One of the charms of Washington’s Pacific Coast is that it’s essentially undeveloped. The beaches stretching from the mouth of the Columbia River to the Strait of Juan de Fuca seem gloriously wild and secluded. While it’s hard to get there, it’s also hard to escape, which is a growing concern for many people living on the outskirts of the state.
At the bottom of the ocean, about 70 miles offshore, two tectonic plates are rubbing against each other along the Cascadia Fault. Unlike fault lines in California that slip and slide in relatively frequent earthquakes, the Cascadia Fault takes its time between literal Earth-shaking events. Which means, when the break does finally come, it will be massive. An epic earthquake will trigger and propel a huge wall of water that will hit the coast in just 10 or 15 minutes, drowning coastal communities in a 23-foot-deep deluge of water.
About 70,000 people now live in the path of this potential tsunami, and 32,000 of them have no means of quick escape to higher ground. Add to that the thousands of people at risk along the coasts of Oregon and northern California, and it could turn out to be the deadliest natural disaster in US history.
The question is not whether it will happen. It will be. This is how our planet works. The crucial and unanswered question is when. Scientists give a 1 in 9 chance of a 9.0 mega-earthquake in the next 50 years and a 1 in 3 chance of a sizeable 7.0 earthquake in the same period.
Some people are content to live with these probabilities; a beachfront home is a hard thing to give up, after all. And, anyway, it could still be 100 years before the big wave arrives.
But it could also be tomorrow.
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