It coming and here how
The outer coast will bear the brunt of tsunami damage after the next Cascadia megaquake, though smaller surges will travel up the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Columbia River. Puget Sound will be largely spared, but as this map shows, the entire Ocean Shores peninsula is likely to be underwater.
Where not to be in a quake: A survey identified 800 unreinforced masonry buildings mostly brick clustered in pockets around Seattle. The city is moving patagonia better sweater jacket nordstrom2slowly toward the type of mandatory retrofits that California has long required. The city is moving slowly toward the type of mandatory retrofits that California has long required.
Stories passed down from that night don tell us if dogs howled a warning. Huddled together in the cold, the animals might have sensed the first faint vibrations whipatagonia outlet new englandle the people still slept.
A quarter moon hung in the sky.
Far offshore, where only the boldest whalers paddled their canoes, a 700 mile long gash on the ocean floor was shifting. Masses of rock thrust past each other, grinding and buckling and jerking as if the planet were being torn apart.
People jolted awake in their longhouses. The motion pounded out a staccato rhythm, like a woodpecker hammering a tree. Cedar planks rattled and timbers groaned. In those first moments, it might have seemed as if a gale patagonia better sweater jacket nordstromwere sweeping in off the Pacific Ocean. But how could the wind rock the ground? Children cried out in fear. Men and women stumbled toward doorways.
The ground began to roll like the sea. People dropped to their hands and knees, felled by shaking so intense cedar bark baskets flew into the air. Ancient spruce trees whipped back and forth like saplings, raining branches onto the forest floor. The people lucky enough to make it outside clung in darkness to a world that seemed intent on casting them off.
As the seam in the seafloor continued to rip, the shaking swept along the western edge of North America. Under its thick blanket of mud, the margin of a great geologic plate shuddered and patagonia better sweater jacket nordstrom0slid westward, pulling the continent with it. Shock waves raced out in all directpatagonia duffel reviewions, traveling miles in seconds and rattling the shores of the inland sea many coast dwellers had heard of, and some had even visited. The people who live there today call it Puget Sound.
Carved posts that had supported plank buildings for generations crashed to the ground. It was January, and the people were gathered in lowland camps for the winter. The river mouths, where many longhouses clustered, were the first to turn to jelly and spout geysers of watery sand. At the confluence where Portland would later spring up, sandbars vibrated into a slurry. Fountains spurted from spruce swamps along the Columbia River. The tideflats of the Duwamish River, today the busy port of Seattle, trembled and split. In the night, no one saw the undulations. Only later would people notice strange patterns left behind in the sand and silt.
Forested slopes gave way, rushing downhill in a tumult. Ripatagonia gen 3 pcu soft shell for salever valleys and shorelines quivered and dropped by several feet. Stands of cedar that had sprouted centuries ago were suddenly below sea level. Some of the gray haired elders had felt the earth shake before; this time they wondered if it would ever stop.
When earthquakes strike urban areas, they give off a dull roar like a jet passing overhead. The din rises from thousands of structures vibrating and grating against each other. What would the sound have been like centuries ago, when there was just the thrashing of forests and the wrenching of miles thick chunks of crust?
Like a storm with its strength spent, the patagonia backpacks reviewmaelstrom in the earth subsided. The edge of the underwater plate ground to a halt, perhaps 50 feet from where it started. Along 700 miles of wild coastline, tribal communities that had never encountered each other rode out the final throes in tandem. In the stillness that followed, survivors must have felt as if they had slipped the clutches of an angry god. They couldn have known the most awful blow was yet to come.
Triggered by thpatagonia capilene 3 washing instructionse upheaval on the ocean floor, swells were hurtling toward the coast faster than any fish could swim. Would the sliver of moon have cast enough light to reveal the sea pulling back? Surely people heard the thunder as the surge neared shore and gathered height.
The ocean stampeded across the land like a tide gone mad. No longhouse could stand up to the rush. Beaches where hundreds of thopatagonia better sweater jacket nordstrom1usands of tourists now fly kites and race three wpatagonia outlet store foley alabamaheelers on sunny days were swallowed by waves no man or beast could outrun. Uprooted trees became battering rams. Caught up in the icy water, people flailed desperately for anything to grab onto, anything to keep them afloat. Entire villages were swept away in a matter of moments.
THE EARTHQUAKE that lashed the Pacific Northwest in 1700 ranks among the mightiest the Earth can yield. Scientists today call it a megaquake a magnitude 9 monster that rippatagonia better sweater wax redped the full length of the offshore fault where seafloor and continent collide, and unleashed a killer tsunami. Only a few seismic disasters in modern times have approached that level of fury.
No one who saw the videos from the 2004 Indian Ocean megaquake and tsunami will ever forget the wall of water that pulverized cities and muscled through resorts as if they were made of cardboard. More than 200,000 people died. The force of the fault rupture made the Earth wobble on its axis.
In March 2011, an offshore fault ripped loose off Japan. The magnitude 9 quake shoved the island of Honshu eight feet to the east and triggered a tsunami that reached the closest shores in 20 minutes. A nation whose leaders thought they were prepared for the worst watched in horror as waves poured over sea walls and swept nearly 20,000 people to their deaths. Nuclear reacpatagonia discount code yoshi'stors cripppatagonia discount code zenniled by the flood melted down and spewed enough radiation to turn the surrounding countryside into a no man land.
For Northwesterners, the images from Japan of doomed men and women running from the waves and tall buildings engulfed by water resonated in a visceral way. Even the world most earthquake ready nation was no match for the kind of blow that had struck the Pacific Northwest more than three centuries ago and which geologists now know will strike again someday. When it does, it will roil a human landscape that has undergone a tectonic shift of its own. The region called Cascadia is now home to more than 15 million people and several of North America most vibrant cities, businesses and ports.
One in the Pacific Northwest has the potential to be the most costly and destructive disaster in the history of the United States, both in terms of loss of life and economic damage, said patagonia better sweater jacket nordstrom3James Lee Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). long term economic impact could alter our entire economy.
Analyses from Oregon put that state possible death toll at 5,000 or more.
Rough estimates of economic losses in Oregon and Washington approach $80 billion, without factoring in damage from Northern California and British Columbia.
But the realization that the Cascadia region is vulnerable to the world most formidable earthquakes and tsunamis was slow in coming.
When the 1700 megaquake struck, the Pacific Northwest didn exist in the eyes of the world. Most maps of North America showed a void above California. England colonies were thriving on the continent eastern shore, but explorers didn begin to chart the coastlines of the Northwest with their snow capped peaks and impenetrable forests until the end of the century. It was the mid 1800s before European and American settlers began arriving in large numbers.
By then, more than seven generations had passed since 1700. Some of the region indigenous people retained their collective memories of the cataclysm, but an onslaught of outsiders drowned out the native voices. The story of a night when earth and sea convulsed was lost to history.
If the newcomers paused to consider earthquakes, as they must have after San Francisco was reduced to a smoldering wreck in 1906, it was to congratulate themselves for living in a more solid place than California. In the 1920s, a geology professor named Collier Cobb surveyed the Puget Sound area and pronounced it earthquake proof. Angeles may shimmy with earthquakes and San Francisco may get another one, he said, Seattle, set on the deepest glacial drift yet discovered, has a shock absorber which makes the city immune for all time. The Chamber of Commerce Commercial Club liked the quote so much they featured it in national newspaper ads.
