The Really Big One
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
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.
If your own internal rate is higher than the public one, then indeed you should borrow to consume (or put off saving).
Companies only care about the public rate---if they have a higher rate of reliable return internally, they can keep borrowing money to invest until there's an equilibrium. A low interest rate makes companies more forward looking.
Words like "Artificial vs. natural" attempt to ascribe illegitimacy to what is mostly a policy difference.
If you describe a situation in too dire terms, people will conclude nothing can be done about it and do nothing. On the other hand, if you describe a situation in too rosy terms, people will conclude it will work itself out... and do nothing.
If you live in Japan you can't merely shrug and say "oh, who can predict when an earthquake will come? nobody knows", no you live in an earthquake prone area, you need to plan. Similar if you live in tornado alley in the US you can't shrug and say "nobody can predict a tornado". You need to prepare.
In this case, it's not at all difficult.
Wysopal offered this grim precedent: Cities were once
vulnerable to disastrous fires, which raged through dense
clusters of mostly wooden buildings. It took a giant fire
in Chicago to spur government officials into serious
reforms, including limits on new wooden structures, a
more robust water supply for suppressing blazes and an
overhaul to the city’s fire department.
“The market didn’t solve the problem of cities burning
down,” Wysopal said, predicting that Internet security
may require a historic disaster to force change. “It
seems to me that the market isn’t really going to solve
this one on its own.”
But here’s a frightening fact: The push to create tough
new fire-safety standards did not start after the Great
Chicago Fire in 1871, which killed hundreds of people and
left 100,000 homeless. It took a second fire, nearly
three years later in 1874, to get officials in Chicago to
finally make real changes.
As for relatively fire-resistant wooden buildings? I suspect that it's easier to "just" use less wood.
Although note that there are a couple of things that do help. A steel roof as opposed to a shingled one. Having proper screens in the roof vents. Having fire-resistant siding. Tile floors (or something else that's non-flammable) as opposed to carpet or wooden ones. Not having gas lines to be ruptured by an earthquake. Having proper (read: not likely to catch something on fire in the case of an earthquake) electrical connections.
I'm in a modern home, so I'm not making much of a claim if there's a smallish earthquake. But if there's a big one, I assume the insurance company will just go under, leaving me out the premiums and with no recourse.
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.
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.
Though of course if headquarters was really wiped off the map, there'd be huge problems with communication, tribal knowledge that only existed in the heads of senior engineers in Seattle, and so forth.
Now, there may certainly be larger systemic effects over long time periods caused by eg. the death of the company CEO, the loss of new product development, or the complete destruction of the company's market (in, for example, a global thermonuclear apocalypse that sets us back to the stone age). But the tests absolutely do simulate the simultaneous death of 15,000+ employees, destruction of the Mountain View headquarters, and loss of all datacenters, data, and power in the Bay Area, and verify that remote teams can continue the day-to-day operations in such an event.
On the scale of devastation this article is describing, none of Google's servicing being obliterated really matters but I'm personally pretty glad Google is prepared for multiple, massive scale disasters to happen at once.
When the towers went down in 2001, the first business priority of many companies was getting email back online. It's an incredibly important part of a business.
The search engine that holds the vast majority of the worlds traffic? The search engine that everyone is going to call on minutes after the earthquake to get news, but isn't going to be there so all the other search engines slow to a crawl. If Google search just disappeared for a week there would be a considerable number of businesses go out of business. You see it now in one off cases where a site is delisted and its traffic drops 99%.
That said, Google has datacenters around the nation and the world so that scenario is unlikely.
The one thing you should bear in mind about earthquakes is that in many cases the aftershocks make more damage than the main one, because damage accumulates. Which means that critical infrastructure could take weeks to become fully operational.
Perhaps you can, but how many companies are now wholly dependent on Google for their groupware functionality? What happens if you're one of the gaggle of people who make a living off YouTube?
I bet Google could absorb 100% of the emergency evacuation of AWS in a pinch. Remember also that not 100% of services will be moved, and those that are will not be running at 100% capacity - everyone would be suspending their batch/analytics/warehousing jobs that week (or month).
EDIT: Also, lock in would stop all the redshift/dynamo/etc users from migrating, and would limit people to just what they could throw up on GCE/GAE.
There were Wall St firms that literally had to get the military to escort them into Lower Manhattan in the days after to rescue servers, tapes, etc and cobble something together in a satellite office.
No one wants a repeat of that, and you'll notice subsequent disasters like Sandy have barely been a blip for most as a result of policy changes.
At this point basically any major company will/should have procedures in place for "perfect" DR, the ability for everyone to work from home indefinitely (and alternate offices/infrastructure waiting for the few people who need something special, like the special needs of a trading desk), as well as obviously having back up data centers with full replication.
http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...
I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi companies have gone out of business.
Of course all this stuff is supposed to have clean failover, but not all of it has had its mettle tested.
The loss of life would be sad too. /s
Why is it necessary to prefix/suffix a comment on the article, with an "of course, people will die and that's obviously bad, we don't want people to die, is this enough mentioning of the people dying that we can say something else without you passive aggressively implying I don't care about the people dying?"
I grew up in Central Oregon which is surrounded by fresh (geologically speaking) lava fields. I wonder if the Native Americans that were around when Mt Mazama was turned into Crater Lake worried about the disruption of their Obsidian tool making business.
I'm not sure I see how that really counts as 'more robust'.
Of course, the infrastructure of the greater Seattle area is going to be trashed, but chances are good that the Redmond and Kirkland campuses of Microsoft and Google respectively would be intact.
Link to the inundation zone predicted for a magnitude 7.3 earthquake on Seattle: http://wa-dnr.s3.amazonaws.com/Publications/ger_ofr2003-14_t... This isn't even "the big one" as the OP describes, much less "the really big one", but it's a rough description of where the flooding will happen. Downtown Seattle (up and left of the word SEATTLE on the map, with streets in a dense diagonal grid) won't be strongly affected, because downtown Seattle is a hill. With an 8.5 or 9.0 earthquake, of course, Seattle will be much worse off, but there's still some hope that Redmond and Kirkland won't get too damaged.
Ultimately it's up to the user: if they're going to put all their eggs in a us-west basket, they're out of luck if the west coast ends up under water.
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
For Seattle, it's south of Downtown, Pioneer Square, the Duwamish industrial areas, and Interbay.
But the density of (destroyed) infrastructure and loss of power/water/sewer would be a much bigger problem citywide.
A MBA in my python night class said that one approach to the viaduct problem would be to: fund a "victims of the viaduct" fund, today, with a couple million. And then pass a law that the compensation for families of the victims is limited to what's in the fund. It is appealing in a weird evil way.
Engineers have told us that the tunnel will be safer in an earthquake, but then, essentially everything those engineers have told us has been straight out of the Brothers Grimm.
Seattle's geology is somewhat different from any of the usual cited examples, as we've learned by watching everyone from journalists to politicians to engineers stand around with dumbfounded looks while the Bertha saga unfolds.
What exactly is the "viaduct problem"?
//edit: and here's a simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hos_uIKwC-c
Setting up the compensation fund cements the idea that the disaster is a 'when', not 'if'. Putting a small cap on compensation signals to people - if you're a victim, you might only get this amount of money. The overall effect being that people are actually motivated to vote for measures to fix the problem. e.g., I know I'll only get compensated for a small amount, thus, I want to make sure it's less likely I'm victimized.
Except that every time even one direction of the viaduct is closed during rush hour (due to an overturned semi or whatever) traffic grinds to a complete halt throughout the entire city.
"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://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:
...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-casc...
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.
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.
That said 80% of the benefits are in location. If you're on flat bedrock, located away from the coast, you just don't feel the most intense shaking, and you won't face a tsunami.
I wonder about injecting a very strongly non-Newtonian fluid (a super-high tensile version of oobleck, maybe with nanotubes) into subduction zones. At high shear the fluid would be very viscous and might allow gradual release of energy.
You'd have to do this thousands of times (log scaling, remember!), in a new location each time, to produce enough small earthquakes to relieve the stress accumulated on a locked subduction zone fault: Large earthquakes produce relatively similar magnitudes of stress drop to smaller ones; this stress drop is just spread over a much larger area. So you'd have to basically tile the fault with drill holes and then do whatever to produce earthquakes. And hope it doesn't cascade. Thousands of times.
A magnitude 2 earthquake releases ~30x the energy as a magnitude 1 earthquake. A magnitude 3 releases ~900x the energy of a magnitude 1. You can see where this is going. (Note, the "shaking intensity" of the earthquake doesn't increase as quite as rapidly as the amount of energy released, but the relationship depends on a lot more than the earthquake's size.)
Let's say we were to trigger many magnitude 5's. We'd need to trigger 810,000 of them to equal the energy released in a Mw 9.0 earthquake.
Interestingly, though, there are other types of earthquakes that _do_ release accumulated elastic strain over large areas. Cascadia is actually where they were first noticed.
Every ~11 months, the cascadia subduction zone has a magnitude 6 or 7 earthquake. You'll never notice in Seattle, though, because it occurs over about a month.
These "slow earthquakes" _do_ release significant amounts of accumulated strain. Sometimes they trigger "normal" earthquakes and vice versa. We don't really understand the details. The most interesting part (and the part most relevant for seattle) is that the same fault can have both these "slow earthquakes" and a full on >Mw 9 "normal" earthquake.
This is one of the "hottest" topics in earthquake seismology and convergent margins research at the moment.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/earthquakes-fra...
One problem is that experimentation is risky. If you do an experiment, and a tsunami follows, you are likely to be sued, even if it happens months later. Conversely, there's no way we know of to prove that a man-triggered magnitude quake prevented a more destructive one a few years later. So, you couldn't even prove that that quake with a few billion dollars of damage and a few hundred deaths relatively speaking is a good thing.
Dreamers even envision extracting energy from tectonic plates. Small-scale, that is trivial (you can easily stretch a rubber band a few centimeter a year across a fault line). Large-scale, it could be a huge energy source.
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-earthqu...
This isn't a catchall solution (old folks, the disabled, children), but it would work for a lot of downtown people.
So imagine you take one of these - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_(shipboard)#/media/Fi...
Then combine it with one of these - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_balloon#/media/File:Clo...
Imagine the life-raft bundled around a central high powered air pump and heating unit which could deploy in seconds and heat enough air to generate the lifting power to get 6-10 adults/children (plus raft/heater/pump) in the raft to 15 meters in air within the remaining time before the wall of water/debris crushes you all. You would only need to maintain that altitude for long enough to get a tow from a helicopter (or drone) to safety or for the waters to recede.
It's doesn't seem like an easy engineering problem and I didn't even do any back of the envelope calculations to see the power required to lift 1000-1500lbs 15 meters in 10 minutes, but my gut says it's totally within the realm of our current engineering capabilities.
If we could build such a device that could be mass-produced for a reasonable cost and deployed en masse to schools and other highly populated areas within the subduction zone, it could potentially save thousands of lives that would otherwise have 0 chance of survival.
The problems that would need solving and the potential life-saving potential has me kind of excited and my brain is already getting ahead of itself thinking Kickstarter. So if you or anyone else would like to talk some more about this, I'd be more than game to start getting technical.
If anyone sees a glaringly obvious problems in this, please don't hesitate to call it out rather than just rolling eyes and moving on... wish I'd put this up when it was still on the front page.
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.
Also check the diagram(s) for a better understanding.
[0]http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scen...
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...
Edit: I spoke my opinion. Down vote me!
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.
I like the idea, though. I proposed something similar in another earthquake-related HN thread a while back. If you can't stop or predict natural disasters, make them predictable by causing them yourself!
We already do a certain measure of that in terms of wildfires. Regular "controlled burns" to reduce fuel load (among other reasons) are a routine part of forest management practices. See, for example: http://ncprescribedfirecouncil.org/newsletter_stories/Spring...
Could we really cause an earthquake? How many nukes would it take? How much would the operation cost? What if someone steals a nuke while they are installing it (add some more to security cost)? What if we can't predict how it will react and end up causing more damage?
Could go on and on with these questions for an hour. And each of these questions means more time / money to come up with solutions.
The easy, stupid, and probably correct answer is... let nature sort it out. Our species is great at surviving and rebuilding. Better to worry about stuff we can control and fix than try to attempt to control things wildly beyond our means.
Fortunately, Oklahoma, with their anti-science "we don't believe in global warming and we are against figuring out what is causing these not seen for 100 year earthquakes" is testing out exactly how to cause them.
Thanks Oklahoma! (this should replace thanks Obama in the lexicon).
So, it would be easier, cheaper and safer (but equally infeasible) to simply force resettlement of the population somewhere without a crack in the crust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtH0EDLcbwA
From Wikipedia:
"Cannikin was detonated on November 6, 1971 51°28′13.20″N 179°6′40.75″E, as the thirteenth test of the Operation Grommet (1971–1972) underground nuclear test series. The announced yield was 5 megatons (21 PJ) – the largest underground nuclear test in US history.[24] (Estimates for the precise yield range from 4.4[36] to 5.2[37] megatons or 18 to 22 PJ). The ground lifted 20 feet (6 m), caused by an explosive force almost 400 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.[38] Subsidence and faulting at the site created a new lake, over a mile wide.[3] The explosion caused a seismic shock of 7.0 on the Richter scale, causing rockfalls and turf slides of a total of 35,000 square feet (3,300 m2).[24] Though earthquakes and tsunamis predicted by environmentalists did not occur,[33] a number of small tectonic events did occur in the following weeks, (some registering as high as 4.0 on the richter scale) thought to be due to the interaction of the explosion with local tectonic stresses.[39]"
For some reason I am picturing this cartoon:
... Bwahahaha ...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?
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9886142
Basically put a high-powered airpump and heating element in the center of a life raft with a balloon designed to lift a bunch of people above the tsunami wall
Helium is too expensive and rare to be deployed for this purpose (imo) and hydrogen is too reactive to be stored where these life rafts would need to go
As for the dangers associated with anything that could go wrong in flight or putting down somewhere dangerous... I think most people would rather take those chances than just be instantly crushed to death.
There is a carry-heavy loads around the city cargo bike race that's been going on for a few years. http://disasterrelieftrials.com/
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).
I imagine that after such a large earth quake, many buildings would be unstable and potentially open to collapse from the force of a tsunami. I'm sure going to higher ground would be a better idea if possible, but say if it was iffy to get there in 10 minutes, should I spend that time looking for a high building instead or just get as far inland as possible?
Debris (furniture, broken walls, etc) can be a dangerous obstacle, especially when you have to traverse several/dozens of flights of stairs, much of which will be wet, muddy/dirty, and possible destroyed in some places. This danger magnifies when you have to evacuate large amounts of people of varying mobility (young, old, sick, or otherwise infirm).
Entrances and exits will be serious obstacles if not outright impassable, due to large amounts of debris and unknown/unstable physical integrity.
Tsunami evacuation and safety policies are outlined for movement and monitoring large groups of people, not just individuals.
With regards of where you should go -- go outside and move to higher ground.
1) I'm going with the logic that surviving video person uploading to youtube is probably a good sample of the "worked" side of the equation.
A little bit of Googling found this[2]. The largest known tsunami to hit Seattle was 16ft, 1100 years ago.
That said, heading for the hills is probably a good choice anyway.
[1] Seismologist
[2] http://www.seattle.gov/emergency-management/what-if/hazards/...
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 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2AGlhuCQ-A
> A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet.
That's on the coast, not in the sound, of course.
To put it in perspective, it seems like a 10km asteroid would cause a 1.5km tsunami along the nearby coasts if it crashed in the middle of the (contemporary) Gulf of Mexico; a 200m tsunami if it crashed in the middle of the Indian Ocean; and a 100m tsunami if it crashed in the middle of the Pacific.[0]
Some coastal areas would experience this more than others because of geological formations, naturally, even holding distance from the impact site constant.
[0] I'm not sure how much this depends on angle of impact, speed of impact, and composition, if it does at all.
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.
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."
Also, here are some sources that seem to coincide with what the author wrote.
- http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_...
Right, at
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.
http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-ri...
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.
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
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.
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/ [2]: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-earthquake... [3]
Many of the videos from the Japan tsunami showed people getting alerted well before the quake hit. All TV stations flipped over to a warning screen with information on the quake and a map of tsunami danger areas based on computed projections.
I can see how having the fault line directly under your city is a problem, but this "mega quake" is projected to originate off-shore.
I guess the US solution is to keep watching Twitter.
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.
I felt that one - I was over in Eugene for the weekend of the 4th, and was... uh... seated, when it felt like something slammed into the house. Not much shaking, just one short, sharp impact.
Regardless, Goldfinger is still correct on all the statements that you've quoted. In addition to the scientific content, it still is possible to spend several lifetimes in the PNW (which does extend beyond King County) in between the 1700 event and the 2001 event. Granted, there was the 1872 event near Lake Chelan [2], which was the biggest PNW quake since 1700, but still... there were multiple generations of people born in between 1872 and 2001.
[1]: http://www.geodesy.cwu.edu/instruments/tilt/explanation_ETS....
[2]: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/scientists-may-be-c...
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.
If I open an Incognito window in Chrome it works.
Don't move here. You will die. But please visit and enjoy your stay!
Love, Portland
Come visit though. We have great tri-tip and outdoor activities.
[1] http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/ful...
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
Really needed that?
In truth, only one Abstract is needed: JUST READ IT
Enjoy!
It's one of the factors I would consider when deciding if I really want to move to west coast.
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.
I would have thought of food.
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.
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).
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
At the time of the video, they said over 15 million people live along the various fault lines.