Hacker News Reader

Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

That figure comes with a caveat that's mentioned towards the end of the article:

> As for casualties: the figures I cited earlier—twenty-seven thousand injured, almost thirteen thousand dead—are based on the agency’s official planning scenario, which has the earthquake striking at 9:41 A.M. on February 6th. If, instead, it strikes in the summer, when the beaches are full, those numbers could be off by a horrifying margin.

Thirteen thousand sounds like a best case scenario. If it happens 4th of July weekend when a million people are on the beaches all up and down the west coast, that could cause orders of magnitude more fatalities.

View on HN

there is never a million people on the oregon coast.

The problem is if the entire west coast adds up to 1 million people at the beach it might make very little difference which state their in. A 7pm July 4th quake resulting in a massive Tsunami would be vastly more deadly than an identical 4am quake the next day.

If there were ever 1 million people heading to the PNW coast collectively, even on 4 July, the PNW would know it. Routes like the 26 out of Portland or the redwood highway in Oregon / California cannot handle that much traffic. The road to Gerlach, NV gets jammed up by Burning Man traffic, so that should give a good estimate of how many people there can possibly be out there.

Also, unlike in California or the East Coast, these are not quick jaunts to the ocean.

You misunderstood, natural disasters don’t care about state lines or even national borders.

It’s likely no one state adds up to 1 million people, but collectively people at in or near pacific ocean in the US, Canada, and Mexico are at risk. So, if you want to understand the risk from such an earthquake you add everyone together.

If this is the case, it seems like you could get a lot of bang for your buck by building up a beach evacuation infrastructure.

All you really need to do is get inland, and usually not very far.

In this sample evacuation map for Ocean City WA, the higher ground is within half a mile of a good chunk of the coast, and nearly all of the coast is a mile from higher ground. https://www.dnr.wa.gov/Publications/ger_tsunami_evac_oceanci...

All along the Oregon coast are signs indicating where the tsunami impact zone is, and I think there are also alarms in a lot of towns too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com