Cascadia's Fault (46 page)

The main reason why emergency managers and even elected officials tend to focus almost exclusively on their own local concerns is that their jurisdictions demand it. As Lori Dengler at Humboldt State University pointed out, the Governor's Office of Emergency Services in California does not have a mandate to worry about what might happen in Oregon or Washington, much less the consequences for British Columbia. But as soon as Cascadia breaks we're all going to be out there in the rubble together, and that's a hell of a time to get to know each other.

If the biggest, wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation in the history of the world could not cope with Hurricane Katrina any better than it did, how on earth will it cope with Cascadia? How will Canada? And here's the thing: with Katrina there was at least forty-eight hours'worth of muscular wind and howling rain before the main part of the storm hit New Orleans. When Cascadia's fault ruptures there will probably be no warning at all.

So what should we do—slit our wrists? Absolutely not. Even after more than twenty-five years of watching people ignore the obvious, I still think we can survive this thing better than we might imagine. As Patrick Corcoran said time and time again—yes, it is likely to happen; yes, it will be bad; and yes, education can make it better. So go out there and get some. Join an emergency preparedness group. Take a first aid course. Just get up off the couch and do something.

Bottom line: we're
not
all going to die! The vast majority of us will survive the big jolt from Cascadia. The key issue is how well we endure the aftermath. And that depends totally on how much time and attention we invest now in preparing ourselves, making our communities resilient.

Two anecdotes told by Lori Dengler when we interviewed her for the 2008
ShockWave
documentary stick in my mind and give me something to hang onto. A bit of hope. After the Sumatra earthquake and
tsunami Dengler traveled to the disaster zone to study what had happened and how it might apply to us in North America. Like Chris Goldfinger and others she came back to her laboratory on the north coast of California with a huge volume of new data and insights about how a subduction quake works and what a tsunami will do.

But the story of Tilly Smith was one she simply had to tell anyone who would listen. The film crew and I definitely listened. Tilly Smith, a ten-year-old British schoolgirl on Christmas holidays with her parents in Thailand, was strolling across the sands of Mai Khao Beach near Phuket when she noticed frothing bubbles on the surface of the sea as the tide started to recede quite suddenly. Two weeks before Christmas break Tilly had learned about tsunamis in her geography class. Old film footage of a wave that hit Hilo, Hawaii, back in 1946 had evidently left an indelible memory because she immediately recognized the same thing and ran to tell her parents.

“I told my mom again and again,” she squealed later in a television interview, “and I was hysterical at this moment, saying, you know, ‘There's
going
to be a tsunami! There's
definitely
going to be a tsunami!' You know? Just
believe
me!”

“Her mum and dad
did
believe her,” said Dengler, “and they managed to clear everybody off the beach. Got them into the hotel. And they managed to vertically evacuate and get about a hundred people from that hotel into the upper floors. And not a single person died in that particular hotel complex. All because a ten-year-old girl had knowledge! All because she recognized the natural warning signs.”

Even more to the point of our survival in Cascadia's shadow was Dengler's story from a personal visit to Simeulue Island, a tiny tropical outpost roughly ninety miles (150 km) off the west coast of Sumatra: one of the nearest human settlements to the epicenter of the magnitude 9.3 earthquake of Christmas 2004.

“Simeulue Islanders are a relatively homogeneous people,” Dengler explained. “They're still very much in touch with their tribal identity
and a strong oral tradition.” Legend has it that a quake and tsunami struck Simeulue in 1907, killing many local residents. Those who survived evidently told this story to their children and grandchildren, which may have been why they knew what to do when the same thing happened again in 2004.

“Langi village was the village closest to the epicenter of that earthquake,” Dengler continued. “They felt that earthquake very, very strongly. And in fact it damaged about 25 percent of their structures. The first tsunami waves arrived at that northern part of Simeulue Island only eight minutes after the earthquake,” she said. “They had very, very little time.”

But because their oral history had been kept alive, they knew exactly what had to be done. According to Dengler, everyone in Langi knew that “when you feel a really long strong duration earthquake, you immediately grab your children, help grandma—and get yourself up to high ground. And not only did they go up to high ground, they actually had an entire temporary village—materials to
make
an entire temporary village up there. They had posts; they had aluminum for roofs; they had water; they had food.” She sounded impressed, almost amazed. And so was I. Best of all, however, was the conclusion to her story. After the earth shock came the waves.

“The waves were enormous,” said Dengler. “In Langi village every single house was completely wiped off the face of the earth. The only thing left were the concrete foundations.” She shook her head. “Completely destroyed. They lost their animals; they lost their fields.” But? And I knew there had to be a but. “Not a single man, woman, child—not a single old person—died,” Dengler said. “Not one!”

Thinking about it now I'm pretty sure I had to look away. We both had tears in our eyes. “Oh, it was an amazing story,” she continued. “To me the most important lesson from Indonesia is that if you have an aware community, you can all survive. But you need to keep that as a
part of your culture. You need to make sure that it's not forgotten from generation to generation.”

And now we on the west coast of North America must learn to do the same. Dengler put it in perspective: “Most people here are going to survive a Cascadia event. But a Cascadia event is going to have more people having to be on their own and self-reliant and resilient for a longer period of time than any other event that I can think of.” So there's more to it than duck-and-cover drills in schools and tsunami evacuation exercises.

We have to gather at the neighborhood level and in family groups to come up with personal survival plans that instantly come to mind no matter where we are when it finally happens. With busy lives that seem like a game of musical chairs, we need to know what we'll do wherever we happen to be when the music stops: at home, at work, or at play, as Patrick Corcoran likes to say.

We also need to think hard about mitigation, about renovating and upgrading essential structures such as hospitals, schools, and other public buildings that we'll need for emergency shelters. Computer models have already shown some communities that their police stations, fire halls, and other important infrastructure may be wiped out in the coming flood. City and village councils should already be thinking about how and when (and how to afford) to move some of these facilities or rebuild them on safer ground. Governments need to pass legislation to rezone the dangerous parts of town so that if public or private buildings are destroyed by Cascadia's fault, people will know ahead of time that they cannot and should not expect to simply rebuild in the same spot, re-creating the same fatal vulnerabilities.

Eddie Bernard of NOAA summed it up nicely. “Don't we as a society want to save the
community
?” he asked. “That is—you want to have a community to return to. You want to have a hospital to go to. You want to have schools that your children can go to. You want to have teachers
in those schools. All those things were wiped out in Sumatra. They lost everything. So that's a lesson that we should take away—we should be building our society so that it's resilient to the next tsunami.” And even though the job sounds daunting, Bernard remains an optimist. “What we don't want to have is just the assumption that it's hopeless. Because it's not.”

I agreed. And so did Chris Goldfinger: “It doesn't have to be such a disaster. It's only a disaster if we don't do something.”

Lessons from Tohoku—A “Worse Than A Worst-Case Event”

At magnitude 9.0 the Tohoku-Oki earthquake on March 11, 2011, was the strongest ever to hit Japan. The main shock was followed by more than nine hundred aftershocks, sixty of which measured magnitude 6.0 or higher. Three of them reached magnitude 7.0 or higher. An estimated twenty thousand people are dead or missing, more than 95 percent of whom were killed not by the quake but by the tsunami that followed. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that 332,395 buildings were either destroyed or damaged. At a cost of more than $309 billion, this seismic event has become the most expensive natural disaster in history. And it all began with a quake exactly like the one Cascadia's fault will generate along North America's west coast.

 

At home in British Columbia, it was Thursday night, March 10, 2011. In Japan it was Friday afternoon. Out of the blue I received an urgent email from Chris Goldfinger of Oregon State University.

It was a madly dashed mass-mail-out to his wife, colleagues, and friends around the world. It basically said that he was okay, that he had survived the quake, and that he would tell us more as soon as he could.
At that very moment, I was watching coverage of the largest tsunami in a thousand years as it rolled over the top of a thirty-three-foot-high (10 m) seawall in northern Japan.

Goldfinger just happened to be in Tokyo attending a science conference about the Sumatra earthquakes of 2004 and 2010. “It was the third earthquake of the week,” he blogged a short time later. Japan had been rattled by a magnitude 7.4 earlier in the week and a smaller one the next morning, both of which may have been foreshocks.

The jolt on Friday afternoon, however, was definitely the main event. “At first, it seemed no larger than the others . . . But instead of stopping at a few seconds, or maybe a minute as the earlier ones had, this one kept going, and going, and going.

“In a room full of seismologists, we timed the gap between the P-wave and S-wave arrivals, and then started thinking about whether we should get out of the building. The desks looked really flimsy, so duck and cover didn't look good at all . . . After about a minute of shaking, we were all outside in the courtyard watching the flagpole on the roof of the seventh floor whipping through sixty degrees. And the dry rattle of the trees with last year's leaves as they shook . . .

“The main shock lasted an eternity . . . I never realized you could feel the difference between the different types of waves. The P-wave is like a jackhammer under your feet; the S-wave much more like an ocean wave. We all felt a little seasick . . . The aftershocks were nearly continuous for the next twelve hours or more. It's a long time for the earth to feel like the ocean.”

In a television interview months later, Goldfinger explained that the quake was far bigger than anything anticipated from the Japan Trench. There was befuddlement in the science community about how conventional wisdom could have been so wrong. He wanted to know “how this earthquake could have happened in a place where, according to our pet geophysical theories, it should have been impossible.”

Nearly a year later, the first flurry of scientific papers began to emerge,
analyzing what went right or wrong and what lessons had been learned from the Tohoku quake. I read Goldfinger's first messages again and tried to put myself on the ground over there—to think of what it must have been like as the earth came apart at one of its deep-ocean seams.

I pictured myself on a street in a fishing town called Minamisanriku, on Japan's northeast coast, to imagine what I might have done when the ground began to shake at 2:46 p.m. I'm pretty sure I would have dropped to my knees as the shockwaves started rolling through the sidewalks. As buildings started to rattle and sway, I would have heard glass breaking. Sirens and loudspeakers blaring. People spilling into the streets—not in a panic yet, because they've been through this drill so many times before. The first big fist of seawater would not arrive for twenty or thirty minutes, so there would still be time to respond.

The big question would be what to do next. Would I perceive myself to be at risk and head for high ground in the dark, forested hills beyond the main village? The safe zone would be in plain sight. It would be easy to run there in twenty minutes. Or would I feel fairly secure hiding behind the massive concrete seawalls that stood between humanity and the roiling-mad North Pacific?

If I were a local citizen, I would also know exactly where to find at least one of the eighty buildings in this village designated as tsunami-evacuation shelters, so I would probably make a beeline for the nearest one instead of jogging all the way to the hills. And why not? Government officials had assured everyone that these buildings would be safe places to escape a killer wave. What could go wrong?

Minamisanriku had earned an international reputation for being prepared for the worst disaster imaginable. A small army of scientists had studied the thirty-two biggest earthquakes (from magnitude 7.0 to 8.5) that had rumbled through the region since 1900 from a subduction zone called the Japan Trench, 124 miles (200 km) offshore. Others had computer-modeled the highest tsunami wave conceivable based on the “most credible earthquake.” They were pretty sure they knew what was coming.

For decades the government of Japan had braced itself by spending billions of dollars to build dikes and breakwaters along 30 percent of the eastern seaboard. These concrete barriers were up to sixty-six feet (20 m) thick, anchored to the ocean floor nearly 200 feet (60 m) down, and in some cases rose as high as thirty-three feet (10 m) above the sea surface—surely high enough to deflect any doomsday wave that might come along. It would be hard to find a more organized, drilled, and solidly grounded community in the most earthquake- and tsunami-ready nation on earth. If anybody knew how to cope, it would be the people of Minamisanriku.