Kathryn Schulz has written an interesting article in The New Yorker on the Cascadia subduction zone on the US west coast. Unlike the San Andreas fault, this fault line is far more dangerous and has been lying dormant for longer than expected:
…we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
The scenario of what might happen if and when the fault line produces an earthquake is sobering.
Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.
When I read articles like this I often wonder what the experts in the field think and whether they agree with everything said:
New Yorker story on Cascadia EQ in PacNW is accurate representation of EQ & tsunami threat, if a bit sensationalist. http://t.co/alCn5TVyv5
— Dr. Lucy Jones (@DrLucyJones) July 14, 2015
Dr. Lucy Jones is a USGS Seismologist, if she says its an accurate description then residents on the US west coast might have something to worry about…