A mega-earthquake could strike the Pacific Northwest any day — and we’re not prepared

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A mega-earthquake could strike the Pacific Northwest any day — and we’re not prepared

Your phone blares, “

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” The voice instructs you to duck, cover, and hold on. About 30 seconds later,

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.

At first, it makes the furniture sway. It’s stronger than the little quakes you normally get here in

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. Another 30 seconds later, the shaking suddenly intensifies.

Pictures fall from the walls, objects fly across the room, and the dining table you’re sheltering under begins to scoot across the floor, several inches at a time.

A loud rumble fills the air. It’s the sound of

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swaying and creaking and all their contents shimmying, wobbling, scraping across floors, or crashing down from shelves.

Seattle isn’t even that

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.

The Olympic Mountains and about 100 miles stand between the city and the ocean. For people on the coast, the shaking is much worse.

Robert Ezelle, director of emergency management at Washington state’s Military Department

After about six minutes, the earthquake ***** down, and a new countdown begins. People along the coast now have 10 to 30 minutes to reach high ground before a giant wave engulfs the

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.

Tsunami sirens wail in some towns. In others, the earthquake has knocked out alert systems.

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A tsunami evacuation sign in Long Beach, Washington.Rick Bowmer/AP Photo

From Northern California to Vancouver Island, a wall of water up to eight stories high surges onto the coast.

Over the next hour or two, the

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makes its way up rivers and straits and into Puget Sound. It’s much smaller by the time it reaches Seattle, but it floods some streets.

Between

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, 14,000 people *****, many more were trapped or injured, and more than 618,000 

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. The shaking triggered landslides, fires, and spills of hazardous materials.

But the disaster has just begun.

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A member of the Washington Army National Guard 792nd Chemical Company from Grandview, Washington, demonstrates a decontamination station during an earthquake readiness exercise.Ted S. Warren/AP Photo

Eventually, the total economic losses will amount to $134 billion, placing it high among the costliest

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in US history.

The scene above is a worst-case scenario of a megaquake striking the Pacific Northwest. Emergency managers have spent decades preparing for it. Still, they say the region isn’t ready.

“To be fully, completely, and totally prepared is an impossibility,” Robert Ezelle, the director of the emergency-management division of Washington state’s Military Department, told Business Insider, “just because of the magnitude of the event.”

Inside the major disaster brewing off the coast of the Pacific Northwest

About 100 miles offshore from the Pacific Northwest, deep beneath the seafloor, two

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are building tension that could erupt at any moment.

In a region called the

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, the Juan de Fuca oceanic plate is sliding (or “subducting”) beneath the North ********* plate — but its edge is stuck. As the plate keeps pushing against its locked-up edge, stress builds.

“It’s ominously quiet,” Harold Tobin, Washington’s state seismologist and the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, told ***. “The fact that it doesn’t even produce little earthquakes to any significant extent makes us believe that it is completely locked up.”

Scientists like Tobin ***** that without releasing tension through smaller earthquakes, the Cascadia subduction zone is more likely to erupt in a “megathrust” earthquake — or

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for short — with a magnitude of about 9.

“It will be the worst natural disaster our country has ever seen,” Ezelle said. That’s why some call it the “Big One.”

On average, the Cascadia subduction zone produces an immense earthquake every 200 to 500 years. The most recent one was in 1700.

Just how big is the Big One?data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

A “ghost forest” of Sitka spruces juts up from an Oregon beach. The trees were likely ******* by tsunami debris in 1700.AP Photo/Andrew Selsky

The Richter scale, which measures earthquake magnitude, is logarithmic, not linear. That means a magnitude 9 quake releases about 32 times as much energy as a magnitude 8 but about a million times as much as a magnitude 5.

The closest thing in human memory to the Big One

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. That magnitude 9 event, called the Tohoku earthquake, also came from a subduction zone.

It generated a tsunami that reached 130 feet high, inundated over 1,200 miles of coastline, and washed thousands of people out to sea. Together, the quake and tsunami ******* an estimated 18,500 people.

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The aftermath of a tsunami in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture two days after the Tohoku disaster.Itsuo Inouye/AP Photo

It’s hard to imagine the power of a magnitude 9 quake, but the

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, a group of Columbia University scientists, created a video that tries to convey it through sound.

The animated video, below, shows every earthquake in Japan from 2008 through 2014, accompanied by sounds of various volumes. A normal background hum of magnitude 4, 5, and 6 quakes gives way to an intensely loud *****, the Tohoku event, about 22 seconds in. (The label saying the event occurred in 2012 is incorrect.)

For years after the Tohoku event,

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rippled across Japan, adding to the damage, including a 7.1 earthquake in 2021.

Likewise, in the Pacific Northwest, aftershocks could continue for months, maybe even years, following the Big One. The first tsunami may not be the biggest.

The aftermath of the Big One

Scientists, Ezelle’s department, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have practiced for the Big One in two “Cascadia Rising” exercises, one in 2016 and another in 2022.

They’ve found that in the days following the megaquake, much of western Oregon and Washington may be

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, internet, cell service, or drinking water.

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A US Navy sailor walks through a camp of living quarter tents during the 2016 Cascadia Rising exercise.Ted S. Warren/AP Photo

In certain areas, it could be more than two weeks before help arrives because landslides,

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, bridge collapses, and other damage to roads could make travel impossible.

Both

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and Washington advise that all residents have enough food, water, and medicine on hand to last at least two weeks.

“People that we’re counting on to be

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may very well be victims,” Ezelle said. “A lot of it is going to be neighbors taking care of neighbors.”

Among dozens of preparedness goals set after the last Cascadia Rising exercise, Ezelle’s division is assessing the state’s roadways to identify “lifelines” through the mountains — ways it might piece together surviving or quick-to-repair roads to transport critical supplies to the coast.

Once those lifelines open after a megaquake, national and international aid can step in. A FEMA spokesperson told *** in an email that the agency would have teams ready to step in “almost immediately.”

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A destroyed neighborhood below Weather Hill in Natori, Japan, after the Tohoku disaster.Wally Santana/AP Photo

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is also crucial since many aren’t megaquake-resilient. Tobin said there wasn’t much money for this “piecemeal process.”

“We have a really long way to go,” he added.

Japan has known about its risk of giant earthquakes and tsunamis for centuries. It’s

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. And still, the 2011 subduction-zone rupture was devastating.

The Pacific Northwest, by contrast, only

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.

“Preparing for this is like trying to drain an Olympic-sized swimming pool with a teaspoon,” Ezelle said.

Science could help better prepare for the Big One

Ezelle said that to be “the best prepared that we could possibly be,” the Pacific Northwest’s roadways, buildings, airports, and other infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.

A more immediate, affordable strategy to save lives is building out a system that sends early warnings to phones — which already happens for many earthquakes but isn’t a guarantee.

The sooner the phone warning blares, the more time people have to duck and cover. The next frontier for that, Tobin said, is laying cables with seismic instruments on the seafloor along the

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. That’s what he’s trying to do at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

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A Shake Alert earthquake notification on a smartphone.AP Photo/Barbara Ortutay

In the meantime, Tobin and other researchers are working to map the fault’s structure. Their latest study may have uncovered some good news: The Cascadia subduction zone could rupture in segments or smaller earthquakes rather than all at once as one giant event.

But which scenario will actually happen — one Big One or multiple big-ish ones — ******** unclear.

“I don’t lose sleep over it,” said Tobin, who lives in Seattle beneath the snowy peaks of the Cascades.

The Cascadia subduction zone pushed those mountains up about 10 million years ago, carving the

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that makes the Pacific Northwest so stunning.

“The same thing that makes the earthquakes, I should say, is part of what makes it a beautiful place to live,” he said.

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#megaearthquake #strike #Pacific #Northwest #day #prepared

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