Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest Read online

  Copyright ©2013 by Sandi Doughton

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,

  without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Sasquatch Books

  Editor: Gary Luke

  Project editor: Michelle Hope Anderson

  Cover design: Anna Goldstein

  Interior design and composition: Sarah Plein

  Cover photograph: Seattle Skyline © Newleaf/Veer.com

  Glass © Smit/Veer.com

  Copy editor: Sue Mann

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  eISBN: 978-1-57061-855-0

  Sasquatch Books

  1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710

  Seattle, WA 98101

  (206) 467-4300

  www.sasquatchbooks.com

  [email protected]

  v3.1

  To my family of friends: RB, CB, PB, CD, BH, JJ,

  MM, DM, DR, AS, SS, JV, Patu & Six-Thirty

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  INTRODUCTION: A WARNING FROM THE PAST

  CHAPTER 1: QUIET AS KANSAS

  CHAPTER 2: WRITTEN IN MUD

  CHAPTER 3: PARENT QUAKE, ORPHAN TSUNAMI

  CHAPTER 4: A VIEW FROM THE SEA

  CHAPTER 5: SEATTLE’S FAULT

  CHAPTER 6: SEEING THE FAULTS FOR THE TREES

  CHAPTER 7: THE EARTHQUAKE THAT WOULDN’T STAY PUT

  CHAPTER 8: IT CAME FROM THE DEEP

  CHAPTER 9: RUN FOR YOUR LIFE

  CHAPTER 10: “IT’S OUR JOB”

  CHAPTER 11: SHAKE, RATTLE—PORTLAND, VANCOUVER, AND SEATTLE

  CHAPTER 12: NUTS, BOLTS, AND CHIMNEYS

  CHAPTER 13: FUTURE SCIENCE, COMING QUAKE

  CHAPTER 14: INEVITABLE, INSCRUTABLE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES

  RESOURCES

  IMAGE CREDITS

  About the Author

  (image credits map1.1)

  INTRODUCTION:

  A WARNING FROM THE PAST

  STORIES PASSED DOWN FROM THAT NIGHT don’t tell us if dogs howled a warning. Huddled together in the cold, the animals might have sensed the first faint vibrations while the people slept.

  A quarter moon hung in the sky.

  Far offshore, where only the boldest whalers paddled their canoes, a seven-hundred-mile-long gash on the ocean floor was shifting. Masses of rock thrust past each other, grinding and buckling and jerking as if the planet were being torn apart.

  People jolted awake in their longhouses. The motion pounded out a staccato rhythm, like a woodpecker hammering a tree. Cedar planks rattled and timbers groaned. In those first moments, it might have seemed as if a gale were sweeping in off the Pacific. But how could the wind rock the ground? Children cried out in fear. Men and women stumbled toward doorways.

  The ground began to roll like the sea. People dropped to their hands and knees, felled by shaking so intense, cedar-bark baskets flew into the air. Ancient spruce trees whipped back and forth like saplings, raining branches onto the forest floor. The people lucky enough to make it outside clung in darkness to a world that seemed intent on casting them off.

  As the seam in the seafloor continued to rip, the shaking swept along the western edge of North America. Under its thick blanket of mud, the margin of a great geologic plate shuddered and slid westward, pulling the continent with it. Shock waves raced out in all directions, traveling miles in seconds and rattling the shores of the inland sea many coast-dwellers had heard of, and some had visited. The people who live there today call it Puget Sound.

  One minute passed.

  Hillsides where condominiums now command million-dollar views trembled and sloughed off cascades of mud and stones. Deer and elk stampeded blindly, but couldn’t escape the unearthly shaking. Nor could the people. From the Haida in the far north, to the Quileute on the Washington coast and the Yurok of California’s redwood forests, the tribes of the Pacific Northwest felt the earth reshaping itself beneath their feet.

  Two minutes.

  Carved posts that had supported plank buildings for generations crashed to the ground. It was January and the people were gathered in lowland camps for the winter. The river mouths where many longhouses clustered were the first to turn to jelly and spout geysers of watery sand. At the confluence where Portland would later spring up, sandbars vibrated into a slurry. Fountains spurted from spruce swamps along the Columbia River. The tide flats of the Duwamish River, today the busy port of Seattle, trembled and split. In the night, no one saw the undulations. Only later would people notice strange patterns left behind in the sand and silt.

  Three minutes.

  Forested slopes gave way, rushing downhill in a tumult. River valleys and shorelines quivered and dropped by several feet. Stands of cedar that had sprouted centuries ago were suddenly below sea level. Some of the gray-haired elders had felt the earth shake before; this time they wondered if it would ever stop.

  The year was 1700.

  When earthquakes strike urban areas, they give off a dull roar like a jet passing overhead. The din rises from thousands of structures vibrating and grating against each other. What would the sound have been like centuries ago, when there was just the thrashing of forests and the wrenching of miles-thick chunks of crust?

  Four minutes.

  The only signs of humanity were scattered native settlements. Imagine the scene today. What highway would remain passable after being tossed like a ship on the high seas? How many bridges and office towers could twist for four minutes and still stand? Pipelines that carry water, gasoline, and oil to fuel a modern economy run through the same valleys that dissolved under the shaking so long ago. Power poles march over slopes that were scarred by landslides and littered with fallen trees.

  Five minutes.

  Like a storm with its strength spent, the maelstrom in the earth subsided. The edge of the underwater plate ground to a halt, perhaps fifty feet from where it started. Along seven hundred miles of wild coastline, tribal communities who had never encountered each other rode out the final throes in tandem. In the stillness that followed, survivors must have felt as if they had slipped the clutches of an angry god. They couldn’t have known the most awful blow was yet to come.

  Triggered by the upheaval on the ocean floor, swells were hurtling toward the coast faster than any fish could swim. Would the sliver of moon have cast enough light to reveal the sea pulling back? Surely people heard the thunder as the surge neared shore and gathered height.

  The ocean stampeded across the land like a tide gone mad. No longhouse could stand up to the rush. Beaches where hundreds of thousands of tourists now fly kites and race three-wheelers on sunny days were swallowed by waves no man or beast could outrun. Uprooted trees became battering rams. Caught up in the icy water, people flailed desperately for anything to grab onto, anything to keep them afloat. Entire villages were swept away in a matter of moments.

  The earthquake that lashed the Pacific Northwest in 1700 ranks among the mightiest the Earth can yield. Scientists today call it a megaquake—a magnitude 9 monster that ripped the full length of the offshore fault where seafloor and continent collide, and unleashed a killer tsunami. Only a handful of seismic disasters in modern times have approached the same level of fury.

  No one who saw the videos from the 2004 Indian Ocean megaquake and tsunami will ever
forget the wall of water that pulverized cities and muscled through resorts as if they were made of cardboard. More than two-hundred thousand people died. The force of the fault rupture made the Earth wobble on its axis.

  In March 2011, an offshore fault ripped loose off Japan. The magnitude 9 quake shoved the island of Honshu eight feet to the east and triggered a tsunami that reached the closest shores in twenty minutes. A nation whose leaders thought they were prepared for the worst watched in horror as waves poured over seawalls and swept nearly twenty thousand people to their deaths. Nuclear reactors crippled by the flood melted down and spewed enough radiation to turn the surrounding countryside into a no-man’s-land.

  For Northwesterners, the images from Japan of doomed men and women running from the waves and tall buildings engulfed by water resonated in a visceral way. Even the world’s most earthquake-ready nation was no match for the kind of blow that had struck the Pacific Northwest more than three centuries ago—and which geologists now know will strike again someday. When it does, it will roil a human landscape that has undergone a tectonic shift of its own. The region called Cascadia is now home to more than fifteen million people and several of North America’s most vibrant cities, businesses, and ports.

  “The ‘Big One’ in the Pacific Northwest has the potential to be the most costly and destructive disaster in the history of the United States, both in terms of loss of life and economic damage,” said James Lee Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). “The long-term economic impact could alter our entire economy.”

  Analyses from Oregon put the state’s possible death toll at five thousand or more.

  Rough estimates of economic losses in Oregon and Washington approach $80 billion, without factoring in damage from Northern California and British Columbia.

  But the realization that the Cascadia region is vulnerable to the world’s most formidable earthquakes and tsunamis was slow in coming.

  In 1700, world maps showed a void north of California. (image credits itr1.1)

  When the 1700 megaquake struck, the Pacific Northwest didn’t exist in the eyes of the world. Most maps of North America showed a void above California. England’s colonies were thriving on the continent’s eastern shore, but explorers didn’t begin to chart the coastlines of the Northwest with their snow-capped peaks and impenetrable forests until the end of the century. It was the mid-1800s before European and American settlers began arriving in large numbers.

  By then, more than seven generations had passed since 1700. Some of the region’s indigenous people retained their collective memories of the cataclysm, but an onslaught of outsiders drowned out the native voices. The story of a night when earth and sea convulsed was lost to history.

  If the newcomers paused to consider earthquakes, as they must have after San Francisco was reduced to a smoldering wreck in 1906, it was to congratulate themselves for living in a more solid place than California. In the 1920s, a geology professor named Collier Cobb surveyed the Puget Sound area and pronounced it earthquake-proof. “Los Angeles may shimmy with earthquakes and San Francisco may get another one,” he said, “but Seattle, set on the deepest glacial drift yet discovered, has a shock absorber which makes the city immune for all time.” The Chamber of Commerce & Commercial Club liked the quote so much they featured it in national newspaper ads.

  It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that a young scientist digging in marshes along the Washington coast uncovered the first solid evidence of upheaval in the past. The rediscovery of the 1700 quake and tsunami is one of geology’s most remarkable detective stories. The finding ignited a revolution in earth science that’s still under way, still yielding insights into the forces responsible for both the region’s breathtaking beauty and its seismic perils. Once considered a backwater, the Pacific Northwest has been the epicenter of some of the world’s most exciting seismological research for nearly thirty years.

  Piece by piece, scientists have re-created a history fraught with mayhem. If there’s one thing geologists grasp more fully than most people, it’s that what happened before will happen again. “People look upon the natural world as if all motions of the past had set the stage for us and were now frozen,” said geologist Eldridge Moores, in John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World. “To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need.… [But] the time we’re in is just as active as the past. The time between events is long only with respect to a human lifetime.”

  Scientists now understand that the Northwest is even more seismologically complex than California, subject to three distinct types of earthquakes: deep, shallow, and 1700s-style giants. California may rock more often, but it can’t rock as hard or in so many ways. The 1700 megaquake was sixty times as powerful as the quake that destroyed San Francisco.

  Despite its outsized risks, the Pacific Northwest lags in its ability to cope with a restless Earth. Californians have had nearly two centuries to come to terms with the shaky ground they inhabit. In Japan people have been adapting to life with earthquakes for more than a thousand years. Northwesterners are still getting used to their region’s status as a seismic hot spot. For many, the discoveries of the past few decades have been nothing but bad news.

  But the work of a generation of geoscientists has given the region the gift of foresight. It’s better to know what’s coming than to be caught off guard. Geologists may never be able to predict earthquakes, but they have been able to map out the Northwest’s seismic destiny in a level of detail that hasn’t been matched in many other parts of the world. Without having suffered through a great earthquake in modern times, the Pacific Northwest has been granted the chance to get ready before the next one strikes.

  The new insights began to dawn in the 1960s, when geologists developed a comprehensive theory that for the first time made sense of why and where earthquakes occur. By the early 1970s, scientists strongly suspected the existence of an offshore fault—the fault that turned out to be responsible for the 1700 quake. But then they made the mistake of shrugging it off.

  CHAPTER 1:

  QUIET AS KANSAS

  ON A MISTY MORNING in October 2011, the Satsop nuclear plant’s cooling towers floated like twin mirages above Washington’s Chehalis River valley. Traffic was heavy on the highway that connects Olympia to the Pacific Coast. One after another, flatbed trucks, vans, and pickups exited onto a back road and wound their way to the plant’s hilltop perch.

  The parking lot was already packed. Men in cowboy hats and Carhartts prowled a warehouse the size of a football field, inspecting the items that were up for grabs. Pallets piled high with circuit breakers and heaps of rusted cable filled one corner. Fuses as big as flashlights spilled out of cardboard boxes like leftovers from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. An emergency eyewash station leaned against metal lockers stamped “Property of WPPSS.”

  “It’s basically a bunch of spare parts,” explained Stan Ratcliff. When Ratcliff hired on with the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) in 1981, he was one of more than five thousand workers at the Satsop site. If all had gone according to the utility consortium’s plans, a pair of pressurized-water reactors would be humming atop this ridge, thirty miles from the state capital. Instead, Ratcliff was overseeing a final fire sale to clear out odds and ends he squirreled away for decades.

  Bargain hunters gathered around as auctioneers kicked off the daylong marathon. Metal shelves fetched ten bucks. A contractor carted off three transformers at $400 apiece. Bidding was brisk on bins filled with nuts and bolts, though one man joked that he ought to scan the merchandise with a Geiger counter. The plant’s marquee components—the reactor vessels, steam generators, and condensers—had been sold off for scrap years ago.

  What remained were the towers, each nearly as tall as the Space Needle, and a sprawl of unfinished structures. The site is a business park now. One tenant fabricates steel tanks in the cavernous building where turbines would h
ave spun out enough power to run the city of Seattle.

  The plant never produced a watt.

  The Satsop reactors were among five WPPSS set out to build in the early 1970s, at a time when the atom’s promise seemed limitless and analysts warned that the Northwest would need twenty nuclear plants just to keep the lights on. Other utilities caught the fever, proposing reactors on the Oregon coast, the Columbia River, and in the Skagit valley north of Seattle. The threat of earthquakes barely factored into the equation, though why would it? This wasn’t California.

  It was economics, not seismicity, that toppled the WPPSS nuclear house a decade later and earned it the nickname “Whoops.” When construction costs ballooned more than fivefold and power shortages failed to materialize, the consortium defaulted on $2.25 billion in bonds. The debacle left a lingering distaste for nuclear energy in the Northwest and jacked up power bills to pay off the debt.

  But WPPSS left a scientific legacy too, one that’s still playing out across the region. The prospect of nuclear proliferation inspired the first hard look at the Northwest’s seismic nature. Armed with insights from a new field called plate tectonics, a handful of geologists started asking questions neither the nuclear industry nor much of the scientific establishment wanted to hear.

  The Cessna banked right and Tom Heaton squinted to make out the coastline through ribbons of fog. The plane was flying low, only a few hundred feet above the bluffs. The pilot warned he’d have to pull up fast or risk crashing into a headland if the cloud ceiling lowered. The previous day had been windy and clear, but Heaton still hadn’t spotted what he was looking for along the rim of the Northwest. The year was 1983 and he was on a mission for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Construction at the Satsop plant was in full swing. Experts hired by WPPSS had assured the NRC that its reactors were designed to ride out the worst possible earthquake, but the NRC wanted a second opinion.