The Cascadia Subduction Zone Is in the News Again

I don't believe I've ever seen this much press coverage of a POTENTIAL disaster. This kind of fascination is usually reserved for the aftermath.

It seems to have started about 3 weeks ago. This article from Scientific American seems fairly typical. Could a Monster Earthquake Actually Sink Parts of the Pacific Northwest?

Scary headlines about the Pacific Northwest sinking into the sea are circulating online, with warnings that a major earthquake in the notorious Cascadia subduction zone could be worse than expected.

After a flurry of articles from 2 or 3 weeks ago, I saw another cluster of articles in the past week. Maybe it was a slow news day.

Of course the furor seems to be over "estimated sea level rise by 2100." Take that as you will. At least it seems to have woken people up to the underlying issue. No one should be living in that part of the Northwest. Not that people will change.

People talk about "the big one" being an earthquake that hits the San Andreas fault in Southern California. San Andreas has about 6% of the potential of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, off the coast of Washington and Oregon. The earthquake and resulting Tsunami will kill many thousands of people who will not be able to get out of the way. A 2011 study by the Washington National Guard concluded that over 8,000 people would die. Later estimates triple that number of dead. More than 500,000 buildings would be damaged or destroyed, and about 400,000 people would need emergency shelter.

I had a post on the subject back in 2019, but the magazine article I quoted has moved behind a paywall, and the FEMA document referenced has moved, or been removed. I can find very little information from FEMA today, beyond the "executive summary" of the periodic exercises that they run. I suppose someone decided it was a security risk to publish the full documents, or a PR nightmare.

Here is a video from 7 years ago, on the topic from KING 5 Seattle: Disaster planning: Cascadia rising. Cascadia Rising is the name that FEMA gives to exercises that they run every few years to try to prepare for this event. It is six and a half minutes long.

Of course preparing should consist mostly of getting as many people as possible to move out of the area that will be devastated by the event. But that won't happen.

For anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of tests like Cascadia Rising, you can take a look at this document, which has links to many others. Washington State Cascadia Rising 2022 Exercise (June 2022): Final After-Action Report and Improvement Plan.

While I can't say that FEMA has removed public access to their documents, it so far eluded my Google-Fu in tracking any of them down.