23 ms·

The Really Big One

612 points by Thevet 11y ago

NDizzle 11y ago
As usual, paste this exact url into a google search box to reach a non-paywalled version of the article. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2015%2F07%2F20%2Fthe-really-big-one https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  or pay for the New Yorker because they do really excellent work.
  - skorecky 11y ago
    To read one article once every few months at best is not worth it. Edit: I spoke my opinion. Down vote me!
    - 3JPLW 11y ago
      (If you only read one article every few months, you wouldn't be hitting their pay wall)
      - NDizzle 11y ago
        I am hitting their pay wall by occasionally clicking links from HN. I never read the full articles, but I skim roughly 4x the amount of information provided before the pay wall. It's not worth the full price for me. I'd like a happy medium.
        JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        So, your medium is free content as often as you want it? What's in it for them?
        PaulyGlott 11y ago
        There's no shortage of advertising on The New Yorker.
        freehunter 11y ago
        That killed me when I subscribed to the NYT online. I was paying $15/mo and seeing as many ads as I would expect from a free site. I love the NYT journalism and am willing to pay for it, and I understand they have bills to pay, but it's a lot of money to be sitting on ads. In fact I canceled my subscription (not a quick or easy process) and have the same amount of advertising on their NYT Now app whether I subscribe or not. So what's the point?
        JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        This is how dead tree magazines and papers work. You pay for a subscription and you still receive ads. Why would they think the web should be any different?
        Retra 11y ago
        Why would anybody take your money and not show ads when they can both take your money and show you ads?
deleted 11y ago
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soperj 11y ago
"The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major earthquake—or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver." This is total crap. There was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Seattle in 2001.
- 3JPLW 11y ago
  I wonder if they discounted this because it was (as wikipedia lists it) an "intraslab" earthquake. I'm not a seismologist, but that reads to me like it wasn't an earthquake from the fault line directly, but rather a secondary artifact of the subduction zone. I agree this is very misleading, but as they tell it through the historical lens, this earthquake also hadn't happened before they realized there could be earthquakes or that they could be big.
  - matheweis 11y ago
    Wikipedia (sorry), has a nice diagram that shows the different categories; the "crustal" and " deep" earthquakes being different from the subduction zone earthquakes that this article is specifically about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#/media/File:Cascadia_earthquake_sources.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#/medi...
- jameshart 11y ago
  They are contrasting what they describe as weekly small quakes in Japan with long periods of inactivity in the Pacific Northwest. A significant quake in one city in the region 14 years ago doesn't invalidate the claim that you could spend a significant time in the northwest without feeling a tremor.
sharkweek 11y ago
Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways! While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itself into making me think that nothing can really be done. It's not going to be realistic to establish safeguards against an 8.5+ if it/or the subsequent tsunami is going to flatten the city west of I-5
- edgyswingset 11y ago
  I don't think a tsunami is going to flatten the city. A wave has a lot to go through (peninsulas, narrow straights, etc) before it could reach the city, all of which would likely lessen its impact significantly. Where the area will get hit hard, though, is liquifaction and landslides.
  - saintgimp 11y ago
    There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound, though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast. Everything is going to shift 30 to 100 feet west over the course of a couple minutes - the water in Puget Sound is going to slosh around like crazy.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      - olefoo 11y ago
        Large parts of downtown and the area between Queen Anne and Capitol Hill ( where the Amazon campus is ) are built on fill, and are likely to be subjected to liquefaction in a major seismic event. It's entirely possible that whole sections of Capitol Hill could slide into downtown too. The hills shake and the mountains dance, and then comes the tsunami; this sounds much more exciting to read about than live through.
rfugger 11y ago
I was in New Orleans in October 2002, and this guy was on the front page of the main newspaper predicting that within 20 years a category 5 hurricane was likely to whip around Florida and strike the city head on. He said the levies weren't high or strong enough, and that downtown New Orleans would be under 20 feet of water: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html I remember reading it with interest and then shrugging and moving on with my day. Three years later I remembered that moment and realized that as a society we just don't care that much about our long-term safety.
- CrackpotGonzo 11y ago
  Shocking really. Curious to hear rationale from someone that knew about the odds before moving to the PNW.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- nordsieck 11y ago
  Lots of people predict lots of catastrophes. The trick is identifying the correct ones ahead of time. This is much more difficult than you are implying.
  - hrktb 11y ago
    I think it's still very simple. We can view it through the concept of discount rate [0], basically people don't value a future event as much as a present one. The world ending in 50 years is not worth making drastic efforts now, at least for most people. If your prediction is too costly on the short term, as accurate as it can be most people won't act on it. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice
    - lexcorvus 11y ago
      I suspect this is in part a side-effect of the Anglo-American (maturity-mismatched) banking system, which keeps long-term interest rates artificially low, leading to higher time preference.
iamjs 11y ago
Does the New Yorker just inject random comics into their stories? None of these illustrations appear to be related to the content.
- gwern 11y ago
  Yes. It's not quite so distracting in the print edition, where they tend to be off to the side and don't look like part of the article.
- kleer001 11y ago
  Yes.
- MrZongle2 11y ago
  It's worse than that: none of those illustrations appear to be related to humor. Edit: Looks like we've got a couple of New Yorker cartoon aficionados on HN. I guess I'll have to save my stinging comments for edgier content, such as Doonsbury and Garfield. /s
  - mathgenius 11y ago
    Yeah it is some kind if weird palette cleanse.
  - acheron 11y ago
    Remember, we're talking about an organization that apparently employs Andy Borowitz. Possibly his mere existence sucks any humor out of all surrounding content.
deleted 11y ago
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Locke1689 11y ago
Hmm, in the spirit of thinking of worst-case scenarios, most of the engineering talent for Amazon and Microsoft is in Seattle and Redmond, respectively. There's even a sizable percentage of Google cloud platform in Fremont and Kirkland. Even if most of the employees live, it's likely basic infrastructure will be a disaster for quite a while. Maybe Google would be able to offload ops work to Mountain View, but it seems likely Amazon.com, AWS and Azure would go down, possibly for months. I wonder what the effect would be on the global economy.
- serve_yay 11y ago
  That does seem likely, though as far as I know, AWS's biggest zone is located in Northern Virginia. And, I'm sure the AWS people have planned as much as they can for this eventuality. (Um, I hope.)
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    AWS West in Oregon are somewhat further inland from I-5. It would probably be impacted, but not to the same degree as the datacenters in other cities like Tukwila.
    - trhway 11y ago
      i think the datacenters will get soon to the status of national strategic infrastructure objects similar to bridges, power plants, etc... Given the distributed nature of the services i'd suppose the main threat though isn't from physical effect like earthquake, instead i think the main threat is introduction of something like StuxNet into say AWS (or highjacking the backdoor access that services like NSA already have there)
    - sneak 11y ago
      The loss of datacenters is irrelevant; the loss of people to keep the services running is the issue.
  - Locke1689 11y ago
    I doubt the datacenter's locations matter. The services at the bottom of the stack need constant ops to stay alive. With most of the engineers out, I expect barely a few days to go by before one of the essential services needs servicing.
astrodust 11y ago
Worth noting that the state of warning systems there is somewhere between dismal and non-existent and the disaster preparedness of most cities seems to vary between unprepared and comically inept. Is there anything anyone can do to set up an alert for these sorts of things? If these predictions are true, there's a good chance that the entirety of Silicon Valley could be utterly destroyed. You'd think people would take more of an interest in preventing that.
- idlewords 11y ago
  It's pretty baffling. Japan is the model for earthquake warning systems. Even a few seconds' warning could be invaluable if you are running a major datacenter. But apart from a tiny pilot program in Berkeley I'm not aware of any serious efforts in that direction.
  - sneak 11y ago
    For extra credit, figure out how to trigger the compression wave near the sensors the datacenter depends on to automatically fail masters over to another state.
- cossatot 11y ago
  Earthquakes are, for now, impossible to predict so there is little forewarning (and not for the lack of people trying). However, there is a huge interest in the geological/hazards community in earthquake early warning systems in the US, especially focused on California[1][2]. The Napa earthquake last summer was the first real test of the more modern components and was successful. But again, you're dependent on warning the populace after the earthquake has begun, which isn't useful for people near the epicenter. Tsunami warning systems have been in place for many places for decades; whether people respond is a different story. In terms of people preparedness, again, California is the leader in the US but there are drills in many places[3], though they're generally voluntary and totally ignored by most. [1]: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/ http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/ [2]: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-earthquake-earlywarning-system-gave-10second-alert-before-napa-quake-felt-20140824-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-earthquake... [3]
nkoren 11y ago
I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would work. Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the uncertainty surrounding its timing. "Maybe it'll be some other generation's problem. Maybe we don't actually need to let it affect our thinking about where we live and what we build." This kind of thinking is expedient and economical right up to the point where it gets absolutely everybody killed. There's a second, somewhat less fundamental problem: the causality count can depend dramatically on exactly when the earthquake happens. It'll be worse if it happens at high tide rather than low tide (the tsunami will reach farther). Worse if it happens at night rather during the day (darkness is harder for emergency services to cope with). Worse if it happens in the winter rather than the summer (more deaths from exposure), etc. These problems aside, a 9.0 with a tsunami is eminently survivable. You just need to be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right types of buildings / geology / topography, when it happens. Anyhow, how do we solve these problems? Stopping the earthquake is out of the question ... but making it happen isn't. So here's what I propose: we announce an exact date and time for the earthquake. Give everybody, say, 30 years to prepare for it. That's a decent-enough timescale for the sort of population displacements which will need to happen. So we'll have the earthquake in 2045. Let's have it in the mid-summer, at 10AM during a low tide, to minimise all the timing-related casualties. Then, at the appointed time and date -- if the earthquake hasn't happened yet -- we set off howevermany scores of nukes it's been calculated to take, drilled into the subduction zone, to lubricate the fault enough for a full-fault rupture. Shouldn't take too much of a push to get things going. Over the next 30 years, the absolutely certain foreknowledge of this event would alter the planning, policy, and insurance environments dramatically. Tsunami walls etc. would be built in areas which are planned to be defended. In areas which cannot be defended and must be abandoned, the property prices, development activity, and eventually population levels would gradually crash. Within defended / geological stable zones, buildings which you want to be standing in 31 years would still need to be retrofitted to survive a 9.0 quake; otherwise, they'd be torn down before that point. Finally, on the appointed day of the quake, everybody could gather in the most geologically-stable high-grounds they can find, and just sit back and watch the fun. Of course there'd be a danger that the quake might arrive at a bad time before then -- but even if it does, the incremental changes in land-use and the built environment, which such a policy would provoke, would result in far fewer casualties than our current trajectory. Alas, it'll never happen, if only because a policy which results in the intentional destruction of millions of peoples' homes is a bit difficult to sell in a democracy, even if it would save tens to hundreds of thousands of lives.
interurban 11y ago
For a good read on another somewhat overlooked seismic zone: http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm Most people don't think of the midwest/great plains states as being seismically active, but they're home to some of the most geologically interesting history in the United States.
- sasvari 11y ago
  surfaced here just 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862451
  - idlewords 11y ago
    Consider this an aftershock
kenferry 11y ago
Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?
- iamcurious 11y ago
  I like how you think. If we are going to have an earthquake, at the very least we should have an scheduled organized mild one.
  - nappy-doo 11y ago
    On the Richter scale, the difference a full step (7.0 to 8.0) is about a factor of 32. So if we're trying to mitigate an 8.0 earthquake every 100 years, you're talking about a magnitude 7.0 every 3 years to release the same amount of energy. Most engineering structures on the west coastare built to withstand a 6-7. When a magnitude 8 comes (and it will come, and in some sense we're coming out of the stress shadow from the 1906 quake just now) the devastation will be horrendous. *Editting to add: The structures on the west coast are engineered to withstand a SINGLE 6-7 magnitude event. Not one every 3 years.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      And even if they were built to withstand a mag 7 earthquake every three years, the things inside of them likely won't be. Imagine the engineering that would have to go into designing every single item in your house to withstand a deadly earthquake on a regular basis. No more popping out to Ikea to grab the same furniture everyone else uses. Your TV stand is on springs. Your TV is on springs connected to the TV stand on springs. Your cupboards have notches where your dishes can lock into them so they don't slide. The cupboard doors have latches that let them open when pulled slowly, but resist opening when sudden force is applied. Your refrigerator bolts to the floor and is filled will elastic pockets that hold every item individually. Its either that, or spend a significant amount of time every few years packing all of your items into boxes to ensure they won't be damaged when it's earthquake time.
      - 11y ago
jchrisa 11y ago
Portland has an admirable style when it comes to resilience. At least at the grass roots. It'd be great to see an Apollo program around earthquake preparedness. There is a carry-heavy loads around the city cargo bike race that's been going on for a few years. http://disasterrelieftrials.com/ http://disasterrelieftrials.com/
cdsingh1001 11y ago
the question I would be asking myself is Am I prepared for such a natural disaster ? Or What steps can I take on a personal level to be ready ? For eg: Always have an evac bag ready to take off Or live out of a suitcase so that I dont have to worry about stuff & data. Or distribute my personal resources (cards, cash) etc in PO boxes across the country. Ofcourse, in such a huge disaster these steps wont matter but in small events, there might be of help.
- chiph 11y ago
  ready.gov has some basic steps. But, they don't have enough emphasis on having clean water, IMO. Having a storage sharing agreement with friends within a day or two's walk could be useful, so if your home is destroyed (along with your emergency supplies) your friend's might still be in good shape. And vice-versa.
  - lsllc 11y ago
    Sadly, being well prepared with clean water, food, medicine and shelter does you no good if someone else takes it from you. The very first item on your list should be a powerful firearm & sufficient ammo. Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle has a pretty good take on the post-apocalyptic chaos & breakdown in society that will likely ensue.
    - chiph 11y ago
      Agreed. But ... California makes that tough. Oregon & Washington are more in line with the rest of the country. Something to check is whether your state restricts carrying when a state of emergency has been declared.
- protomyth 11y ago
  I've lived in the northland for a while and my car generally has an emergency kit that includes some survival stuff. Getting stuck in your car in a blizzard is no damn fun. My Dad always kept $40 hidden in the car, but that was more a "need to pay for gas because these damn cards...." thing. I would suggest against the suitcase in the trunk more for social reasons[1]. Hidden compartments are illegal in some states[2]. 1) it is a sign of cheating 2) drug laws, go figure
someear 11y ago
I like to think about how I'd react in the 15 minutes I have between the earthquake and tsunami. How tall would this tsunami be? Quick googling shows the tallest one ever is 524 meters. Assuming the tsunami is that tall, going into tall buildings might not work - tallest building in Seattle, Columbia Tower, is 287 meters (+50m in elevation increase), and is a few blocks from the waterfront . Best bet is to run/bike up the hill to Capitol Hill, which is 100m higher in elevation, and about 2 miles inland (and east of the I5). Just need some science to figure out how far the wave will go given these hill angles and elevations in Seattle to find a precise safe spot (assuming the tallest tsunami ever, and assuming all other variables like me being able to react instantly and fallen buildings not blocking my path stay constant, which they of course won't).
- cossatot 11y ago
  Fortunately, the tallest tsunami was from a rockfall in a fjord[1], not from a subduction zone earthquake. They are typically ~10 m, and it's really the wavelength, not the amplitude, that is a problem because there is so much water that the inundation is more like a flash flood than a quick slap from a breaking wave. Second, I don't believe tsunamis from subduction zone earthquakes on the Cascadia trench will impact Seattle that much, because (as you may be able to see from your location) the Olympic peninsula is in between you and the trench. The wave coming through the Strait of Juan de Fuca will spread outward into Puget Sound and mostly dissipate against Camano and Whidbey Islands. The big tsunami hazard for Seattle itself is the from an earthquake on the Seattle fault[2]. [1]: http://geology.com/records/biggest-tsunami.shtml http://geology.com/records/biggest-tsunami.shtml [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2AGlhuCQ-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2AGlhuCQ-A
  - idlewords 11y ago
    There's a seiche hazard in Seattle, though. Lake Washington will slosh back and forth in resonance with the shaking. Basically every natural feature in the Pacific Northwest has some exotic way of killing you.
- rconti 11y ago
  If you DID go up into a tall building, what's your plan? Jump into the water just as the building's collapsing?
itistoday2 11y ago
TLDR someone?
- sswaner 11y ago
  The Really Big One: earthquake wipes out the Pacific Northwest. Really needed that?
  - itistoday2 11y ago
    ... this article seemed to be talking about a potential future earthquake. And it's a very long article.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      It discusses why a big earthquake is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years with lots of flowery language and science. TL;DR: There's a big earthquake that is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years.
      - itistoday2 11y ago
        Thanks freehunter, I appreciate you taking the time to do that. :)
  - hudibras 11y ago
    Ugh. I stop reading whenever I hit a colon. Life's too short...
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    Yes; abstract culture is killing the academic world. In truth, only one Abstract is needed: JUST READ IT
- lifeformed 11y ago
  We're all gonna die.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
It's interesting to see several articles about this recently. Ever since I was growing up in the 1970's, they've been talking about "the big one". Here's the 1979 show "In Seach Of" discussing it: Leonard Nimoy's narration is top notch as always: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs At the time of the video, they said over 15 million people live along the various fault lines.
michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Silicon Valley refugees and people complaining about Bay Area prices, please note that this is 100% true. Portland will be completely wiped out within the next couple years by a giant earthquake followed by a Sasquatch Apocalypse. Don't move here. You will die. But please visit and enjoy your stay! Love, Portland
- protomyth 11y ago
  Well, the Sasquatch Apocalypse can be dealt with by having some good laws on the books, and this book should help: http://www.amazon.com/The-Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actually/dp/1627222693 http://www.amazon.com/The-Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actu...
- callmeed 11y ago
  Also, please don't move to San Luis Obispo / Avila Beach. We have a nuclear power plant on a bluff near a fault line. Come visit though. We have great tri-tip and outdoor activities.
  - dnautics 11y ago
    not only that, it's called "diabolo canyon". I mean talk about tempting fate.
    - Mtinie 11y ago
      At the end of the road through Montaña de Oro State Park there's a warning siren[1] that will go off if there's a problem at the Diablo Canyon facility. Every time I get out there and see it there's a part of me that expects it to start to blare... and I'm totally glad when I'm "disappointed" and it doesn't. [1] http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/fullsize/IMG_1350.jpg http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/ful...
      - callmeed 11y ago
        Its fun when they test the sirens a couple times a year ...
graycat 11y ago
Reminds me of the movie quote: "Wiped clean by the wrath of God.", I suspect from one of the movies Indiana Jones. Right, at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark > Brody: However, about a year after the pharaoh had returned to Egypt, the city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a whole year. Wiped clean by the wrath of God.
fizixer 11y ago
In recent past, I had this thought that Silicon Valley is sitting on top of, or very close to, potential future fault activity. And I have a hard time believing that the key component of human civilization (technology) is so vulnerable, and was built after the 1906 disaster. It's one of the factors I would consider when deciding if I really want to move to west coast.
- nappy-doo 11y ago
  San Francisco has been built by the grace of the grace of the 1906 quake. When the big quakes happen, they release all kinds of stress, and make a future local quake much more unlikely. It's called the stress shadow. The stress shadow of the 1906 quake was (depending on who you ask) about 100 years. SF is coming out of the stress shadow, and is become "due" for a new big one. WRT the rest of the valley, the main problem is that it's built on sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock slows the seismic waves, which since you need to conserve energy, results in larger shaking. In other words, a small quake further south could result in more damage in the valley.
- codingdave 11y ago
  You think technology is the key component to human civilization? I would have thought of food.
  - munificent 11y ago
    Food is a technology. Horticulture, breeding, domestication, threshing, plowing, sowing, crop rotation, cooking, drying, pickling, brining, canning, curing, refrigerating, etc. Modern civilization is massively more efficient at extracting food from a given piece of arable land than our hunter gatherer forebears were able too, all thanks to thousands of years of food technology.
  - jodrellblank 11y ago
    Where are you going to get food (for a population) without oil powered GPS controlled farm machinery, trucks and technological processing plants, information technology controlled distribution, electricity and on a slightly longer timescale, oil based fertilisers? OK, in a localised disaster you're going to import it. But still, you can grow squash in your back yard, but enough food for all humans means mechanised agriculture, and that's not just tractors. Food is a technology (albeit not a Google one - yet).
VikingCoder 11y ago
After watching the Japanese Tsunami, it got me wondering about a weather-balloon-like device. You strap it on like a life jacket, and you wait for the wave to come your way. As it approaches, you pull the cord. Something that looks like a weather balloon inflates, extends the length of a tether, and then you float a few hundred feet in the air, and then float back down a while later. Why is this a dumb idea?
- freehunter 11y ago
  Where do you get the helium needed to make it fly through the air? If you're just pumping air, at best you would float on water, which still leaves you vulnerable to being killed by something else that is floating (possibly a pickup truck, a growler of Rogue Dead Guy Ale or maybe the Space Needle).
  - mirimir 11y ago
    You'd get helium from a tank. But you'd need a regulator with a huge heat exchanger to get fast inflation. Maybe use a high-volume whitewater kayak as the "basket".
    - VikingCoder 11y ago
      Hmmm - how fast is fast? Do you know how to actually do this math? Like, to lift a 200 lb person, without a heat exchanger (or a more reasonably sized one)? How long would it take?
- azoth_ 11y ago
  There is a company that already makes a Tsunami survival capsule, though it is only designed to float on water: http://survival-capsule.com/ http://survival-capsule.com/
- nickthemagicman 11y ago
  I love this idea. Like a reverse parachute. It would be great for both the earth quake AND the tsunami assuming you could get high enough fast enough and stay up long enough. If I was rich I would just buy a cheap helicopter but your idea is more affordable and would be accessible to more people.
davesque 11y ago
FYI, the two-hundred year figure that this article mentions appears to be in dispute. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earthquake_timing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earth...) includes much more specific, cited information which puts the frequency at 300-600 years between significant quakes with the earthquake of 1700 having occurred after a 780 year lull.
- themgt 11y ago
  I would say overall the situation looks ... not great, in the medium term. "Perhaps more striking than the probability numbers is that we can now say that we have already gone longer without an earthquake than 75 percent of the known times between earthquakes in the last 10,000 years," Goldfinger said. "And 50 years from now, that number will rise to 85 percent." http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/node/13426 http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/node/13426
- GregBuchholz 11y ago
  Yes, how about a histogram of the earthquake intervals? Is table 8 on page 102 of: http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1661f/pp1661f_text.pdf http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1661f/pp1661f_text.pdf ...the raw data we are looking for? That data looks to have a mean of 530 years, and a standard deviation of 262 years, although it isn't very normal looking (well there are only 18 samples after all, so maybe it isn't too bad). See the histogram I plotted at: http://imgur.com/4fv7jDJ http://imgur.com/4fv7jDJ ...any sources of data with the lower average for the interval? Here's the raw data that I used: intervals = [250, 305, 446, 311, 982, 492, 415, 665, 661, 1189, 508, 715, 443, 548, 733, 195, 117, 577] ...as for the disagreement on the intervals, the only thing I could find was: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/how-often-does-cascadia-fault-rip-scientists-disagree/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/how-often-does-casc...
- shas3 11y ago
  I am really interested to learn how they calculate the probability of 1/3. I think there is a legitimate question here about the methods used. In technical terms: what is the sample space and what set are you looking for within that sample space? How strong is the justification to treat the sequence of earthquakes as a sequence of independent identically distributed random numbers? Leaves me scratching my head. I looked at Professor Goldfinger's papers and couldn't find a reasonable answer. Perhaps it is more fundamental knowledge (e.g. something one would find in geology textbooks)?
cdelsolar 11y ago
So SF is screwed right?
rexignis 11y ago
There's a nuclear submarine base there too :(
notNow 11y ago
A heads up: this peace is 6.3K+ word long and according to my estimate it would take you around 45 mins to finish reading it. Enjoy!
- antod 11y ago
  Well, its title is "The really big one" after all.
  - notNow 11y ago
    Shouldn't it have been "The really LOOOONG one" instead?
- shabbyrobe 11y ago
  This is not helped by the three hundred and sixty-six thousand nine hundred and thirty two numbers typed out as words rather than digits.
stokedmartin 11y ago
"The Cascadia subduction zone stretches from Cape Mendocino in northern California to Brooks Peninsula on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a distance of about 700 miles (1,130 km). All along this zone, which begins beneath the seafloor to the west and extends inland towards the Cascade and Coastal mountains, the subducting plates are forced beneath the North American Plate. At a relatively shallow depth (less than about 20 miles/30 km down), the plates have become stuck. Below this locked zone, warmer temperatures make the plates more pliable, allowing them to move more readily past each other. This freer movement deeper down causes strain to accumulate along the locked zone. Once that strain is great enough to overcome the friction that keeps the plates locked, the fault will rupture: the edge of the North American Plate will lurch suddenly upwards and southwestwards as the subducting plates slip under and northeastwards. With this movement, the deformed western edge of the North American Plate will flex, causing the land along large sections of Cascadia" [0] Also check the diagram(s) for a better understanding. [0]http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scenario_2013.pdf http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scen...
kragen 11y ago
So how can you escape from a 10-meter tsunami, like the 11-meter Tohoku tsunami that wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi, assuming you have years to prepare? You could build buildings that could withstand the water flowing around them, as the nuclear reactor center itself did; but windows that can survive not just ten meters of water pressure but also cars and trees being dashed against them by the tsunami are going to be less like windows and more like plastic-filled tunnels to the daylight. You could ensure that all of your buildings are at least 10 meters tall, built to withstand the tsunami without collapsing, and with adequate escape routes to the upper floors, space therein to ensure that everyone can escape, and emergency supplies (e.g. first-aid kits, food, water, insulin) to keep incidental deaths to a minimum. Then you just have to get everyone up four flights of stairs before the tsunami hits. The bottom floors will fill with water, destroying everybody's TV, and then recede. Maybe make it 20 meters, just in case the tsunami is extra huge, like the Kuril Islands tsunami of 2006. Or you could build your houses a meter underground. You might lose the top 50cm of dirt cover, and if you illuminate with lightpipes, your lightpipes will fill with silt and other mud; but you should be able to keep your subterranean house well enough sealed that the water itself won’t be a problem. Escaping the house after the water recedes, though, may be a problem if you turn out to be in a sediment-deposition zone instead of an erosion zone. Tunneling out, using a door built to open inwards specifically for this purpose, may be your only option. Other options are possible; Stapledon’s Star Maker suggests taking flight when the water is incoming, but that would seem to require a sufficient population of evacuation helicopters to evacuate the entire population within the few minutes of warning you have. This is probably not possible for biological humans. And if you have boats, especially if you live in boats, you could take them a few hundred meters offshore and be, in all likelihood, perfectly fine. How can we engineer human civilization to be robust against natural disasters? The Chile and Haïti earthquakes of 2010 showed that there is enormous scope for doing so; how can we do better? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-earthquake-co_n_479705.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-earthqu...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- obstinate 11y ago
  Running in the opposite direction and toward high ground is sufficient. In the case of Japan's tsunami in 2011, there was 25 minutes of warning, which is enough time to get clear of most inundation zones if you indeed do start moving immediately. This isn't a catchall solution (old folks, the disabled, children), but it would work for a lot of downtown people.
jebblue 11y ago
I can't read the article, says I've read my last complimentary issue. That's in Chrome, I added them to my allowed cookie list. It still doesn't work. I tried Firefox with cookies enabled and it works so guessing something to do with the ad cookies from their site I have blocked. If I open an Incognito window in Chrome it works.
anigbrowl 11y ago
Meanwhile the barrier to a proper early warning system for the west coast is a whopping $15.6 million a year, of which California has managed to get a whole $5 million from Congress so far - http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-quake-early-warning-20141215-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-quake-early-wa... Honestly, I'm a little unclear as to why we are even going to Congress for this, instead of the governments of CA, WA and OR agreeing to divide up the sum based on population or state GDP or some other obvious metric. The sums involved are so small in budgetary terms as to seem less than the cost of conducting studies and federal lobbying activities.
- yclept 11y ago
  How about a kickstarter?!
  - fudged71 11y ago
    That's an incredibly good idea
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    That's a fine idea. Now that you mention it I'm surprised it hasn't been tried already (unless it has and failed...). I'll look into it.
kenferry 11y ago
It would be nice if they'd cite their sources. This looks to be one of the main ones: http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scenario_2013.pdf http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_... But this is not nearly as dire. For example, "the Pacific Northwest’s largest population centers and ports, including Portland (OR), Seattle and Tacoma (WA), and Vancouver (BC), are not expected to experience any significant tsunami impacts."
- ryanSrich 11y ago
  I can't speak for any other cities but I do know that Portland is much too far in land to be hit by a tsunami. The destruction within Portland would come from the earthquake itself. Also, here are some sources that seem to coincide with what the author wrote. - http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_Plan_Final.pdf http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_... - http://i.imgur.com/MX7okVp.png http://i.imgur.com/MX7okVp.png - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone
yread 11y ago
Apparently it also created the Bridge of the Gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_(land_bridge) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_(land_bridg...
DubiousPusher 11y ago
Seems the science on this may not be as settled as the article indicates. nature.com/news/seabed-samples-cast-doubt-on-earthquake-risk-for-pacific-northwest-1.15655 But I won't fault the author for not getting it quite right on a shifting area of research.
meej 11y ago
Outside Magazine did a great article about the Cascadia Subduction Zone a few years ago. http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-rip-nine http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-ri...
sytelus 11y ago
There are roughly 3 million people in this area. The really big earthquake may cause death of 13,000 people - or about ~0.5% of the population. Chance of that happening over next 50 years is 10%. In other words, if you were living in this zone, your chance of dyeing due to a big earthquake over next 50 years is about 0.05%. It occurs to me that your chance of dyeing over next 50 years for reasons other than earthquake is 90%. Nevertheless, my hope from this article is that government will invest much more in early warning systems and enact laws to build structures to withstand such natural disasters. As it appears now, government is starving off these kind of projects from funding.
kamilszybalski 11y ago
These guys need to do a kickstarter - http://grillo.io/ http://grillo.io/

612 points by Thevet 11y ago

As usual, paste this exact url into a google search box to reach a non-paywalled version of the article. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2015%2F07%2F20%2Fthe-really-big-one https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...

ForHackernews 11y ago
or pay for the New Yorker because they do really excellent work.
- skorecky 11y ago
  To read one article once every few months at best is not worth it. Edit: I spoke my opinion. Down vote me!
  - 3JPLW 11y ago
    (If you only read one article every few months, you wouldn't be hitting their pay wall)
    - NDizzle 11y ago
      I am hitting their pay wall by occasionally clicking links from HN. I never read the full articles, but I skim roughly 4x the amount of information provided before the pay wall. It's not worth the full price for me. I'd like a happy medium.
      - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        So, your medium is free content as often as you want it? What's in it for them?
        PaulyGlott 11y ago
        There's no shortage of advertising on The New Yorker.
        freehunter 11y ago
        That killed me when I subscribed to the NYT online. I was paying $15/mo and seeing as many ads as I would expect from a free site. I love the NYT journalism and am willing to pay for it, and I understand they have bills to pay, but it's a lot of money to be sitting on ads. In fact I canceled my subscription (not a quick or easy process) and have the same amount of advertising on their NYT Now app whether I subscribe or not. So what's the point?
        JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        This is how dead tree magazines and papers work. You pay for a subscription and you still receive ads. Why would they think the web should be any different?
        Retra 11y ago
        Why would anybody take your money and not show ads when they can both take your money and show you ads?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

soperj 11y ago

"The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major earthquake—or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver." This is total crap. There was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Seattle in 2001.

3JPLW 11y ago
I wonder if they discounted this because it was (as wikipedia lists it) an "intraslab" earthquake. I'm not a seismologist, but that reads to me like it wasn't an earthquake from the fault line directly, but rather a secondary artifact of the subduction zone. I agree this is very misleading, but as they tell it through the historical lens, this earthquake also hadn't happened before they realized there could be earthquakes or that they could be big.
- matheweis 11y ago
  Wikipedia (sorry), has a nice diagram that shows the different categories; the "crustal" and " deep" earthquakes being different from the subduction zone earthquakes that this article is specifically about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#/media/File:Cascadia_earthquake_sources.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#/medi...
jameshart 11y ago
They are contrasting what they describe as weekly small quakes in Japan with long periods of inactivity in the Pacific Northwest. A significant quake in one city in the region 14 years ago doesn't invalidate the claim that you could spend a significant time in the northwest without feeling a tremor.

sharkweek 11y ago

Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways! While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itself into making me think that nothing can really be done. It's not going to be realistic to establish safeguards against an 8.5+ if it/or the subsequent tsunami is going to flatten the city west of I-5

edgyswingset 11y ago
I don't think a tsunami is going to flatten the city. A wave has a lot to go through (peninsulas, narrow straights, etc) before it could reach the city, all of which would likely lessen its impact significantly. Where the area will get hit hard, though, is liquifaction and landslides.
- saintgimp 11y ago
  There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound, though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast. Everything is going to shift 30 to 100 feet west over the course of a couple minutes - the water in Puget Sound is going to slosh around like crazy.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - olefoo 11y ago
      Large parts of downtown and the area between Queen Anne and Capitol Hill ( where the Amazon campus is ) are built on fill, and are likely to be subjected to liquefaction in a major seismic event. It's entirely possible that whole sections of Capitol Hill could slide into downtown too. The hills shake and the mountains dance, and then comes the tsunami; this sounds much more exciting to read about than live through.

rfugger 11y ago

I was in New Orleans in October 2002, and this guy was on the front page of the main newspaper predicting that within 20 years a category 5 hurricane was likely to whip around Florida and strike the city head on. He said the levies weren't high or strong enough, and that downtown New Orleans would be under 20 feet of water: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html I remember reading it with interest and then shrugging and moving on with my day. Three years later I remembered that moment and realized that as a society we just don't care that much about our long-term safety.

CrackpotGonzo 11y ago
Shocking really. Curious to hear rationale from someone that knew about the odds before moving to the PNW.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
nordsieck 11y ago
Lots of people predict lots of catastrophes. The trick is identifying the correct ones ahead of time. This is much more difficult than you are implying.
- hrktb 11y ago
  I think it's still very simple. We can view it through the concept of discount rate [0], basically people don't value a future event as much as a present one. The world ending in 50 years is not worth making drastic efforts now, at least for most people. If your prediction is too costly on the short term, as accurate as it can be most people won't act on it. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice
  - lexcorvus 11y ago
    I suspect this is in part a side-effect of the Anglo-American (maturity-mismatched) banking system, which keeps long-term interest rates artificially low, leading to higher time preference.

iamjs 11y ago

Does the New Yorker just inject random comics into their stories? None of these illustrations appear to be related to the content.

gwern 11y ago
Yes. It's not quite so distracting in the print edition, where they tend to be off to the side and don't look like part of the article.
kleer001 11y ago
Yes.
MrZongle2 11y ago
It's worse than that: none of those illustrations appear to be related to humor. Edit: Looks like we've got a couple of New Yorker cartoon aficionados on HN. I guess I'll have to save my stinging comments for edgier content, such as Doonsbury and Garfield. /s
- mathgenius 11y ago
  Yeah it is some kind if weird palette cleanse.
- acheron 11y ago
  Remember, we're talking about an organization that apparently employs Andy Borowitz. Possibly his mere existence sucks any humor out of all surrounding content.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Locke1689 11y ago

Hmm, in the spirit of thinking of worst-case scenarios, most of the engineering talent for Amazon and Microsoft is in Seattle and Redmond, respectively. There's even a sizable percentage of Google cloud platform in Fremont and Kirkland. Even if most of the employees live, it's likely basic infrastructure will be a disaster for quite a while. Maybe Google would be able to offload ops work to Mountain View, but it seems likely Amazon.com, AWS and Azure would go down, possibly for months. I wonder what the effect would be on the global economy.

serve_yay 11y ago
That does seem likely, though as far as I know, AWS's biggest zone is located in Northern Virginia. And, I'm sure the AWS people have planned as much as they can for this eventuality. (Um, I hope.)
- stephengillie 11y ago
  AWS West in Oregon are somewhat further inland from I-5. It would probably be impacted, but not to the same degree as the datacenters in other cities like Tukwila.
  - trhway 11y ago
    i think the datacenters will get soon to the status of national strategic infrastructure objects similar to bridges, power plants, etc... Given the distributed nature of the services i'd suppose the main threat though isn't from physical effect like earthquake, instead i think the main threat is introduction of something like StuxNet into say AWS (or highjacking the backdoor access that services like NSA already have there)
  - sneak 11y ago
    The loss of datacenters is irrelevant; the loss of people to keep the services running is the issue.
- Locke1689 11y ago
  I doubt the datacenter's locations matter. The services at the bottom of the stack need constant ops to stay alive. With most of the engineers out, I expect barely a few days to go by before one of the essential services needs servicing.

astrodust 11y ago

Worth noting that the state of warning systems there is somewhere between dismal and non-existent and the disaster preparedness of most cities seems to vary between unprepared and comically inept. Is there anything anyone can do to set up an alert for these sorts of things? If these predictions are true, there's a good chance that the entirety of Silicon Valley could be utterly destroyed. You'd think people would take more of an interest in preventing that.

idlewords 11y ago
It's pretty baffling. Japan is the model for earthquake warning systems. Even a few seconds' warning could be invaluable if you are running a major datacenter. But apart from a tiny pilot program in Berkeley I'm not aware of any serious efforts in that direction.
- sneak 11y ago
  For extra credit, figure out how to trigger the compression wave near the sensors the datacenter depends on to automatically fail masters over to another state.
cossatot 11y ago
Earthquakes are, for now, impossible to predict so there is little forewarning (and not for the lack of people trying). However, there is a huge interest in the geological/hazards community in earthquake early warning systems in the US, especially focused on California[1][2]. The Napa earthquake last summer was the first real test of the more modern components and was successful. But again, you're dependent on warning the populace after the earthquake has begun, which isn't useful for people near the epicenter. Tsunami warning systems have been in place for many places for decades; whether people respond is a different story. In terms of people preparedness, again, California is the leader in the US but there are drills in many places[3], though they're generally voluntary and totally ignored by most. [1]: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/ http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/ [2]: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-earthquake-earlywarning-system-gave-10second-alert-before-napa-quake-felt-20140824-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-earthquake... [3]

nkoren 11y ago

I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would work. Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the uncertainty surrounding its timing. "Maybe it'll be some other generation's problem. Maybe we don't actually need to let it affect our thinking about where we live and what we build." This kind of thinking is expedient and economical right up to the point where it gets absolutely everybody killed. There's a second, somewhat less fundamental problem: the causality count can depend dramatically on exactly when the earthquake happens. It'll be worse if it happens at high tide rather than low tide (the tsunami will reach farther). Worse if it happens at night rather during the day (darkness is harder for emergency services to cope with). Worse if it happens in the winter rather than the summer (more deaths from exposure), etc. These problems aside, a 9.0 with a tsunami is eminently survivable. You just need to be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right types of buildings / geology / topography, when it happens. Anyhow, how do we solve these problems? Stopping the earthquake is out of the question ... but making it happen isn't. So here's what I propose: we announce an exact date and time for the earthquake. Give everybody, say, 30 years to prepare for it. That's a decent-enough timescale for the sort of population displacements which will need to happen. So we'll have the earthquake in 2045. Let's have it in the mid-summer, at 10AM during a low tide, to minimise all the timing-related casualties. Then, at the appointed time and date -- if the earthquake hasn't happened yet -- we set off howevermany scores of nukes it's been calculated to take, drilled into the subduction zone, to lubricate the fault enough for a full-fault rupture. Shouldn't take too much of a push to get things going. Over the next 30 years, the absolutely certain foreknowledge of this event would alter the planning, policy, and insurance environments dramatically. Tsunami walls etc. would be built in areas which are planned to be defended. In areas which cannot be defended and must be abandoned, the property prices, development activity, and eventually population levels would gradually crash. Within defended / geological stable zones, buildings which you want to be standing in 31 years would still need to be retrofitted to survive a 9.0 quake; otherwise, they'd be torn down before that point. Finally, on the appointed day of the quake, everybody could gather in the most geologically-stable high-grounds they can find, and just sit back and watch the fun. Of course there'd be a danger that the quake might arrive at a bad time before then -- but even if it does, the incremental changes in land-use and the built environment, which such a policy would provoke, would result in far fewer casualties than our current trajectory. Alas, it'll never happen, if only because a policy which results in the intentional destruction of millions of peoples' homes is a bit difficult to sell in a democracy, even if it would save tens to hundreds of thousands of lives.

interurban 11y ago

For a good read on another somewhat overlooked seismic zone: http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm Most people don't think of the midwest/great plains states as being seismically active, but they're home to some of the most geologically interesting history in the United States.

sasvari 11y ago
surfaced here just 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862451
- idlewords 11y ago
  Consider this an aftershock

kenferry 11y ago

Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?

iamcurious 11y ago
I like how you think. If we are going to have an earthquake, at the very least we should have an scheduled organized mild one.
- nappy-doo 11y ago
  On the Richter scale, the difference a full step (7.0 to 8.0) is about a factor of 32. So if we're trying to mitigate an 8.0 earthquake every 100 years, you're talking about a magnitude 7.0 every 3 years to release the same amount of energy. Most engineering structures on the west coastare built to withstand a 6-7. When a magnitude 8 comes (and it will come, and in some sense we're coming out of the stress shadow from the 1906 quake just now) the devastation will be horrendous. *Editting to add: The structures on the west coast are engineered to withstand a SINGLE 6-7 magnitude event. Not one every 3 years.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    And even if they were built to withstand a mag 7 earthquake every three years, the things inside of them likely won't be. Imagine the engineering that would have to go into designing every single item in your house to withstand a deadly earthquake on a regular basis. No more popping out to Ikea to grab the same furniture everyone else uses. Your TV stand is on springs. Your TV is on springs connected to the TV stand on springs. Your cupboards have notches where your dishes can lock into them so they don't slide. The cupboard doors have latches that let them open when pulled slowly, but resist opening when sudden force is applied. Your refrigerator bolts to the floor and is filled will elastic pockets that hold every item individually. Its either that, or spend a significant amount of time every few years packing all of your items into boxes to ensure they won't be damaged when it's earthquake time.
    - 11y ago

jchrisa 11y ago

Portland has an admirable style when it comes to resilience. At least at the grass roots. It'd be great to see an Apollo program around earthquake preparedness. There is a carry-heavy loads around the city cargo bike race that's been going on for a few years. http://disasterrelieftrials.com/ http://disasterrelieftrials.com/

cdsingh1001 11y ago

the question I would be asking myself is Am I prepared for such a natural disaster ? Or What steps can I take on a personal level to be ready ? For eg: Always have an evac bag ready to take off Or live out of a suitcase so that I dont have to worry about stuff & data. Or distribute my personal resources (cards, cash) etc in PO boxes across the country. Ofcourse, in such a huge disaster these steps wont matter but in small events, there might be of help.

chiph 11y ago
ready.gov has some basic steps. But, they don't have enough emphasis on having clean water, IMO. Having a storage sharing agreement with friends within a day or two's walk could be useful, so if your home is destroyed (along with your emergency supplies) your friend's might still be in good shape. And vice-versa.
- lsllc 11y ago
  Sadly, being well prepared with clean water, food, medicine and shelter does you no good if someone else takes it from you. The very first item on your list should be a powerful firearm & sufficient ammo. Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle has a pretty good take on the post-apocalyptic chaos & breakdown in society that will likely ensue.
  - chiph 11y ago
    Agreed. But ... California makes that tough. Oregon & Washington are more in line with the rest of the country. Something to check is whether your state restricts carrying when a state of emergency has been declared.
protomyth 11y ago
I've lived in the northland for a while and my car generally has an emergency kit that includes some survival stuff. Getting stuck in your car in a blizzard is no damn fun. My Dad always kept $40 hidden in the car, but that was more a "need to pay for gas because these damn cards...." thing. I would suggest against the suitcase in the trunk more for social reasons[1]. Hidden compartments are illegal in some states[2]. 1) it is a sign of cheating 2) drug laws, go figure

someear 11y ago

I like to think about how I'd react in the 15 minutes I have between the earthquake and tsunami. How tall would this tsunami be? Quick googling shows the tallest one ever is 524 meters. Assuming the tsunami is that tall, going into tall buildings might not work - tallest building in Seattle, Columbia Tower, is 287 meters (+50m in elevation increase), and is a few blocks from the waterfront . Best bet is to run/bike up the hill to Capitol Hill, which is 100m higher in elevation, and about 2 miles inland (and east of the I5). Just need some science to figure out how far the wave will go given these hill angles and elevations in Seattle to find a precise safe spot (assuming the tallest tsunami ever, and assuming all other variables like me being able to react instantly and fallen buildings not blocking my path stay constant, which they of course won't).

cossatot 11y ago
Fortunately, the tallest tsunami was from a rockfall in a fjord[1], not from a subduction zone earthquake. They are typically ~10 m, and it's really the wavelength, not the amplitude, that is a problem because there is so much water that the inundation is more like a flash flood than a quick slap from a breaking wave. Second, I don't believe tsunamis from subduction zone earthquakes on the Cascadia trench will impact Seattle that much, because (as you may be able to see from your location) the Olympic peninsula is in between you and the trench. The wave coming through the Strait of Juan de Fuca will spread outward into Puget Sound and mostly dissipate against Camano and Whidbey Islands. The big tsunami hazard for Seattle itself is the from an earthquake on the Seattle fault[2]. [1]: http://geology.com/records/biggest-tsunami.shtml http://geology.com/records/biggest-tsunami.shtml [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2AGlhuCQ-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2AGlhuCQ-A
- idlewords 11y ago
  There's a seiche hazard in Seattle, though. Lake Washington will slosh back and forth in resonance with the shaking. Basically every natural feature in the Pacific Northwest has some exotic way of killing you.
rconti 11y ago
If you DID go up into a tall building, what's your plan? Jump into the water just as the building's collapsing?

itistoday2 11y ago

TLDR someone?

sswaner 11y ago
The Really Big One: earthquake wipes out the Pacific Northwest. Really needed that?
- itistoday2 11y ago
  ... this article seemed to be talking about a potential future earthquake. And it's a very long article.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    It discusses why a big earthquake is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years with lots of flowery language and science. TL;DR: There's a big earthquake that is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years.
    - itistoday2 11y ago
      Thanks freehunter, I appreciate you taking the time to do that. :)
- hudibras 11y ago
  Ugh. I stop reading whenever I hit a colon. Life's too short...
- cbd1984 11y ago
  Yes; abstract culture is killing the academic world. In truth, only one Abstract is needed: JUST READ IT
lifeformed 11y ago
We're all gonna die.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

It's interesting to see several articles about this recently. Ever since I was growing up in the 1970's, they've been talking about "the big one". Here's the 1979 show "In Seach Of" discussing it: Leonard Nimoy's narration is top notch as always: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs At the time of the video, they said over 15 million people live along the various fault lines.

michaelvkpdx 11y ago

Silicon Valley refugees and people complaining about Bay Area prices, please note that this is 100% true. Portland will be completely wiped out within the next couple years by a giant earthquake followed by a Sasquatch Apocalypse. Don't move here. You will die. But please visit and enjoy your stay! Love, Portland

protomyth 11y ago
Well, the Sasquatch Apocalypse can be dealt with by having some good laws on the books, and this book should help: http://www.amazon.com/The-Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actually/dp/1627222693 http://www.amazon.com/The-Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actu...
callmeed 11y ago
Also, please don't move to San Luis Obispo / Avila Beach. We have a nuclear power plant on a bluff near a fault line. Come visit though. We have great tri-tip and outdoor activities.
- dnautics 11y ago
  not only that, it's called "diabolo canyon". I mean talk about tempting fate.
  - Mtinie 11y ago
    At the end of the road through Montaña de Oro State Park there's a warning siren[1] that will go off if there's a problem at the Diablo Canyon facility. Every time I get out there and see it there's a part of me that expects it to start to blare... and I'm totally glad when I'm "disappointed" and it doesn't. [1] http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/fullsize/IMG_1350.jpg http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/ful...
    - callmeed 11y ago
      Its fun when they test the sirens a couple times a year ...

graycat 11y ago

Reminds me of the movie quote: "Wiped clean by the wrath of God.", I suspect from one of the movies Indiana Jones. Right, at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark > Brody: However, about a year after the pharaoh had returned to Egypt, the city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a whole year. Wiped clean by the wrath of God.

fizixer 11y ago

In recent past, I had this thought that Silicon Valley is sitting on top of, or very close to, potential future fault activity. And I have a hard time believing that the key component of human civilization (technology) is so vulnerable, and was built after the 1906 disaster. It's one of the factors I would consider when deciding if I really want to move to west coast.

nappy-doo 11y ago
San Francisco has been built by the grace of the grace of the 1906 quake. When the big quakes happen, they release all kinds of stress, and make a future local quake much more unlikely. It's called the stress shadow. The stress shadow of the 1906 quake was (depending on who you ask) about 100 years. SF is coming out of the stress shadow, and is become "due" for a new big one. WRT the rest of the valley, the main problem is that it's built on sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock slows the seismic waves, which since you need to conserve energy, results in larger shaking. In other words, a small quake further south could result in more damage in the valley.
codingdave 11y ago
You think technology is the key component to human civilization? I would have thought of food.
- munificent 11y ago
  Food is a technology. Horticulture, breeding, domestication, threshing, plowing, sowing, crop rotation, cooking, drying, pickling, brining, canning, curing, refrigerating, etc. Modern civilization is massively more efficient at extracting food from a given piece of arable land than our hunter gatherer forebears were able too, all thanks to thousands of years of food technology.
- jodrellblank 11y ago
  Where are you going to get food (for a population) without oil powered GPS controlled farm machinery, trucks and technological processing plants, information technology controlled distribution, electricity and on a slightly longer timescale, oil based fertilisers? OK, in a localised disaster you're going to import it. But still, you can grow squash in your back yard, but enough food for all humans means mechanised agriculture, and that's not just tractors. Food is a technology (albeit not a Google one - yet).

VikingCoder 11y ago

After watching the Japanese Tsunami, it got me wondering about a weather-balloon-like device. You strap it on like a life jacket, and you wait for the wave to come your way. As it approaches, you pull the cord. Something that looks like a weather balloon inflates, extends the length of a tether, and then you float a few hundred feet in the air, and then float back down a while later. Why is this a dumb idea?

freehunter 11y ago
Where do you get the helium needed to make it fly through the air? If you're just pumping air, at best you would float on water, which still leaves you vulnerable to being killed by something else that is floating (possibly a pickup truck, a growler of Rogue Dead Guy Ale or maybe the Space Needle).
- mirimir 11y ago
  You'd get helium from a tank. But you'd need a regulator with a huge heat exchanger to get fast inflation. Maybe use a high-volume whitewater kayak as the "basket".
  - VikingCoder 11y ago
    Hmmm - how fast is fast? Do you know how to actually do this math? Like, to lift a 200 lb person, without a heat exchanger (or a more reasonably sized one)? How long would it take?
azoth_ 11y ago
There is a company that already makes a Tsunami survival capsule, though it is only designed to float on water: http://survival-capsule.com/ http://survival-capsule.com/
nickthemagicman 11y ago
I love this idea. Like a reverse parachute. It would be great for both the earth quake AND the tsunami assuming you could get high enough fast enough and stay up long enough. If I was rich I would just buy a cheap helicopter but your idea is more affordable and would be accessible to more people.

davesque 11y ago

FYI, the two-hundred year figure that this article mentions appears to be in dispute. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earthquake_timing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earth...) includes much more specific, cited information which puts the frequency at 300-600 years between significant quakes with the earthquake of 1700 having occurred after a 780 year lull.

themgt 11y ago
I would say overall the situation looks ... not great, in the medium term. "Perhaps more striking than the probability numbers is that we can now say that we have already gone longer without an earthquake than 75 percent of the known times between earthquakes in the last 10,000 years," Goldfinger said. "And 50 years from now, that number will rise to 85 percent." http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/node/13426 http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/node/13426
GregBuchholz 11y ago
Yes, how about a histogram of the earthquake intervals? Is table 8 on page 102 of: http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1661f/pp1661f_text.pdf http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1661f/pp1661f_text.pdf ...the raw data we are looking for? That data looks to have a mean of 530 years, and a standard deviation of 262 years, although it isn't very normal looking (well there are only 18 samples after all, so maybe it isn't too bad). See the histogram I plotted at: http://imgur.com/4fv7jDJ http://imgur.com/4fv7jDJ ...any sources of data with the lower average for the interval? Here's the raw data that I used: intervals = [250, 305, 446, 311, 982, 492, 415, 665, 661, 1189, 508, 715, 443, 548, 733, 195, 117, 577] ...as for the disagreement on the intervals, the only thing I could find was: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/how-often-does-cascadia-fault-rip-scientists-disagree/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/how-often-does-casc...
shas3 11y ago
I am really interested to learn how they calculate the probability of 1/3. I think there is a legitimate question here about the methods used. In technical terms: what is the sample space and what set are you looking for within that sample space? How strong is the justification to treat the sequence of earthquakes as a sequence of independent identically distributed random numbers? Leaves me scratching my head. I looked at Professor Goldfinger's papers and couldn't find a reasonable answer. Perhaps it is more fundamental knowledge (e.g. something one would find in geology textbooks)?

cdelsolar 11y ago

So SF is screwed right?

rexignis 11y ago

There's a nuclear submarine base there too :(

notNow 11y ago

A heads up: this peace is 6.3K+ word long and according to my estimate it would take you around 45 mins to finish reading it. Enjoy!

antod 11y ago
Well, its title is "The really big one" after all.
- notNow 11y ago
  Shouldn't it have been "The really LOOOONG one" instead?
shabbyrobe 11y ago
This is not helped by the three hundred and sixty-six thousand nine hundred and thirty two numbers typed out as words rather than digits.

stokedmartin 11y ago

"The Cascadia subduction zone stretches from Cape Mendocino in northern California to Brooks Peninsula on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a distance of about 700 miles (1,130 km). All along this zone, which begins beneath the seafloor to the west and extends inland towards the Cascade and Coastal mountains, the subducting plates are forced beneath the North American Plate. At a relatively shallow depth (less than about 20 miles/30 km down), the plates have become stuck. Below this locked zone, warmer temperatures make the plates more pliable, allowing them to move more readily past each other. This freer movement deeper down causes strain to accumulate along the locked zone. Once that strain is great enough to overcome the friction that keeps the plates locked, the fault will rupture: the edge of the North American Plate will lurch suddenly upwards and southwestwards as the subducting plates slip under and northeastwards. With this movement, the deformed western edge of the North American Plate will flex, causing the land along large sections of Cascadia" [0] Also check the diagram(s) for a better understanding. [0]http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scenario_2013.pdf http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scen...

kragen 11y ago

So how can you escape from a 10-meter tsunami, like the 11-meter Tohoku tsunami that wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi, assuming you have years to prepare? You could build buildings that could withstand the water flowing around them, as the nuclear reactor center itself did; but windows that can survive not just ten meters of water pressure but also cars and trees being dashed against them by the tsunami are going to be less like windows and more like plastic-filled tunnels to the daylight. You could ensure that all of your buildings are at least 10 meters tall, built to withstand the tsunami without collapsing, and with adequate escape routes to the upper floors, space therein to ensure that everyone can escape, and emergency supplies (e.g. first-aid kits, food, water, insulin) to keep incidental deaths to a minimum. Then you just have to get everyone up four flights of stairs before the tsunami hits. The bottom floors will fill with water, destroying everybody's TV, and then recede. Maybe make it 20 meters, just in case the tsunami is extra huge, like the Kuril Islands tsunami of 2006. Or you could build your houses a meter underground. You might lose the top 50cm of dirt cover, and if you illuminate with lightpipes, your lightpipes will fill with silt and other mud; but you should be able to keep your subterranean house well enough sealed that the water itself won’t be a problem. Escaping the house after the water recedes, though, may be a problem if you turn out to be in a sediment-deposition zone instead of an erosion zone. Tunneling out, using a door built to open inwards specifically for this purpose, may be your only option. Other options are possible; Stapledon’s Star Maker suggests taking flight when the water is incoming, but that would seem to require a sufficient population of evacuation helicopters to evacuate the entire population within the few minutes of warning you have. This is probably not possible for biological humans. And if you have boats, especially if you live in boats, you could take them a few hundred meters offshore and be, in all likelihood, perfectly fine. How can we engineer human civilization to be robust against natural disasters? The Chile and Haïti earthquakes of 2010 showed that there is enormous scope for doing so; how can we do better? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-earthquake-co_n_479705.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-earthqu...

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obstinate 11y ago
Running in the opposite direction and toward high ground is sufficient. In the case of Japan's tsunami in 2011, there was 25 minutes of warning, which is enough time to get clear of most inundation zones if you indeed do start moving immediately. This isn't a catchall solution (old folks, the disabled, children), but it would work for a lot of downtown people.

jebblue 11y ago

I can't read the article, says I've read my last complimentary issue. That's in Chrome, I added them to my allowed cookie list. It still doesn't work. I tried Firefox with cookies enabled and it works so guessing something to do with the ad cookies from their site I have blocked. If I open an Incognito window in Chrome it works.

anigbrowl 11y ago

Meanwhile the barrier to a proper early warning system for the west coast is a whopping $15.6 million a year, of which California has managed to get a whole $5 million from Congress so far - http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-quake-early-warning-20141215-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-quake-early-wa... Honestly, I'm a little unclear as to why we are even going to Congress for this, instead of the governments of CA, WA and OR agreeing to divide up the sum based on population or state GDP or some other obvious metric. The sums involved are so small in budgetary terms as to seem less than the cost of conducting studies and federal lobbying activities.

yclept 11y ago
How about a kickstarter?!
- fudged71 11y ago
  That's an incredibly good idea
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  That's a fine idea. Now that you mention it I'm surprised it hasn't been tried already (unless it has and failed...). I'll look into it.

kenferry 11y ago

It would be nice if they'd cite their sources. This looks to be one of the main ones: http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scenario_2013.pdf http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_... But this is not nearly as dire. For example, "the Pacific Northwest’s largest population centers and ports, including Portland (OR), Seattle and Tacoma (WA), and Vancouver (BC), are not expected to experience any significant tsunami impacts."

ryanSrich 11y ago
I can't speak for any other cities but I do know that Portland is much too far in land to be hit by a tsunami. The destruction within Portland would come from the earthquake itself. Also, here are some sources that seem to coincide with what the author wrote. - http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_Plan_Final.pdf http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_... - http://i.imgur.com/MX7okVp.png http://i.imgur.com/MX7okVp.png - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone

yread 11y ago

Apparently it also created the Bridge of the Gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_(land_bridge) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_(land_bridg...

DubiousPusher 11y ago

Seems the science on this may not be as settled as the article indicates. nature.com/news/seabed-samples-cast-doubt-on-earthquake-risk-for-pacific-northwest-1.15655 But I won't fault the author for not getting it quite right on a shifting area of research.

meej 11y ago

Outside Magazine did a great article about the Cascadia Subduction Zone a few years ago. http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-rip-nine http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-ri...

sytelus 11y ago

There are roughly 3 million people in this area. The really big earthquake may cause death of 13,000 people - or about ~0.5% of the population. Chance of that happening over next 50 years is 10%. In other words, if you were living in this zone, your chance of dyeing due to a big earthquake over next 50 years is about 0.05%. It occurs to me that your chance of dyeing over next 50 years for reasons other than earthquake is 90%. Nevertheless, my hope from this article is that government will invest much more in early warning systems and enact laws to build structures to withstand such natural disasters. As it appears now, government is starving off these kind of projects from funding.

kamilszybalski 11y ago

These guys need to do a kickstarter - http://grillo.io/ http://grillo.io/