Off the Richter Scale

If you asked most people to name the biggest natural disaster that's likely to strike the United States, the responses would probably include the Big One (a quake along the San Andreas Fault), a land falling category 5 hurricane, or the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting. All of these are bad and the last is highly unlikely.

The worst disaster would be a megathrust earthquke along the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest. This would be a quake similar to the one that devastated northern Japan in 2011 or the Indonesian Boxing Day quake in 2004. Not only would there be a quake of 9.0 or greater on the Richter scale, but it would be followed by a massive tsunami that would cause devastation both along the North American coast and across the Pacific.

City Journal has published an article that looks at both the consequences of such a quake and what can be done and is being done to mitigate its effects. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you need to read this, now.

When it happens, the earth will slip by roughly 60 feet along a rupture zone more than 600 miles long, unzipping the sea floor at roughly two miles per second and convulsing the West Coast for as long as five minutes. Bridges will fall. Wet soil will liquefy. Brick and masonry buildings will shatter. Skyscrapers built before modern earthquake codes may topple. City centers in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver will be buried beneath glass shards and rubble. Everything underground—water mains, natural gas pipes—will be crushed. Land that has bulged upward from tectonic pressure for the past 300 or so years will collapse to baseline, permanently altering the topography and plunging low-lying coastal areas into the ocean. The inland Cascade Mountains will knock the knees out from under the earthquake, but numerous landslides will occur, especially on roads built with a “cut and fill” method, where flat slabs get cut out of rock walls and smoothed over with soft fill. Just a few minutes after the quake finally stops, the second hammer blow will strike. Tsunami waves up to 50 feet high will rip the face of the coastal region clean off the map, pulverizing everything and killing everyone in their path.

Pray that it doesn't happen during the Trump administration.