Media / articles

Some of the articles that have been in the NEWS to help us prepare for the
​Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake

The Really Big One

The New Yorker
Annals of Seismology

The Really Big One
An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.
By Kathryn Schulz
July 20, 2015 Issue


In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. The shaking earlier in the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in the nation’s recorded history. But for Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world’s leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come.
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Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-on

Emergency planners prepare for earthquake in Northwest

The Register-Guard
Emergency planners prepare for deadly ‘Big One’ earthquake in Northwest
By Terrence Petty
The Associated Press
JAN. 20, 2016


PORTLAND — As military helicopters ferry search and rescue teams over the Pacific Northwest, below them are scenes of devastation from a giant earthquake that could strike the region at any time.
Tsunami waters surge through coastal communities. Buildings, bridges and roads lie in ruins. Fires burn out of control. Survivors are stranded on rooftops, cling to floating debris or are trapped inside wrecked buildings.
Seismologists say a full rupture of a 650-mile-long offshore fault running from Northern California to British Columbia and an ensuing tsunami could come in our lifetime, and emergency management officials are busy preparing for the worst.
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 U.S.
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http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/33975699-75/emergency-planners-prepare-for-deadly-big-one-earthquake-in-northwest.html.csp

How to Stay Safe

The New Yorker

How to Stay Safe When the Big One Comes
By Kathryn Schulz
July 28, 2015


Novelists and screenwriters can terrify people, feel pretty good about themselves, and call it a day. But for journalists, or at least this one, fear is not an end in itself. At best, it is a means to an end, a way to channel emotion into action. To achieve that, however, you need to navigate between the twin obstacles of panic (which makes you do all the wrong things) and fatalism (which makes you do nothing). In an effort to help people to do so, I’ve answered, below, some of the questions I’ve heard most often since the story was published, and also provided a little advice about how best to prepare for the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami, and their aftermath.
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http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-to-stay-safe-when-the-big-one-comes

Prepare for the Big One

Make sure you have the basics to prepare yourself for the Big One
by Keaton Thomas, KATU NewsWednesday, May 10th 2017
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http://katu.com/news/local/get-the-basics-to-prepare-you-for-the-big-one

​How to Prepare Your Community for a Disaster

By ALAN HENRY FEB. 15, 2018
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Hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes and floods strike communities every year, injuring and displacing thousands. A plan and an emergency kit are important, but they only go so far. Ideally, your whole community should be ready, and if you don’t think it is, here’s how you can help make sure.

“Disaster research shows that tight-knit communities with strong, locally driven organizations respond better in disaster situations,” he said. “That means that any work you do to build community, from strengthening a P.T.A. to starting a local business that serves as a community hub, will naturally help your neighborhood be better prepared.

“The most important thing to understand is that planning for these sorts of things is about the process, not any final document,” Mr. Stripling explained. “Because disasters are chaotic, you’re probably not going to have a lot of reading time, right? So, it’s important to get your group ready to improvise. Building your group into a team that can react to different types of events is more important than being ready to run any one evacuation plan.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/smarter-living/prepare-your-community-for-a-disaster.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad