FEMA is planning for an earthquake that devastate the Pacific Northwest, killing 13,0000 people
FEMA is planning for an earthquake that would devastate the Pacific Northwest, killing at least 13,000 people.
To
the north of California's famous San Andreas fault is a less known, but
possibly more deadly, fault line. The Cascadia subduction zone runs
some 700 miles from northern California to Vancouver.
In a deeply
reported article for The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz tells the tale of
how this fault lies dormant for periods of 243 years, on average, before
unleashing monstrous tremors. The Pacific Northwest is 72 years overdue
for the next quake, which is expected to be between 8.0 and 9.2 in
magnitude.
At the upper end of that scale, Schulz notes, we
would experience "the worst natural disaster in the history of North
America." (The major 2011 earthquake in Japan was a 9.0, killing more
than 15,000 people.)
The Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) already has an emergency response plan for when this
earthquake hits. Parts of FEMA's quake expectations are truly
terrifying. As Schulz writes:
FEMA projects that nearly thirteen
thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another
twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it
will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food
and water for another two and a half million.
These projections are
based on a scenario that has the earthquake striking at 9:41 a.m.
February 6. (The agency isn't trying to predict the future or saying
that the earthquake will definitely occur then, they just need a date to
plan around.) The toll would be far higher on a warm day, when more
people — often huge crowds of people — are at the beach or in the water.
When
the quake does occur, its severe effects and the impacts of the
following tsunami ("It will look like the whole ocean, elevated,
overtaking land") will be felt all the way from Canada to Sacramento, in
densely populated cities like Seattle and Portland.
What's more,
the Pacific Northwest is not earthquake ready. Buildings aren't
retrofitted properly and there aren't many effective emergency warning
systems or escape plans in place.
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