Earthquake experts lay out latest outlook for the 'Really Big One' that'll hit Seattle

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Earthquake experts say current building codes don’t reflect the riskiest features of the Seattle area’s geology — but the outlook for survivability looks a lot better if the Really Big One can just hold off for a few more years.

That’s the bottom line from a session focusing on Seattle’s seismic hazards, presented at ground zero today during the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting. The session — titled “Is the Coast Toast?” — followed up on a 2015 New Yorker article that painted a grim picture of the possibilities, based on studies of the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia subduction zone.

The Cascadia subduction zone, centered along a submarine fault just off the West Coast, is known to be capable of generating magnitude-9 quakes, based on the geological and historical evidence for a massive tsunami that reached Japan in 1700.

Seismologists estimate that such quakes and tsunami waves occur roughly every 500 years on average. “We say that there’s approximately a 14% chance of another approximately magnitude-9 earthquake occurring in the next 50 years,” said Erin Wirth, a geophysicist at the University of Washington and the U.S. Geological Survey.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/earthquake-experts-lay-latest-outlook-030810234.html

[applegrove]

1. They showed a swamp on Vancouver Island that had been cleaved by

an earthquake in about 1700 on the tv. One part of the earth dropped two to three feet from the other. I can barely imagine what that would mean for the modern West. The 1700 one resulted in a huge tsunami as far away as Japan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake

[captain queeg]

2. That's a bit better outlook than what I heard

I was in a committee looking at CSZ a couple years ago. At that time they were saying a big one happens every 300-400 years and that we had a 30% chance of getting hit within the next 50 yrs. maybe they’ve fine tuned some of the data since then. But it was all pretty scary. Portland and Seattle and all the cities near the coast would be effected. The scariest part was how badly infrastructure would suffer and how it would take months for even basic services to be restored. Think roads, bridges, water supply, and the big one I hadn’t thought of was gasoline and other fuels. Any that could make it to the area would go to first responders. At least if you had gas and could find some roads that weren’t destroyed you could make it to the other side of the mountains which supposedly won’t be effected.