Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [147]
Back in 2005 a group of scientists, engineers, and emergency planners from the United States and Canada, along with representatives from key industries in the Pacific Northwest, formed a committee called CREW—the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup—to study the magnitude and severity of problems posed by the coming event. Their official disaster scenario states that the rupture of Cascadia’s fault “could be catastrophic ... It will be a long-term event, affecting the economies of the US, Canada, other Pacific countries, and their trading partners for years to come.”
In my own, hypothetical version of this day of reckoning, they were absolutely right. Although nobody has ventured an official guess at how high the death toll will be worldwide, most experts agree that Cascadia won’t kill as many as Sumatra did simply because not as many people live right on the beach. Generally speaking the homes and cities of the Pacific Rim are built a bit more solidly than their counterparts around the Indian Ocean. But the cost of repairing or replacing the damaged or destroyed infrastructure of the Pacific Rim will probably be many times higher. Modern cities cost more to build in the first place and much more to fix when they get smashed. So the economic consequences of a Cascadia quake will be like nothing we’ve ever seen. Some say it will take a decade or more to dig ourselves out of the rubble. From a purely dollars-and-cents perspective, the whole world will feel our pain.
But CREW’s conclusion is not entirely bleak or defeatist: “A Cascadia earthquake will seriously affect our region, but it won’t destroy us. We will rebuild our cities, our neighborhoods, and our businesses. The time it takes us to recover will depend largely on what precautions we take before the earthquake.” Here again, I think they’ve got it absolutely right.
EPILOGUE
Survival and Resilience, a State of Mind
Since I began work on this book, tectonic events have made scary headlines five more times. A team of seismologists in Italy has been threatened with charges of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake that they allegedly saw coming. After several tremors were detected in March 2009 the nation’s Major Risks Committee, a scientific advisory group like the “six wise men” in Japan, met to discuss whether anything in the data could be classified as a reliable precursor to a quake.
After the meeting a government official told reporters the scientists had concluded there was “no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy” being released by the small tremors. Then on April 6, 2009, an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 struck the city of L’Aquila, killing more than three hundred people and injuring sixteen hundred others. The threat of manslaughter charges against members of the advisory committee caused an uproar among earthquake researchers around the world.
As of September 2010 almost four thousand scientists and engineers had signed a letter to the president of Italy calling for an end to what some termed a witch hunt. They urged the government to spend more resources on “earthquake preparedness and risk mitigation rather than on prosecuting scientists for failing to do something they cannot do yet—predict earthquakes.” Barry Parsons, an earth scientist at the University of Oxford and one of those who signed the letter, explained that “scientists are often asked the wrong question, which is ‘When will the next earthquake hit?’The right question is ‘How do we make sure it won’t kill so many people when it hits?’”
In Haiti on January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake destroyed huge sections of the capital city of Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people. The island of Hispaniola sits on the rim of the Caribbean plate, which is being shoved westward by the North America plate as it dives underneath. But here again the real story was about the exposure to risk caused by