Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [136]
What it comes down to is this: when the Big One hits, you’re on your own. This is all about self-reliance. And helping your neighbors.
What if, as some emergency planners have suggested, people were able to escape the inundation zone by climbing a set of stairs instead of running halfway across town horizontally? The concept of “vertical evacuation” seemed to make instant good sense. To compare the official evacuation route with a hypothetical plan B, Patrick Corcoran agreed to run for his life again.
Poised again at the base of the Lewis and Clark statue, this time he ran only three city blocks to the nearest easily accessible building that was more than three stories tall. The most recent computer model for Seaside has suggested the waves from Cascadia could be ten meters high, or a bit more than thirty feet, a monster by any measure. Just one block inland from the beach is a public parking building with four or five levels, just enough vertical amplitude to get us above a thirty-foot wave.
Corcoran didn’t need to click the stopwatch this time because it was obvious he would make it to the parkade well before the imaginary tsunami hit the seawall. He took off at a brisk jog from the promenade to the first traffic light, where he hooked a quick right and headed for the stairwell door at the base of the building. The additional benefit of a parkade structure is the gently inclined ramps. People in wheelchairs or those who cannot thunder up the stairs as Corcoran did would still be able to gain some elevation without having to go all the way across town.
Every beach town I’ve ever seen has always had a shortage of parking spots. What if city hall—with help from senior levels of government—were to solve their parking problem and save lives at the same time? All they’d need would be a building designed and engineered to withstand both the seismic shaking and the torrent of water.
It just so happens that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States, the USGS, NOAA, and all five Pacific Coast states have already commissioned a study of that very idea. Not a parkade, necessarily, but earthquake- and tsunami-resistant vertical evacuation shelters. The engineering study was only one component of the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program created by the U.S. Congress in October 1996—the product of lobbying efforts by people like Eddie Bernard and Lori Dengler in California in the wake of the Petrolia earthquake.
From deep-ocean warning buoys and computer models to estimate and predict tsunami run-up and inundation zones town by town and beach by beach, the United States, at least, seems ready to take seriously the job of making coastal communities “tsunami ready.” Harry Yeh, a civil engineer at Oregon State University and one of the three principal investigators on the shelter study, believes most of the critical engineering problems could be solved and the proof was in Sumatra.
In 2005, as engineers studied the tsunami aftermath in Indonesia and Thailand, everywhere they looked, “well-engineered, reinforced concrete structures were still standing,” said Yeh. He showed me a picture, drawing my attention to an apartment block or hotel right at the waterline in Banda Aceh. “Even though the structure was completely inundated to the roofline,” he said, “the structure itself is still standing. So our experience says that if you have a well-engineered concrete structure, I think those can be used for tsunami shelters.”
Yeh also showed me other pictures of an odd-looking, cone-shaped building erected in a coastal town in Japan, where the concept of vertical evacuation has been studied, debated, and implemented already. In some places the top floors of apartment blocks, warehouses, and public buildings have been designated and prominently marked as tsunami shelters. Stairwells and doors to the rooftops are never locked. Local residents have been