Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [72]
“At first, it was the excitement of a scientific discovery” that kept Yeats motivated. Unfortunately, telling people about a catastrophic seismic threat was a lot like telling them that a lack of exercise and a bad diet and would make them fat. “The reaction was, ‘Yes, I know, but I don’t want to think about it, let alone do anything about it,’” Yeats wrote in his survival guide to earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest.
After a while, though, public lethargy became a real drag. “Suddenly, earthquake science stopped being fun, and as a scientist, I began to feel like a watchman on the castle walls warning about barbarians at the gate, begging people to take me seriously,” he lamented. Despite recurring images in the news of death and destruction from previous subduction disasters, people seemingly didn’t have the will to respond. Perhaps burying one’s head in the sand is a type of survival mechanism, a way of coping.
CHAPTER 13
Cascadia’s Segmented Past: Apocalypse or Decades of Terror?
For Stephanie Fritts, moving to a small town seemed like a logical way to escape the chaos and frenzy of the modern world. When she arrived in her chosen paradise on the western edge of Washington State, nobody said anything about megathrust earthquakes or tsunamis. Ilwaco was an idyllic resort community with a mild climate, white sandy shores, and tall green forests.
She had lived the jet-set life of a fashion buyer for the May Company department store chain, and in the early days it seemed like a great job. Based in Portland, she spent half her life in New York hotels, missing her husband and children way too much. She began to question her “contribution to society” and decided that “clothing people just wasn’t doing it.”
Then one day her father told her he could use some help running his department store—an old-fashioned local landmark that carried everything from ladies’ wear to oakum—in the fishing town of Ilwaco, just across the Oregon line in the lower left-hand corner of Washington State. Here the turbulent outflow of the Columbia River creates Cape Disappointment and the Long Beach Peninsula, a narrow, sandy spit that forms the outer boundary of Willapa Bay. A necklace of quiet little hideaways like Seaview, Long Beach, and Ocean Park were being transformed into retirement and tourist destinations famous for clam digs, sandcastles, kite festivals, and the scenic splendor of the Pacific.
So Stephanie decided to make a lifestyle change. She went to work in her dad’s store and not long after settling in started volunteering as an emergency medical technician for the Pacific County ambulance service. She really liked the feel of public service, of doing something positive for society. She had no idea how much bigger that job would eventually become.
Willapa Bay is the main place where Brian Atwater was quietly digging into tide marshes and stream banks in the spring and summer of 1986, finding evidence of huge prehistoric earthquakes and tsunamis. Few local residents were aware at the time that he was in the neighborhood or what he was up to, and it’s probably just as well because the news when it finally came out was most unwelcome. Like ships in the fog, he may even have crossed paths with Stephanie Fritts, unaware they would later join forces on a much-needed public safety campaign.
Stephanie’s own introduction to plate tectonics and tsunami waves came on May 7 that year, when a distant rupture triggered a chain of events that would rattle nerves and change the lives of people living in Pacific County. On the Wednesday in question her husband, David, who worked in the lumber industry, had driven to Portland on business when a magnitude 8 quake sent shockwaves through the U.S. Naval Air Station on Adak Island, at the far end of the Aleutian