In Our View: Get Ready for The Big One

They were small, unnoticeable to those of us living our lives in a bucolic region of the earth. And yet they made us think.

A pair of earthquakes struck off Oregon’s central coast in late November, measuring magnitudes of 4.9 and 4.8 several miles below the Pacific Ocean. And while neither of these were The Big One of which we have been repeatedly warned, they were a reminder that we live in earthquake country and that The Big One will eventually strike.

Last year, writer Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker painted a post-apocalyptic portrait of just what The Big One will mean. She mentioned that federal authorities estimate 13,000 fatalities, 27,000 injuries, 1 million people requiring shelter, and 2.5 million needing food and water. She quoted Kenneth Murphy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency as saying, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” And her editors wrote a sub-headline saying, “The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent.”

As much as we like to pretend that we can, humans are unable to prevent such an occurrence. And yet there are measures that can better prepare Washington for a large-scale earthquake — measures that largely have been ignored.

As The Seattle Times has noted in an ongoing series of stories about earthquakes and our preparedness for them, Oregon and California have laws regarding seismic upgrades for schools, and British Columbia is spending $3 billion on such upgrades. Washington, however, has no provisions for seismic standards on school buildings. This is disturbing, considering that the Times estimates that an earthquake of a 9.0 magnitude and a resulting tsunami could kill as many as 7,600 students and staff members while causing $4 billion in damage to schools.

As Schulz wrote, the people of the Northwest have been “lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment.” That is understandable, but it does not mean that such complacency is acceptable. Experts believe that, over the past 10,000 years, the Cascadia subduction zone has rearranged itself an average of every 243 years. They also believe that — using accounts from Native Americans in the region and reports of a tsunami in Japan — the last major earthquake hit the Northwest in January 1700. That means we are now 316 years into a 243-year cycle.

This would seem to be a call for some preparation, and as lawmakers delve into the pressing issues facing the state during next year’s legislative session, they should heed that call.

Requiring seismic assessments and upgrades to schools should be the first priority, and that priority should be a natural part of the massive education funding that is expected to come out of the Legislature. But attention also should be paid to the seismic sturdiness of roads and bridges, to standards for existing buildings, and to an early warning system that detects compressional waves at the fault line and automatically shuts down railroads, power plants, and public transportation. The dystopian FEMA projection is that half of all highway bridges will fail in a major earthquake, meaning that any effort that reduces the number can be seen as a worthy investment.

Because the fact is that we live in earthquake country, even if we are nonchalant about it. And when The Big One hits, we won’t be able to say that we were not warned.