Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [5]
But that’s just the United States. Nobody has done a projected death toll for the other Pacific Rim nations that would be affected. Researchers have, however, made a convincing case that an earthquake on Cascadia’s fault in 1700 put a series of waves thirteen to sixteen feet (4–5 m) high—imagine water more than fifteen feet above the highest tides—onto the beaches of eastern Japan, causing widespread damage, injuries, and deaths. At this point one can only imagine what the same waves would do to the seaports and villages of modern-day Japan. To this scenario add Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand—all of which would be hit by Cascadia’s waves.
And now we’ve learned that the effects could be even worse than previously imagined. The evidence from Sumatra, translated into numerical code and applied to updated computer models of Cascadia, confirms that some of the waves generated could be as high as seventy to ninety feet (20–30 m). Earlier computer simulations had put the maximum wave height at roughly fifty to sixty-five feet (15–20 m). Looking at footage of what a ninety-foot wall of water had done to one beach near Banda Aceh in 2004, an emergency manager from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, shook his head and told a journalist from CNN that quite frankly no town on the western U.S. coast had any idea how to plan for or cope with that kind of wave.
Canada’s situation will be considerably worse. Federal and provincial emergency planners in British Columbia are laughably underequipped and underfunded. Canada doesn’t even have a national guard to take over when local governments are quickly overwhelmed—as they surely will be when Cascadia rips loose.
At NOAA’s laboratory in Seattle, chief oceanographer Eddie Bernard says the easiest way to put Cascadia’s fault into perspective is to “multiply the New Orleans disaster times four or five.” Imagine having five Hurricane Katrinas—hitting five different cities—on the same day. Other experts believe Cascadia’s next big temblor will be the largest peacetime disaster in North American history.
As a journalist and documentary filmmaker I have covered the Cascadia earthquake story at least five times over the past twenty years and have talked to dozens of geologists, seismologists, civil engineers, and oceanographers. With each new evolution or refinement of earthquake and tsunami science, I have been stumped in the final scene by the same nagging question. Do I make things better or worse by warning people about an event that may not happen in their lifetimes? If I take the latest scientific evidence, show that a monumental disaster is probably overdue and issue a dire warning—what do I accomplish? The initial shock wears off quickly. After that, nothing much changes.
All I’ve done in telling the tale is to make people more depressed than they already were. Folks who live around the Pacific Rim have heard this wake-up call many times before and disaster fatigue creates inertia. Because there are so many worrisome things to obsess about—global warming, terrorist attacks, killer plagues, and asteroid impacts, to to name a few—disaster stories are losing their punch.
Unfortunately Cascadia’s menace remains, whether those of us in the danger zone respond to it or not. What happened to Sumatra in 2004 will happen to North America, beyond any reasonable scientific doubt. A nearly identical earthquake will rattle the West Coast and a train of killer waves will tear across the Pacific.
One might argue that because I know what’s going on, I have a moral obligation to spread the word even if I don’t know how to respond to it myself. A replay of the Indian Ocean disaster along the shores of the North Pacific is absolutely going to happen. And