Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [144]
At the USGS lab in Menlo Park seismometers peg the quake at magnitude 8.1 and the tsunami detection centers in Alaska and Hawaii begin waking up the alarm system with stand-by alerts all around the Pacific Rim. High-rise towers in Sacramento begin to sway. Early morning commuters emerging from a BART station in San Francisco feel the ground sway beneath their feet and immediately hit the sidewalk in a variety of awkward crouches, a familiar fear chilling their guts. Then another little rough spot on the bottom of the continent snaps off. The fault unzips some more.
Back in Petrolia, where the ground has been shaking for more than a minute already, the street now heaves like a trawler’s greasy deck in a North Pacific gale. The entire Gorda plate has come unstuck. The outer edge of California snaps free like a steel spring in a juddering lurch—nine feet (2.7 m) to the west. The continental shelf heaves upward, lifting a mountain of seawater.
The new shockwave, from the latest broken rough spot, slams from the Gorda into the Juan de Fuca plate farther north—like gigantic train cars banging together—and thus the fault continues to rip all the way to Newport, Oregon, halfway up the state. The magnitude suddenly jumps to 8.6. A power surge blows a breaker somewhere east of town and feeds back through the system, throwing other breakers in a cascade of dominoes that quickly crashes the entire grid in Oregon, Washington, and parts of California, Idaho, and Nevada. A brownout begins in six more western states. The wireline phone systems crash in lockstep.
Then the asperity beneath Newport shears away. The fault unzips the rest of the way to Vancouver Island. The quake now pins seismic needles at magnitude 9.2. A pineapple express has delivered a long string of storms that are pelting rain from Cannon Beach all the way to the Queen Charlotte Islands. High-rise towers in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria begin to undulate. Cascadia’s shockwave hammers through sandy soil, soft rock, and landfill like the deepest notes on a big string bass. The mushy ground sings harmony and tall buildings hum like so many tuning forks. The earth rings like a bell as three plates of crust find a new equilibrium.
On I-5, the main north–south interstate highway, thirty-seven bridges between Sacramento and Bellingham, Washington, collapse or are knocked off their pins. Five more go down between the Canada–U.S. border and downtown Vancouver. The most vital overland lifeline from California to British Columbia is severed and bleeding badly. The Trans-Canada Highway has been cut in three places east of Vancouver. All the big bridges spanning the Fraser River in metropolitan Vancouver, around Puget Sound in Seattle, and across the Columbia in Portland have been damaged. None has collapsed outright, but they are considered unsafe until inspection teams can check them out. All major highways leading out of the big cities are plugged with debris from toppled buildings, rockslides, and traffic jams.
Nineteen railway bridges along the north–south coastal mainline of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway are wrecked as well. Boulders block the east–west mainline tracks of both the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railway systems. Three engines and twentynine chemical tank cars, at least half of them full of chlorine, derail and spill their deadly cargoes just outside Tacoma. Deep-sea shipping docks in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver slump and crack, their pilings undermined by liquefaction. As miles and miles of dikes around the city of Richmond, British Columbia, turn to mush, the incoming tide sweeps inland, swamping much of the city.
The runways of every major coastal airport from northern California to Vancouver are buckled, cracked, and no longer flyable. An Airbus on short-final at Sea-Tac touches down just as the concrete breaks. The impact shears off