Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [149]
Mud-spattered survivors looking stunned and forlorn wandered through rubble in search of family and friends. Hundreds of people sprawled, exhausted and in shock, on the floor of a school gymnasium, nesting in rucked-up blankets, their coats and shoes and “grab-and-go” bags gathered around them like imaginary walls to fend off the ongoing nightmare.
Food store shelves were stripped bare and long lines of cars appeared at gasoline pumps, the fuel supply running dangerously low. And still, somehow, all of this post-quake scramble was happening in a relatively organized and orderly manner, presumably because the Japanese had experienced many smaller quakes and tsunamis before and knew this was coming. They had planned and drilled and rehearsed. The atmosphere seemed amazingly calm and eerily quiet. I sincerely doubt it will be this peaceful when the same thing happens to North America.
But if pride comes before a fall, then the construction of nuclear reactors near an active fault zone has to rank among the most dazzlingly optimistic—or stunningly foolish—things that modern nations have ever done. Not just in Japan, but in California and many other places around the globe. Until we watched those plumes of gray-white smoke rising across the Japanese coast as the roof and outer walls of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex began to vaporize and then collapse—until we saw it with our own eyes—the horror of a nuclear meltdown seemed like the last thing a quake or tsunami survivor should have to worry about. Scientists, engineers, and government officials have led us to believe that nuclear plants are built to withstand seismic shocks. Now I guess we know better. For those living on North America’s own locked and loaded segment of the Ring of Fire, the question now must be: are we next?
Even though seismologists still cannot predict when Cascadia’s fault will break, pretty much everybody who has lived out west for a while knows deep down inside that a megathrust quake will eventually happen. Sure, on any given day the mathematical odds of a magnitude 6 or 7 under downtown Seattle or Vancouver are higher than for a magnitude 9 from Cascadia. Smaller quakes do happen more often than big ones. That’s why most emergency managers have been told the local rumble is still their worst scenario. And for any given point on the map, that’s absolutely right—the local quake may cause more intense damage to that particular city than Cascadia would.
But Cascadia’s fault is going to cause damage to all the cities and towns along a swath more than 800 miles (1,300 km) from north to south and as much as 125 miles (200 km) inland. So the cumulative damage will be far greater than the impact of any local quake on any single city. The enormity of what’s about to happen in the Pacific Northwest is almost inconceivable. And that’s only part of the reason why Cascadia is not yet as infamous or worrisome to many people as the San Andreas already is.
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?