerable damage, such as the collapse of structures built before codes were updated to take into account a mega-quake.
The last full rip of the Cascadia Subduction Zone happened in January 1700.
The exact date and destructive power was determined from buried forests along the Pacific Northwest coast and an ‘orphan tsunami’ that washed ashore in Japan.
Geologists digging in coastal marshes and offshore canyon bottoms have also found evidence of earlier great earthquakes and tsunamis.
The inferred timeline of those events gives a recurrence interval between Cascadia megaquakes of roughly every 400 to 600 years, reports the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
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