SEATTLE - After an earthquake measuring 6.0 on the moment magnitude scale rocked the Napa region of California earlier this week, some Northwest residents wondered if we, too, might be in for another big shake. The answer, according to a local author, is a resounding "yes."
"There's absolutely no doubt about it," said Seattle Times science writer Sandi Doughton. "There's 100% chance it's going to happen again."
It will strike without warning.
Doughton said, "It will be the worst natural disaster the Unites States has ever seen."
Doughton has sounded the alarm in her new book, Full Rip 9.0.
It's all due to the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the place where the seafloor plate meets the continental mass. Don't look now, but you're practically sitting on it. At regular intervals, every 250 to 300 years, it "gives" in a big way.
Doughton explained, "Amazingly, scientists have recently been able to pinpoint the last northwest megaquake to an exact date. January 26, 1700. That earthquake was so big, the tsunami it created so huge, that it traveled across the Pacific and hit Japan. And in 1700, Japan was a very literate society, a very organized society. So people in Japan noticed this, and they wrote it down."
That quake was 60 times more powerful than the one that leveled San Francisco in 1906. We're just about due for another one, a "megaquake," that could rock the earth for more than 4 minutes.
"To put that in perspective, if you go to a baseball game and you listen to them sing the national anthem, that takes two minutes," said Doughton.
We know it will happen. But do we know if we're ready?
Doughton said, "Very few of our big buildings in the northwest are built to stand up to a major magnitude 9.0 quake."
Damage estimates start at 100 billion dollars. The human cost is uncertain.
"It's very hard to estimate how many people will be killed," Doughton said. "The estimates range from a few thousand to 10,000 or more."
Doughton says there's still time to prepare for the next Big One. The question is: how long?
"I consider this a very, very hopeful story, because we're very lucky in the Northwest that scientists were able to ferret out this history of quakes that none of us knew existed, and give us enough warning so that we have a chance to do something before it happens again."
