Oregon town plans first tsunami-resistant building

[depakid]

An Oregon coastal town hopes to put its new City Hall on stilts and become the first U.S. city to raise a municipal building to withstand the major earthquake and tsunami that scientists say are coming sooner rather than later. City officials and emergency workers hope the building in Cannon Beach will also raise a sense of urgency in the Pacific Northwest about the jeopardy coastal residents and visitors face.

Geological findings in recent years suggest there's a one-in-three chance that in the next half century a mega-earthquake will tear the seafloor apart off the Oregon Coast.

Huge waves would surge onto coastal communities in as little as 15 minutes. There isn't a coastwide estimate of potential lives lost and damage, but about 100,000 Oregonians live in tsunami inundation zones. Many more visit the coast. The $4 million building the city proposes in Cannon Beach would have room for as many as 1,500 people, and could save lives.

...The 2004 Sumatra tsunami, which killed almost 230,000 people, galvanized federal emergency planners and coastal communities. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent engineers to learn what buildings withstood the earthquake — measured at magnitude 9.1 to 9.3 — and cataclysmic waves.

They found that buildings on stilts, without impediments that increased the stress of the on-rushing water, often survived, said Jenifer Rhoades, tsunami program manager for the National Weather Service. The Cannon Beach structure would be the first "vertical evacuation site" built in the United States, she said.

Japan has built several of the buildings but they've never been tested.

..."Imagine a July 4 weekend with an additional 200,000 people at the coast," said James Roddey of Oregon's geology agency. "That's a lot of folks who don't know what to do if the ground starts shaking.

More: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/05/31/state/n104109D88.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0pdqBCjqI

[Ruby the Liberal]

1. Nature.com Risk of giant quake off American west coast goes up

America's Pacific Northwest has a 37% chance of being hit by a magnitude 8 or larger earthquake in the next 50 years, a new study shows. That's more than double previous estimates of a 10-15% risk, says Chris Goldfinger, a marine geologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

In a monograph1 soon to be published by the US Geological Survey, Goldfinger and colleagues examined more than 80 core samples taken from the seabed between Vancouver Island, in south-western Canada, and Cape Mendocino, in northern California, looking for deposits from submarine landslides triggered by massive earthquakes.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100531/full/news.2010.270.html

[depakid]

2. There's a very cool book written about the last major event on the Cascade Subduction Zone

The outside world scarcely knew of northwestern North America in the year 1700. The Pacific coast, from southcentral Alaska to Oregon's Cape Blanco, was uncharted until the Spanish and English explorations of the 1770s. Yet, when tectonic plates suddenly shifted there in 1700, a train of ocean waves - a tsunami - sped across the Pacific Ocean. When the waves came ashore in Japan, they flooded fields and washed away houses. Samurai, merchants, and villagers recorded the mysterious event, but they observed no storm and felt no parent earthquake. In Japan, this tsunami was an orphan.

The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 tells this transpacific detective story by presenting its primary sources, Japanese documents and North American sediments and tree rings. They tell of a catastrophe a century before Lewis and Clark's expedition that now guides preparations for future earthquakes and tsunamis in the North Pacific.

A rich array of graphic detail and narrative explains the creation, action, and lasting effects of earthquakes and tsunamis.

Brian F. Atwater is a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and an affiliate professor of earth sciences at the University of Washington. Satoko Musumi-Rokkaku teaches at Obirin University, Tokyo. Kenji Satake is deputy director of the Active Fault Research Center for the Geological Survey of Japan. Yoshinobu Tsuji is associate professor at the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo. Kazue Ueda is retired from the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo. David K. Yamaguchi is a statistician at the Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative, Seattle.

"Paddling around the salt marshes and tidal flats of Washington State, Atwater discovered evidence of earthquakes and giant waves of a magnitude that seemed, to many, inconceivable - until late last year, when a tsunami of similar power tore across the Indian Ocean, killing more than 200,000." - Time Magazine, naming Brian Atwater one of the world's 100 most influential people of 2005

Hear Brian Atwater on NPR with Renee Montagne http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4629401

More: https://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/ATWORP.html

[Ruby the Liberal]

3. Wow! I never knew this. Thanks for the links!