PNW Earthquake Preparedness
Robert Yeats knows a lot about earthquakes. He’s based his professional career on them and has even written a book about them. In the introduction to that book, Yeats describes an encounter he had with his neighbor when he first moved up to Oregon. He was introducing himself to the new neighbors and mentioned to one of them that he was a professor studying earthquakes. The neighbor, slightly incredulous, replied, “Earthquakes? You gotta be kidding!”
“You gotta be kidding,” or some derivative of it, was the response of many Oregonians before recent events. This is not because Oregon residents did not care about the dangers that an earthquake in their state could cause, or that they didn’t believe the data– there simply was no data to be believed.
Earthquakes were traditionally not viewed as a threat for Oregon, and for good reason. Ever since the arrival of Americans in the Pacific Northwest circa Lewis and Clark, there has not been a single major earthquake in the area. In fact, there hasn’t even been a minor one. And for the longest time, this was accepted as the way it was. The Pacific Northwest just didn’t have earthquakes.
In recent years though, that belief has been overturned. In the 1970s, scientists discovered the Cascadia Subduction Zone off of the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The zone is an intersection of the continental plate that the Northwest lies upon and an oceanic plate to the west. And while the zone was discovered the 1970s, it wasn’t fully understood until the 1980s and it wasn’t until the 1990s that scientists found evidence that the Cascadia Zone had even produced earthquakes.
The last known earthquake that the zone produced, according to experts was in 1700, a massive 9.0 shaking that triggered a tsunami that drowned the Oregon coast. The quake was so large in fact, that it also triggered a tsunami heading in the opposite direction that would severely damage the Japanese coast.
There are two ways to view that finding: either that Cascadia quakes happen so infrequently that they don’t need to be worried about too much, or that the Northwest is long overdue for a major quake. The data suggests that it is the latter. If one calculates the average interval between earthquakes in this area of the world, the result is 243 years. Simple math reveals that over 300 years have passed since the last Cascadia quake. This delay coupled with the already protracted interval means that humanity can quickly can become complacent about the dangers beneath them.
As Kathryn Schulz wrote in her influential New Yorker article about the Cascadia zone “The Really Big One,” “(The interval is) long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line.”
In order to combat against a Cascadia quake, people first need to know what makes it tick, so to speak, so that they can specialize their defenses against one. The nature of the plate intersection that creates the Cascadia zone is what makes the zone for dangerous for Oregon. Normally, the more malleable oceanic plate would gradually slip underneath the continental one and life would continue uninterrupted.
Except that’s not what’s happening. What is happening is that the continental plate is being compressed up against the oceanic plate, not unlike the end of a pencil about snap.
“The plate is just bending, slowly building up energy,” Lucy Walsh, a coordinator at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) said. “When all that energy gets released, that’s when you get a 9.0 quake.”
Walsh explained that the danger of 9.0 level quakes isn’t just that they’re bigger than normal tectonic events, it’s that they’re orders of magnitude bigger. Because the Richter Scale is logarithmic, the difference in power between each successive level on the scale goes up exponentially.
“A 9.0 isn’t 30 percent stronger than a 6.0 (an average rating for a decent sized earthquake),” Walsh said. “It’s 900 times stronger.”
The fact that the Cascadia zone can produce 9.0 level earthquakes seems to support Schulz’s classification of it as the worst fault line in the country. In many ways, the comment isn’t hyperbole. In fact, according to Walsh, the unique geology of the Cascadia zone makes in intrinsically more dangerous than other fault lines.
The first way is the 9.0 tectonic events. Subduction zones like the Cascadia are the only fault lines that can even produce such large earthquakes; it’s simply not geologically possible for other areas to do so.
The second difference is depth. Some earthquakes, like those produced by the San Andreas fault in California are what geologists call “shallow” quakes, meaning that their damage is high at the epicenter, but is reduced the farther out you go. But the Cascadia zone naturally makes deeper quakes, meaning that the reach of its damage is far more than anything San Andreas can produce.
“Even though the actual fault line is off of the coast,” Walsh said, “A deep quake can still have severe impact as far inland as here in Eugene, and possibly farther.”
That depth however, is the key to Walsh’s other job at PNSN: detection. In addition to just studying earthquakes Walsh is also working on a way to detect them before they reach people and to convey that warning in an efficient manner. The result of all that is ShakeAlert, a program that not only detects earthquakes but sends notifications to users about the incoming event.
ShakeAlert was initially devised in Southern California due to the presence of the San Andreas fault, but the PNSN has adapted it for use in the Northwest. Like many things related to earthquakes, ShakeAlert makes use of a quake’s natural geology to notify users of incoming quakes.
When a quake happens, Walsh says, there are two stages or “waves” of the quake. The first is the primary, or p-wave, a shallow wave sent out ahead of the actual quake, which is designated as the secondary or s-wave. ShakeAlert uses sensors across the state to track incoming p-waves and then computers quickly calculate how much time a person has until the quake as well as how strong it is.
From the time the p-wave hits to the alert coming in, all those calculations take about two seconds. Once the alert arrives, users have anywhere from 10 seconds to two minutes to prepare before the quake hits.
Two minutes might not seem like a lot, and ten seconds might be even less so, but Walsh stresses that it is.
“Count off 30 seconds in your head. It feels like an eternity,” Walsh said. “It’s more than enough time to get under a table to cover and hold.”
Walsh also says that those who have longer countdowns might even be able to do things to avert potential damage in their home, like turning off their gas line before the quake hits.
And though ShakeAlert is doing some promising beta testing, don’t go looking for it in app stores just yet. It currently only has a desktop mode with a limited number of users at the moment. Next year, Walsh says, the desktop mode will begin an incremental rollout to some members of the public, likely university faculty members so they can do real world, classroom testing. The phone app is coming, Walsh says, she just doesn’t know when.
“We want to see how people react and how people interact with the app,” Walsh said. “We don’t want to give people this tool only for them to not know how to use it, or worse, to panic.”
A Cascadia earthquake is clearly not something that can be stopped nor can it be avoided, save for moving clear across the country. Since it is all but unavoidable, cities that will be affected by the quake are focusing their time and energy not on prevention, but on preparation, hoping that residents will be fully ready to wait out not only a Cascadia earthquake, but the days after it as well.
That’s where Patence Winningham comes in. Winningham is a Senior Program Coordinator at the City of Eugene’s Emergency Management Department. Among the many things under her purview, two are critical to earthquake preparedness: helping to run Eugene’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) group and talking with people about how they can make sure that they are ready for an event like a quake.
The CERT group, Winningham says, will be a crucial resource for Eugene when the Cascadia earthquake hits. The group is a community institution that has trainers teach regular, everyday residents how to react and respond during emergencies, such as an earthquake. According to Winningham, the Eugene/Springfield CERT Team has trained roughly 1600-1700 people to date.
“We give CERT members the tools and resources they need so that they can go back to their community and build their own team, so that they can respond to their neighbors (in an emergency),” Winningham said.
In her talks with community members, Winningham emphasizes that they need to be prepared to wait a bit for help to come and for what she calls “gaps in government.” For example, the area of Eugene represented by the Southeast Neighbors Association has a population of around 16,000 people. It also has exactly one firehouse, run by precisely four guys.
It’s this lack of instant help that Winningham wants people to know about. She talks to people about how much water you need, how long you should prepare to be without aid and other details like that.
The answers to those questions, by the way? The standard figure is that you need one gallon of water per person, per day. And experts predict that anyone in the Eugene area should prepare to be on their own for up to two weeks following a Cascadia event. If you live on the coast, that number doubles, up to a full month.
“It’s all about knowing what you know,” she said. “People can’t help themselves if they don’t know how to do it.”
James Wooten is a enthusiastic proponent of Winningham’s “know what you know” mentality. A recent Eugene resident, Wooten moved out west a few months ago from North Carolina and has been shifting his disaster mindset from hurricanes to earthquakes.
“They’re not that different I think, hurricanes and earthquakes,” Wooten said. “You need to know how you’re prepared and how you’re going to respond for both.”
Wooten is probably better prepared than the average citizen, in part because he’s learned by experience. In North Carolina, he says, hurricanes come through every one to three years. It’s that repeated exposure, that “muscle memory,” as he calls it, that has allowed him to become more aware of what he needs to do to be ready for an emergency.
The flip side of this is that since earthquakes are so infrequent in the Northwest, the cities here haven’t had the chance to experience a real, live disaster. In Wooten’s opinion, there’s only so much communities and others can learn from drills and events like the Great Shakeout.
“The people and the city probably won’t respond (to an earthquake) as well as they could the first time around, because they haven’t gone through it before,” Wooten said.
But despite this lack of experience and the resistance to prepare caused by the long gaps between quakes, Wooten still encourages anyone he talks to to do as much as they can, if only for their peace of mind.
“When a hurricane– or earthquake– hits, I can go to work much easier knowing that my wife and kid are safe at home, that they have enough food and water to get through the day, then I could if I didn’t know that,” Wooten said.
Community preparedness is one thing. But in a college town like Eugene, earthquake preparedness is almost like fighting two separate battles. On the one hand, there’s community preparedness covered by Winningham and in the future, Walsh’s ShakeAlert. Then there’s also the college, a small city unto itself and one with its own issues and idiosyncrasies to be dealt with in the event of a disaster. That’s the job of Krista Dillon, the Director of Operations for the university’s Safety and Risk Services Department.
Dillon explained that while community preparedness is critical, the university has its own special needs that have to be addressed in the event of an earthquake. Most crucially, how is the university going to care for the nearly 25,000 students who might be on campus when the quake hits?
Dillon says that there are multiple pieces of preparedness that are being coordinated within the university to ensure that the campus can handle a Cascadia earthquake as well as it is able to. One way this is being done is working on reinforcing and retrofitting the older, unreinforced buildings on campus. Buildings like Ansett, Fenton and Straub Halls all have undergone retrofits in recent years to bolster their stability in the event of a quake.
Dillon’s department also oversees the on campus Incident Management Team, a group of about 60 people who are trained by FEMA in crisis response. They work out of an operations center where they can coordinate response across campus with various departments and if traditional communications are down, the IMT also has ties to amateur ham radio operators in the area who have pledged to help the team in the event of an emergency.
“We’re really lucky to have the IMT,” Dillon said. “They’re very well trained and not many campuses have such a robust response team.”
Another important piece of the preparedness puzzle is the the Disaster Resilient Universities (DRU) program, a collation of institutions across the country focused on assisting each other in the event of a natural disaster, earthquake or otherwise. The University of Oregon was one of the founding members of DRU in 2005 and the group has grown to include representatives of over 800 schools.
Dillon says that the DRU is basically an agreement to provide “network of support” if a disaster should strike any member institution. If that were to happen, then neighboring colleges that are part of DRU would send supplies to the afflicted campus.
“It basically lets us send up a flag saying ‘We need help’ when something bad happens,” Dillon said. “When we send up that flag, we know that help is coming.”
Despite all the efforts made by people like Winningham, Walsh and Dillon, the greatest aid for a city affected by a Cascadia event will be how prepared each individual resident is.
“It’s on them (to be sufficiently prepared for a quake),” Winningham said. “They need to know that help probably won’t be coming right away.”
Despite this, actually getting people to prepare is a difficult task. Walsh, Wooten, Winningham and Dillon all agree that people, at least in the Northwest, aren’t chomping at the bit to stock up on supplies and make emergency plans. Walsh thinks is is in part due to the intervals between quakes (she imagines “It won’t happen in my lifetime” is a common thought among residents), but Dillon is of the opinion that it’s more sociological.
“It’s a hard sell. We live in a culture where preparedness is ‘difficult’, where it’s extra work to be done,” Dillon said. “Still, things will turn out much better if people take the time to prepare for this than if they do not.”