Putting our lives back together after that The New Yorker article

I was going to write about the article more this week anyway, but I saw a pretty good responding article which I am sharing here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/20/1403522/-So-About-That-Cascadia-Article#

This is a recommended read.

I appreciate the even-handedness of this article. The New Yorker's take was full of gloom and doom. It is possible that the melodramatics will cause some people to face the issue that have previously been ignoring it, it is just as easy that the perceived hopelessness of the situation will lead people to bury their heads in the sand in despair.

So, yes, the earthquake threat is not new. People have been aware of it for decades now, and some people are doing things differently - that's why I was writing newsletters about it back in 2008. There is also room to do more.

There were four main points that stuck with me out of the original article. The first was about the duration:

"Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0."

While it is well known that the magnitude gets bigger exponentially, can still be hard to understand the difference between 6.9 and 7.5. Fifteen seconds to thirty seconds is more comprehensible, and then thinking of 15 seconds to 4 minutes, and how much more shaking that is, kind of sinks in.

The second thing that stuck with me was that I am not aware of any magical properties of I-5, where saying everything west of I-5 is toast could be anything but a simplification. Maybe I'm wrong and Lake Oswego will be miraculously unharmed while Tigard and Tualatin are destroyed.

It probably makes more sense to imagine that while the Coast Range will protect those to the West from tsunamis, the significant shaking will not only cause damage to buildings but also roads, and so getting access to those communities will be more difficult. As you continue heading East - depending on where the epicenter was and all the other factors - there will start being less damage and more access.

(Next week it will probably make sense to talk more about those issues, including liquefaction, but I want to get to the other two points.)

The Gearhart school situation stuck out to me. No one wants to imagine a school full of children being wiped out by a tsunami. That has already happened too often. However, my first thought was perhaps you could build a pathway over the bog. I have seen trails built over marshy lands before.

That may not be practical, so maybe they will need to look at building a new school. That's expensive, but new schools do need to be built periodically. If a tsunami comes tomorrow that won't work, but if the earthquake is three or thirty years away, it's doable. It's at least worth looking at the issue.

Finally, I was struck by the predicted economic collapse; I'd never heard that one before. On the one hand, if you have no utilities or infrastructure it sounds plausible, but there are many business for whom it would not be plausible.

I work for a company that provides health insurance in four states, including Washington and Oregon. We have a business presence and physical locations in all four states. There will be lots of people alive, they will still need insurance - I don't think we'll just pull up stakes, but electricity and internet are necessary.

Fortunately we have a contingency planner. I meant to write to her this week, and I didn't get around to it. I wasn't expecting an answer this week necessarily, but still I did procrastinate. I intend to write to her next week.

It makes perfect sense to ask if your employer has a plan for a big earthquake. There are some other good places to ask, and we will get more into that next week, but I wanted to make one final point here. We may not get to everything right away, but keep them in mind. I think writing to our planner this week versus next week will have little impact. Never asking would. Waiting two years to ask might. Try to maintain some balance between doing everything in a panic versus not getting to anything at all.