Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest

by Sandi Doughton

  “It’s a last-gasp solution,” said Dengler, who toured post-tsunami Japan and reported on the spotty performance of the so-called vertical evacuation structures common there. “On a place like the peninsula, it’s absolutely appropriate—but you had better be damn sure it’s tall enough.” Dengler counted more than a hundred buildings, elevated platforms, and towers designated for tsunami evacuation that were overtopped by Japan’s 2011 tsunami. In the town of Minamisanriku, once famed for its seawall, 120 people died in the emergency management building. The 10 people who survived clung to railings and antennas on the roof as the torrent swept over them.

  Horror stories like those leave Fritts and the people of the Long Beach Peninsula paralyzed. Do they need to supersize their berm? How tall is tall enough? Fritts keeps asking those questions, even though she knows the answers will never be as rock solid as she wants. “We’re relying on the scientists,” she said. “But tsunami science is in its infancy.”

  Fritts’s introduction to the subject of giant waves came soon after she and her husband quit their corporate jobs in Portland and moved to the fishing port of Ilwaco to manage her father’s hardware store. They were living on the main drag in 1986 when the Alaska earthquake that caused Hawaii’s costly false alarm spurred a similar, pointless panic in the Northwest. Fritts was in the front yard washing her car that day. She couldn’t figure out why a line of vehicles was speeding out of town at seventy-five miles per hour. When she clicked on the radio and heard the warning, she bundled her kids into the car and joined the exodus.

  Fritts’s first assignment when the county hired her a couple of years later was to fix the tsunami mess. Her bosses were mostly concerned about botched evacuations because of distant tsunamis, but Fritts soon realized that the real danger lay right off shore. The first tsunami layers Brian Atwater unearthed were from Willapa Bay, the aquatic hub of Fritts’s county. She was so alarmed by the discovery she wanted to take action immediately. The only thing she could think of was to post tsunami-warning signs, but there weren’t any in Washington yet. So Fritts started calling other states, shopping around. When Washington emergency managers got wind of her plan, they didn’t know what to make of the crazy lady from Pacific County. Eventually, they followed her lead.

  Since then Fritts has watched the worst-case tsunami for the Northwest coast inflate like a balloon. At first thirty feet seemed almost too outrageous to imagine. After Sumatra many communities began to consider the possibility of fifty-foot waves. Corcoran now advises people to keep running until they reach an elevation of one hundred feet. The original plan for Long Beach’s tsunami “safe haven” called for a berm about thirty feet high, which could be built for $1 million. After watching the videos from Japan, residents now fear it’s ridiculously puny.

  Fritts takes comfort in the fact that tsunamis can be capricious, and not every wave will be the worst case. Surge heights are strongly influenced by proximity to the subduction zone, how much the seafloor lurches, underwater topography, and the shape of the coast. Modelers draw up inundation maps by trying to juggle those factors and predict the way they will interact. In the Northwest, with no recent experience to draw upon, the process is as much art as it is science.

  Modelers generally expect higher surges along the Oregon coast, where the water is deeper and the subduction zone more steeply angled. Waves arriving at the Long Beach Peninsula could be bigger than elsewhere in Washington because of an offshore sandbar where the water will pile up. But the Northwest lacks the jagged, narrow bays that so greatly amplified the tsunami in Japan and resulted in the highest waves.

  The broad bays more typical of the Washington coast will probably have the opposite effect, dampening the intensity. The tsunami will remain fearsome as it travels up the mouth of the Columbia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But most of the punch will be gone by the time it reaches Puget Sound, Portland, and Vancouver. The urban centers can expect higher water than usual, but major tsunami damage is unlikely unless the earthquake shakes loose landslides that trigger local waves.

  A whopper on the subduction zone could cause violent sloshing in Puget Sound and Lakes Washington and Union. The phenomenon is called a seiche. The last time one hit the Seattle area, seismic waves from a 2002 quake in Alaska traveled thousands of miles and caused the water in Lake Union to slop back and forth as if in a giant bathtub. The waves fling houseboats like rubber ducks. But the biggest tsunami threat to Puget Sound is from a quake on the Seattle Fault or any of the other shallow faults that pass under the water.

  The toll from a Cascadia tsunami will be paid by those who find themselves on the outer coast—in the wrong place at the wrong time. The UW team that’s helping Long Beach design its berm estimates the peninsula’s likely death toll at more than 2,000. A series of strategically located berms and towers could save about half of those people.

  No one comes right out and says it, but it’s a given that many fatalities will be people too immobile or infirm to make it to high ground or an evacuation structure. In Japan, where nearly half of those who died in the tsunami were over the age of sixty-five, private enterprise has stepped in with another option. One company is manufacturing yellow fiberglass survival spheres.

  Called Noah for the Biblical ark-builder, a standard pod costs about $4,000 and can hold a family of four. Larger versions are also available. The company says it’s sold more than six hundred. At least two American firms are tinkering with the idea of marketing something similar to people along the U.S. West Coast.

  Absurd as they sound, Bernard thinks the buoyant pods or something similar might be worth a shot. Not a single evacuation structure has yet been built in the United States, which leaves people in Long Beach, Ocean Shores, and equally vulnerable spots with few options for escape. “We need to be thinking about other alternatives,” Bernard said, “but we’re not even considering it in this country.” Maybe scientists and entrepreneurs can come up with better ideas, like tsunami survival suits or specially designed inflatable rafts.

  Even without pods, many people in Japan related amazing survival stories in the days after 3/11. One elderly woman filmed as the water engulfed her was able to grab onto a house that floated by and pull herself up on the roof. A man swept to sea was rescued two days later clinging to the remnants of his home. Inside submerged buildings, a few lucky people found air pockets that kept them alive. “There are going to be people who do exactly the right thing and they will die,” Corcoran said. “And there will be people who do exactly the wrong thing and they will live.”

  So much will depend on when the Cascadia quake strikes. On a January day, the biggest crowds on the beach will be gulls and sanderlings. On a weekend in August, Seaside will be wall-to-wall humanity. The magnitude 8.8 megaquake that rocked the coast of Chile in 2010 struck on the last weekend in February, the equivalent of Labor Day across much of South America. Most locals were savvy enough to run to high ground. Many of those who died were urbanites visiting the beach. The waves washed over an island where extended families were camped out to watch the fireworks. Out of nearly a hundred people on the island, all but a handful were killed.

  One of the things that shocked the Japanese people most on 3/11 was how their government failed them. Warnings underestimated the earthquake and tsunami size. In many areas the alerts never got through. Emergency responders were slow to arrive in remote coastal villages, leaving people to fend for themselves in the freezing weather. In the Northwest it’s going to be much worse, warned Dengler, who spends more of her time these days on public education than on tsunami science. “Japan’s systems are far more robust than ours.”

  For nearly twenty years, Dengler has been surveying residents in Humboldt County, California, about earthquake and tsunami risks. During that time the percentage of people who know about the danger has soared. The majority even understand that the first tsunami wave isn’t usually the biggest. But by other measures, the region seems to be moving backward. When Dengler started askin
g people who they would rely on for help in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, three-quarters said it would be up to them and their neighbors to take care of one another. By 2010 more than half of respondents said they expect the cavalry to swoop in, in the form of an organized government response.

  Results like that make Dengler worry she’s been wasting her time. A Cascadia earthquake and tsunami will so overwhelm the region’s fire departments, police forces, and National Guard units that people should expect to fend for themselves for as much as two weeks. “People still think somebody else is going to tell them what to do, somebody else is going to take responsibility,” Dengler said.

  But there’s one story from Japan that gives Dengler hope as she works to prepare people in the Pacific Northwest. The Japanese call it the miracle of Kamaishi.

  In the town where the tsunami flicked aside the $1.6 billion breakwater, a university professor had been working with local schools on an education program that broke the mold in a nation where children are taught not to question authority. Toshitaka Katada had noticed Japan’s fear of tsunamis fading as the government erected King Kong–size barriers to protect fishing ports and coastal communities. People put their faith in the gates and seawalls and the official warning system.

  Katada based his approach on psychology. Humans have a built-in bias that makes it hard for them to accept they’re in danger, he explained. The alarm sounds but few people bolt immediately. They hesitate. They look around to determine if the threat is real and how others are reacting. Katada taught his students to take the lead, to be the one who runs first. By doing so they could not only save themselves but prompt others to flee. Katada also urged the youngsters not to rely on teachers, scientists, or tsunami evacuation maps. “With nature, anything is possible,” he said in one interview. “Nobody can predict what kind of tsunami will come.”

  On 3/11 the children of Kamaishi took the teachings to heart. The earthquake knocked out alarm systems, but students at the junior high school near the town center evacuated anyway. At the neighboring elementary school, teachers had already herded the kids to the top floor. But when they saw the older students heading for high ground, the younger children and their teachers decided to follow. As they raced along, eighth-graders took second-graders by the hand to help them keep up.

  The group arrived at the designated evacuation point and looked behind them. The tsunami was rolling up the river and traveling overland, its path marked by a cloud of dust from demolished buildings. So the students kept going. From the high point where they finally stopped, they watched as the water swallowed up their classrooms and the evacuation site. Every child in school that day survived.

  CHAPTER 10:

  “IT’S OUR JOB”

  IN 1879 the men of the newly formed U.S. Geological Survey turned heads as they toured the mining districts of the Rocky Mountains. Dressed in snow-white buckskins stitched by London tailors, Clarence King, the first director of the USGS, traveled with a valet and “an apparently inexhaustible supply of fine wines, brandy, and cigars,” according to author Wallace Stegner. King’s corps of geologists was drawn from Harvard, Yale, and other elite schools. The director himself was a national hero, celebrated for exposing a phony diamond mine that snookered some of America’s leading financiers. One contemporary eulogized him as “the best and brightest man of his generation.”

  In Angle of Repose, Stegner described King and his party rolling into Leadville, Colorado, with a train of wagons and mules. They made camp in a stand of aspen and stayed two months to study ore deposits. Stegner’s story is fiction, but based on historical accounts. In the novel, as in reality, the USGS men held court in the evenings, dazzling the locals with literate discourse, well-aged liquor, and delicacies prepared by their cook.

  Today’s USGS rolls with a lot less flash. In 2012, at a workshop hosted by the agency in Seattle, more than a hundred people crammed into a windowless room on the University of Washington campus. Refreshments were Costco bagels, bottled water, and coffee. The meeting was called to order by Art Frankel, a breed of USGS scientist King couldn’t have imagined. Frankel jokes that he can’t tell one rock from another. He spends most of his time crunching numbers on a computer and writes code to relax. But Frankel and his colleagues represent a clear line of succession from the gentlemen geologists of the nineteenth century. Instead of mapping minerals, they map earthquakes.

  Sizing up seismic risk wasn’t codified as part of the USGS mission until Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but it has grown into one of the agency’s most high-profile jobs. The maps Frankel and his team develop are forecasts of future ground shaking. Hugely influential, the maps form the basis for building codes and shape emergency plans across the country. They’re also controversial. Critics accuse the USGS of hyping the danger in some places and low-balling it in others. The grumbling has intensified since devastating quakes in Sumatra, Japan, and New Zealand took many experts by surprise.

  Like his USGS predecessors, who foreswore any financial stake in the mineral deposits they uncovered, Frankel tries to steer clear of competing interests and let science be his guide. He organized the Seattle meeting as a forum where earthquake experts and engineers could debate the latest seismic discoveries in the Northwest and come to a consensus on how—or if—they should be factored into the hazard equation.

  Among the questions on the table were whether giant subduction zone quakes occur more frequently along the Oregon coast than along the rest of the plate margin and whether the seismic rating in Eastern Washington needs to be dialed up.

  Wearing one of the few sport coats in a room dominated by denim and fleece, Frankel urged the participants to be candid. “Improving public safety is what it’s all about,” he said. “We want your comments. We welcome your participation.” But the final responsibility rests with the USGS, as spelled out in the law that added earthquakes to the agency’s portfolio in 1977. The same law charged it with doing the research necessary to identify the danger.

  That’s why USGS scientists have been at the center of almost every seismic breakthrough in the Pacific Northwest, from uncovering the Cascadia Subduction Zone’s true nature to digging into the history of the faults that threaten the region’s cities. “The short answer is, it’s our job,” said David Applegate, associate director for natural hazards. Earthquake programs account for only 6 percent of the agency’s budget but attract the lion’s share of public attention. After every major quake, USGS scientists are called on to explain what happened and what it means. “When the quake hit,” Applegate said, “the world turns to us.”

  That wasn’t the case in 1906, when the great San Francisco earthquake and fire left the city in ruins. The federal agency responsible for monitoring quakes at the time was the Weather Bureau, whose observers were supposed to report all unusual phenomena.

  The USGS was interested, of course. The agency’s chief geologist, Grove Karl Gilbert, said it was the “natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist” to feel an earthquake, visit a glacier and witness a volcanic eruption. When the quake hit, Gilbert was in Berkeley, heading up an investigation of hydraulic mining. His report would help end the ecologically ruinous practice of sluicing away hillsides to get at hidden flakes of gold. The early-morning quake knocked Gilbert out of bed. He caught the first ferry to San Francisco and immediately started documenting the quake and its effects. His photos of the dramatic offset on the San Andreas Fault still appear in textbooks.

  But literal earthshaking had not been on the mind of Grove’s old friend and former boss, John Wesley Powell, when the latter set out to revolutionize the government’s role in science. The American West was being rapidly and, to Powell’s mind, recklessly settled. He pressed Congress to establish a corps of professional geologists to survey the vast public domain in a systematic way, identifying land best suited for farming, ranching, and timber growing. Only the federal government could do the job free from the corrupting influence of greed,
he argued.

  A self-taught geologist and Civil War veteran who lost his right arm to a musket ball, Powell was every bit as famous as Clarence King, the man he anointed to be the USGS’s initial leader. Powell’s celebrity was sealed in 1869, when he led the first party to navigate the treacherous Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. It was the last major journey of discovery in the continental United States. Powell set out with four wooden rowboats and a rag-tag crew of nine volunteers. Ninety-nine days and a thousand miles later, six starving men paddled out of the unknown. Their adventures were splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world.

  After guiding the creation of the USGS, Powell became its second director in 1881 when King left government service to chase gold in Mexico. Powell soon launched the young agency on perhaps its most ambitious and enduring project: the topographical mapping of the entire United States. Powell promised Congress he would get the job done in twenty-four years. It took more than a century. The fifty-five thousand quadrangle maps that resulted remain the go-to standard for hikers, planners, and resource managers. Powell also foresaw the need for long-term monitoring of waterways, especially in the arid West where the agency pioneered the development of stream gauges. For more than 120 years the USGS has maintained the nationwide network used to monitor floods and water supplies.

  But for most of its existence, the USGS’s bread and butter was geologic mapping in support of the mining industry. There was no better job for a young graduate than to join the legions of hard-rock men who set off into the mountains with mules and rock hammers and came back with schematics of sandstones, conglomerates, and shales—and, they hoped, clues to the next mother lode.