Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [150]
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