Recent Stories with tag earthquake

February 28, 2001, at 10:54 a.m., a 6.8 "intraslab" earthquake shook the Puget Sound region for about 45 seconds. The Nisqually quake's focus was some 32 miles deep, in the Cascadia subduction zone. It might seem like things have been quiet since then, but as the graphic from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network illustrates, we live with minor quakes almost daily.

It's the effects of major earthquakes that are on everyone's mind recently, though. Andrew Rivkin, writing for the New York Times' Dot Earth, emphasizes that the news from Chile should spur preparations in the Northwest. "The Pacific 'ring of fire' doesn't stop at the equator," he writes. In this or the next generation, the Northwest will likely experience a megathrust quake similar to Chile's, which tend to generate tsunamis.

We tend to consider the averages of megathrust quakes over the centuries as their periodicity, but Chile's last megathrust quake was only 50 years ago.

As much as we talk about the "Big One" on the way, there are still troubling lapses. King County's emergency preparedness page specifically mentions bioterrorism, floods, and flu...not earthquakes.

The Seattle Channel has earthquake safety videos, and the city offers ongoing training programs, but when you search on "earthquake kit," the first page with the elements of a disaster kit was last updated in 1999. The pdf on "How to Prepare for Earthquakes" has a total of four bullet points on things you can do beforehand, including one sentence about keeping supplies in the home. Another piece of advice is to stop driving in an earthquake.

Here's SFGate's extensive earthquake kit suggestions. Trust the Californians. UPDATE: Or, trust the Red Cross.

You've probably spent a lot of time the past week watching video and photos, reading news articles and tweets about the Haiti earthquake. You've felt sorry for the Haitians, aghast at the scenes of death and ruin, and agonized over the condition of the survivors. But you probably haven't imagined anything remotely similar happening in the Seattle area.

Back in June 2005, a half year after the earthquake and tsunami in Southeast Asia, and over four years after the Nisqually earthquake, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the Washington Military Department brought out a "Scenario for a Magnitude 6.7 Earthquake on the Seattle Fault."

That is, an earthquake slightly lighter than what struck Haiti last week, and one that would come on the Seattle Fault, which runs through south Seattle, Mercer Island, Bellevue, and the Issaquah area. It wasn't pretty: the vision of the aftermath of a 14-mile surface rupture running roughly parallel to I-90 involved over 1,600 dead, another 24,000 wounded, $33 billion of damage, and months of transportation problems for Puget Sound.

The scenario said a 6.7 Seattle Fault quake will cause damage "far worse and more extensive than seen in any earthquake in the state's history."

"The viaduct will be heavily damaged or collapse," in a way very similar to how Oakland's Cypress Viaduct pancaked in the Loma Prieta quake, Boeing Field "will experience significant liquefaction" on its runways and close for several days, the Seattle ferry terminals "will shut down for at least a week due to damage from ground failures and failure of the seawall," and we'll see a lot of the brick buildings in Pioneer Square tumble, along with a lot of the concrete warehouses south of downtown....

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