Coming Soon? This Is What Would Happen If A 9.0 Earthquake Hit The Cascadia Subduction Zone…

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you have probably already heard of the Cascadia Subduction Zone.  It is where the Juan de Fuca plate meets the North American plate, and it stretches approximately 700 miles from northern Vancouver Island all the way down to northern California.  This subduction zone is capable of producing far more powerful earthquakes than the much more famous San Andreas fault in southern California, and scientists tell us that it is only a matter of time before another continent-killing earthquake hits this area.  And when it does hit, it will be far worse than any other natural disaster that the United States has ever seen up to this point.

According to CNN, “the largest earthquake in the continental United States” took place along the Cascadia Subduction Zone on January 26th, 1700, and one of the reasons why it is considered to be far more dangerous than other west coast faults is because it is also capable of producing massive tsunamis…

The Cascadia can deliver a quake that’s many times stronger — plus a tsunami.

“Cascadia can make an earthquake almost 30 times more energetic than the San Andreas to start with, and then it generates a tsunami at the same time, which the side-by-side motion of the San Andreas can’t do,” said Chris Goldfinger, a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University.

The Cascadia is capable of delivering a 9.0-magnitude quake — an awesome show of force by Mother Nature.

So what would that look like?

What would a 9.0-magnitude quake that also produced a huge tsunami do to the highly populated northwest coast?

According to an article in the New Yorker, the head of the FEMA division that oversees Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska says that “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast”…

If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

…By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people.

Like I said earlier, it would be far worse than any natural disaster that we have ever experienced in the history of the United States up until now.

A recent piece by Adam Rothstein gives us an idea of what the first few moments of such a quake might look like in the city of Portland, Oregon…

• Cacophony swells from the city as if it is howling in response to the earth’s call: car alarms, shattering glass, the thudding of bricks popping out of building facades, humans screaming in fright, and far off, echoes of what sound like dumpsters clattering to the ground from the jaws of garbage trucks. It is the sound of shifting foundations and collapsing masonry, continuously, a roar increasing from every direction. It is the sound of the living surfaces that a city takes for granted becoming undone.

 

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