Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [2]
That leaves just one corner unaffected—the northeast. And the fault lines in the northeast of the Pacific plate are most notoriously the San Andreas fault, underpinning the city of San Francisco; the Hayward fault, underlying the teeming and less well engineered cities of Oakland and Berkeley; and then offshore, the 800-mile-long Cascadia Subduction Zone fault. If the San Andreas or the Hayward fault were to rupture, the devastation on land could be immense; but if the Cascadia were to do likewise, the event would be global in scale, regional in destructiveness, lethal in a vast swath of countryside from Vancouver Island to the border of California. It would be a disaster of titanic proportions. It would, in a word, be epic.
That makes the geological community very apprehensive. All know that both the San Andreas fault and Hayward fault are due to rupture any day—the former last did so in 1906, and strains have built beneath it to a barely tolerable level. But it has been fully 311 years since Cascadia fractured—and it is in my view far from wholly irresponsible (though some scientists say otherwise) to employ the word impending when describing its potential to fracture and possibly cause a terrible disaster.
For Cascadia to rupture again, with unimaginable consequences for the millions who live in its danger zone, some triggering event has to occur. Three disasters—the Japanese tragedy of March 2011 being the most recent, New Zealand and Chile before that—have now taken place, and each of these can reasonably be regarded, perhaps, as a triggering event. There are in consequence a lot of thoughtful people in the American and Canadian west who are currently very nervous indeed—wondering, as they often must do, whether the geological consent that permits them to inhabit so pleasant a place might be about to be withdrawn, sooner than they had supposed.
INTRODUCTION
On Christmas Eve 2004 my wife, Bette, and I were in a hotel bar in San Francisco dreaming up plot points for a film we’d like to shoot some day when a woman arrived from the airport with breathless news. The bartender clicked his remote and It’s a Wonderful Life vanished, Jimmy Stewart’s smiling face wiped off the screen by a mountain of angry seawater. I can still see those endlessly repeated loops of amateur video shot from the balconies of beachfront resorts in Sumatra and Thailand, relayed by satellite to every TV receiver on the planet.
The first horrifying, mesmerizing wave crashed against a seawall, jetting skyward in salty white torrents, tearing through a fringe of palm trees like a monsoon river, across a hotel pool deck and a manicured square of green lawn. The darkening surge roared uphill through narrow, cluttered streets choked with tourist luggage, broken timbers, small motorcycles with their riders struggling to stay vertical, cargo vans overturned and bulldozed by white froth into market stalls. A transit bus floating on its side began to sink as desperate passengers jumped from the slippery roof.
It’s impossible to forget the images, those flailing human bodies—especially one unfortunate older man clinging to the outside railing of a rapidly filling parkade. Exhausted and in shock, he finally let go. We watched as he sank into the muddy torrent and was swept away.
More than 230,000 people in fourteen countries around the Indian Ocean died or disappeared, many of them before our eyes, and there was nothing any of us could do. Everything not nailed to the ground was torn loose and carried off by the roaring water. And there was more to come. Even after the first water had cut a swath nearly a mile inland and then sucked itself halfway out to sea again, full of death and floating debris, people standing among the palms were so stunned by the spectacle they waited too long to outrun the next wave.
Most victims, including those who’d lived their entire lives along the beach—even fishermen who knew the sea