Cascadia Apocalypse
Why government agencies and local communities must do more to prepare for the “really big one.”
I hail from Cascadia, a land of evergreen trees, deep blue waters, majestic snow-capped mountains, and across the Palouse, mesmerizing rolling hills. The environment is idyllic. Cities like Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland mesh together the beauties of nature with the convenience and enjoyment of multicultural cosmopolitan settings. Mountains offering some of the best snow sports and hiking in the world stand only an hour or two away. There is a wealth of industry, from the plethora of tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft, to manufacturing giants like Boeing and Weyerhaeuser. Costco, Starbucks, Nike, Nordstrom — need I name more? Having lived across the United States, there are few places that even hold a candle to the Pacific Northwest.
But not many of these places have the ever-threatening Cascadia Subduction Zone (“CSZ”) at their doorsteps. Kathryn Schultz of The New Yorker published a masterful piece on the CSZ in 2015, and won a Pulitzer Prize for her prose a year later. Her article describes “the really big one”, an overdue full-margin earthquake with a potential magnitude somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2 on the Richter scale. It projects, citing a FEMA director, that everything west of Interstate 5 (the highway that runs through Portland and Seattle) “will be toast.” Despite Schultz’s horrific illustrations of death and destruction that could imminently affect this beautiful region, governmental agencies at federal, state, and local levels have done little to prepare and encourage locals to do the same.
Background — Diving Into the CSZ
The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a long dipping fault line that stretches from North Vancouver Island to Cape Mendocino, California (approximately 700 miles in length). It runs between the Pacific and Juan de Fuca Plates.
“Cascadia” refers to the nearby Cascade moutain range, a chain of volcanic mountains that run parallel to the subduction zone a hundred or so miles inland. A “Subduction Zone” is a region of the planet where one tectonic plate slides underneath (i.e., subducts) another. Tectonic plates are large slabs of mantle and crust that throughout the annals of time…
