Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [151]
“The waves were enormous,” said Dengler. “In Langi village every single house was completely wiped off the face of the earth. The only thing left were the concrete foundations.” She shook her head. “Completely destroyed. They lost their animals; they lost their fields.” But? And I knew there had to be a but. “Not a single man, woman, child—not a single old person—died,” Dengler said. “Not one!”
Thinking about it now I’m pretty sure I had to look away. We both had tears in our eyes. “Oh, it was an amazing story,” she continued. “To me the most important lesson from Indonesia is that if you have an aware community, you can all survive. But you need to keep that as a part of your culture. You need to make sure that it’s not forgotten from generation to generation.”
And now we on the west coast of North America must learn to do the same. Dengler put it in perspective: “Most people here are going to survive a Cascadia event. But a Cascadia event is going to have more people having to be on their own and self-reliant and resilient for a longer period of time than any other event that I can think of.” So there’s more to it than duck-and-cover drills in schools and tsunami evacuation exercises.
We have to gather at the neighborhood level and in family groups to come up with personal survival plans that instantly come to mind no matter where we are when it finally happens. With busy lives that seem like a game of musical chairs, we need to know what we’ll do wherever we happen to be when the music stops: at home, at work, or at play, as Patrick Corcoran likes to say.
We also need to think hard about mitigation, about renovating and upgrading essential structures such as hospitals, schools, and other public buildings that we’ll need for emergency shelters. Computer models have already shown some communities that their police stations, fire halls, and other important infrastructure may be wiped out in the coming flood. City and village councils should already be thinking about how and when (and how to afford) to move some of these facilities or rebuild them on safer ground. Governments need to pass legislation to rezone the dangerous parts of town so that if public or private buildings are destroyed by Cascadia’s fault, people will know ahead of time that they cannot and should not expect to simply rebuild in the same spot, re-creating the same fatal vulnerabilities.
Eddie Bernard of NOAA summed it up nicely. “Don’t we as a society want to save the community?” he asked. “That is—you want to have a community to return to. You want to have a hospital to go to. You want to have schools that your children can go to. You want to have teachers in those schools. All those things were wiped out in Sumatra. They lost everything. So that’s a lesson that we should take away—we should be building our society so that it’s resilient to the next tsunami.” And even though the job sounds daunting, Bernard remains an optimist. “What we don’t want to have is just the assumption that it’s hopeless. Because it’s not.”
I agreed. And so did Chris Goldfinger: “It doesn’t have to be such a disaster. It’s only a disaster if we don’t do something.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the course of filming a CBC documentary about Hungarians who fled to Canada after the 1956 uprising, I met Anna Porter, who escaped her Budapest home as a teenager and passed through New Zealand and the UK en route to becoming a successful author and publisher in Toronto. The room was lit and we were ready to shoot an introductory sequence of her working on final revisions to the manuscript of Kastner’s