
The Really Big One - Thevet
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
======
rfugger
I was in New Orleans in October 2002, and this guy was on the front page of
the main newspaper predicting that within 20 years a category 5 hurricane was
likely to whip around Florida and strike the city head on. He said the levies
weren't high or strong enough, and that downtown New Orleans would be under 20
feet of water:

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-
katrina.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html)

I remember reading it with interest and then shrugging and moving on with my
day. Three years later I remembered that moment and realized that as a society
we just don't care that much about our long-term safety.

~~~
nordsieck
Lots of people predict lots of catastrophes. The trick is identifying the
correct ones ahead of time. This is much more difficult than you are implying.

~~~
hrktb
I think it's still very simple. We can view it through the concept of discount
rate [0], basically people don't value a future event as much as a present
one.

The world ending in 50 years is not worth making drastic efforts now, at least
for most people. If your prediction is too costly on the short term, as
accurate as it can be most people won't act on it.

[0][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice)

~~~
lexcorvus
I suspect this is in part a side-effect of the Anglo-American (maturity-
mismatched) banking system, which keeps long-term interest rates artificially
low, leading to higher time preference.

~~~
eru
Wouldn't a lower interest rate cause us to value the future more? (Or you
mean, the natural interest rate should be higher?)

~~~
lexcorvus
Lower interest rates increase your relative propensity to spend by lowering
the opportunity cost of consumption. For example, if you have $10K and can get
only a 1% annual return, you might as well take that trip to Vegas. If you
could get a 15% return, though, you might rather stay home and rake in the
interest.

~~~
eru
OK, you basically have to compare your own internal discounting rate of
consumption with the public rate of interest offered on savings.

If your own internal rate is higher than the public one, then indeed you
should borrow to consume (or put off saving).

Companies only care about the public rate---if they have a higher rate of
reliable return internally, they can keep borrowing money to invest until
there's an equilibrium. A low interest rate makes companies more forward
looking.

------
anigbrowl
Meanwhile the barrier to a proper early warning system for the west coast is a
whopping $15.6 million a year, of which California has managed to get a whole
$5 million from Congress so far - [http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-
me-quake-early-wa...](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-quake-
early-warning-20141215-story.html)

Honestly, I'm a little unclear as to why we are even going to Congress for
this, instead of the governments of CA, WA and OR agreeing to divide up the
sum based on population or state GDP or some other obvious metric. The sums
involved are so small in budgetary terms as to seem less than the cost of
conducting studies and federal lobbying activities.

~~~
yclept
How about a kickstarter?!

~~~
anigbrowl
That's a fine idea. Now that you mention it I'm surprised it hasn't been tried
already (unless it has and failed...). I'll look into it.

------
Locke1689
Hmm, in the spirit of thinking of worst-case scenarios, most of the
engineering talent for Amazon and Microsoft is in Seattle and Redmond,
respectively. There's even a sizable percentage of Google cloud platform in
Fremont and Kirkland.

Even if most of the employees live, it's likely basic infrastructure will be a
disaster for quite a while. Maybe Google would be able to offload ops work to
Mountain View, but it seems likely Amazon.com, AWS and Azure would go down,
possibly for months. I wonder what the effect would be on the global economy.

~~~
waynecochran
Not only would there be significant downtime of major internet services, but
lots of people would die as well!

~~~
qq66
Downtime of major internet services could also cause deaths elsewhere, as more
industries become reliant on cloud services.

I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency
responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing
access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi
companies have gone out of business.

Of course all this stuff is supposed to have clean failover, but not all of it
has had its mettle tested.

~~~
zecho
Man. In times like these—the northwest falling into the ocean or whatever—it's
unimaginable to think about the sheer amount of data loss that could occur.
I'd probably be really worried about that loss of data or, worse, the loss of
_services_ if millions of people suddenly died.

~~~
myth_buster
Isn't it the case that there is replication across data centers which are
geologically spread apart?

~~~
deegles
Only if you had the foresight to set that up.

------
sharkweek
Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the
viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways!

While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going
to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!"
after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future.
But this article does seem to stretch itself into making me think that nothing
can really be done. It's not going to be realistic to establish safeguards
against an 8.5+ if it/or the subsequent tsunami is going to flatten the city
west of I-5

~~~
edgyswingset
I don't think a tsunami is going to flatten the city. A wave has a _lot_ to go
through (peninsulas, narrow straights, etc) before it could reach the city,
all of which would likely lessen its impact significantly. Where the area will
get hit hard, though, is liquifaction and landslides.

~~~
saintgimp
There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound,
though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast.
Everything is going to shift 30 to 100 feet west over the course of a couple
minutes - the water _in_ Puget Sound is going to slosh around like crazy.

------
davesque
FYI, the two-hundred year figure that this article mentions appears to be in
dispute. Wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earthquake_timing))
includes much more specific, cited information which puts the frequency at
300-600 years between significant quakes with the earthquake of 1700 having
occurred after a 780 year lull.

~~~
shas3
I am really interested to learn how they calculate the probability of 1/3\. I
think there is a legitimate question here about the methods used. In technical
terms: what is the sample space and what set are you looking for within that
sample space? How strong is the justification to treat the sequence of
earthquakes as a sequence of independent identically distributed random
numbers? Leaves me scratching my head. I looked at Professor Goldfinger's
papers and couldn't find a reasonable answer. Perhaps it is more fundamental
knowledge (e.g. something one would find in geology textbooks)?

~~~
chillacy
From what I've heard, earthquakes are frequently modeled as following a
poisson process

~~~
shas3
How reliable is such a model? I'd imagine they have gigatons of data on
earthquakes, so validating the model must be fairly straightforward.

------
kenferry
Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds
to catastrophe levels?

~~~
iamcurious
I like how you think. If we are going to have an earthquake, at the very least
we should have an scheduled organized mild one.

~~~
nappy-doo
On the Richter scale, the difference a full step (7.0 to 8.0) is about a
factor of 32. So if we're trying to mitigate an 8.0 earthquake every 100
years, you're talking about a magnitude 7.0 every 3 years to release the same
amount of energy.

Most engineering structures on the west coastare built to withstand a 6-7.
When a magnitude 8 comes (and it will come, and in some sense we're coming out
of the stress shadow from the 1906 quake just now) the devastation will be
horrendous.

*Editting to add: The structures on the west coast are engineered to withstand a SINGLE 6-7 magnitude event. Not one every 3 years.

~~~
freehunter
And even if they were built to withstand a mag 7 earthquake every three years,
the things inside of them likely won't be. Imagine the engineering that would
have to go into designing every single item in your house to withstand a
deadly earthquake on a regular basis. No more popping out to Ikea to grab the
same furniture everyone else uses. Your TV stand is on springs. Your TV is on
springs connected to the TV stand on springs. Your cupboards have notches
where your dishes can lock into them so they don't slide. The cupboard doors
have latches that let them open when pulled slowly, but resist opening when
sudden force is applied. Your refrigerator bolts to the floor and is filled
will elastic pockets that hold every item individually.

Its either that, or spend a significant amount of time every few years packing
all of your items into boxes to ensure they won't be damaged when it's
earthquake time.

~~~
chipsy
My mom's strategy for the biggest items: lash them to the walls so that they
don't topple or walk out of position. This doesn't solve the problems of
falling plates, but it does mitigate death-by-cabinet.

That said 80% of the benefits are in location. If you're on flat bedrock,
located away from the coast, you just don't feel the most intense shaking, and
you won't face a tsunami.

------
kragen
So how can you escape from a 10-meter tsunami, like the 11-meter Tohoku
tsunami that wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi, assuming you have years to prepare?

You _could_ build buildings that could withstand the water flowing around
them, as the nuclear reactor center itself did; but windows that can survive
not just ten meters of water pressure but also cars and trees being dashed
against them by the tsunami are going to be less like windows and more like
plastic-filled tunnels to the daylight.

You could ensure that all of your buildings are at least 10 meters tall, built
to withstand the tsunami without collapsing, and with adequate escape routes
to the upper floors, space therein to ensure that everyone can escape, and
emergency supplies (e.g. first-aid kits, food, water, insulin) to keep
incidental deaths to a minimum. Then you just have to get everyone up four
flights of stairs before the tsunami hits. The bottom floors will fill with
water, destroying everybody's TV, and then recede. Maybe make it 20 meters,
just in case the tsunami is extra huge, like the Kuril Islands tsunami of
2006.

Or you could build your houses a meter underground. You might lose the top
50cm of dirt cover, and if you illuminate with lightpipes, your lightpipes
will fill with silt and other mud; but you should be able to keep your
subterranean house well enough sealed that the water itself won’t be a
problem. Escaping the house after the water recedes, though, may be a problem
if you turn out to be in a sediment-deposition zone instead of an erosion
zone. Tunneling out, using a door built to open inwards specifically for this
purpose, may be your only option.

Other options are possible; Stapledon’s _Star Maker_ suggests taking flight
when the water is incoming, but that would seem to require a sufficient
population of evacuation helicopters to evacuate the entire population within
the few minutes of warning you have. This is probably not possible for
biological humans. And if you have boats, especially if you live in boats, you
could take them a few hundred meters offshore and be, in all likelihood,
perfectly fine.

How can we engineer human civilization to be robust against natural disasters?
The Chile and Haïti earthquakes of 2010 showed that there is enormous scope
for doing so; how can we do better?
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-
earthqu...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-earthquake-
co_n_479705.html)

~~~
obstinate
Running in the opposite direction and toward high ground is sufficient. In the
case of Japan's tsunami in 2011, there was 25 minutes of warning, which is
enough time to get clear of most inundation zones if you indeed do start
moving immediately.

This isn't a catchall solution (old folks, the disabled, children), but it
would work for a lot of downtown people.

~~~
kragen
It depends on how far away the high ground is. There are islands where it’s
hundreds of miles away (and putting out to sea is by far the better idea) but
even miles away would be too far to run for me.

~~~
obstinate
We're talking about Seattle. I don't know if you've been there, but most of it
is pretty hilly.

~~~
kragen
I used to live in Seattle — I used to bike up Yesler to go home from work —
but I was talking about tsunami zones in general, especially the Pacific
Northwest mentioned in the New Yorker article, not just Seattle. Maybe you
replied to the wrong thread by mistake.

------
interurban
For a good read on another somewhat overlooked seismic zone:
[http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm](http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm)

Most people don't think of the midwest/great plains states as being
seismically active, but they're home to some of the most geologically
interesting history in the United States.

~~~
sasvari
surfaced here just 3 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862451)

~~~
idlewords
Consider this an aftershock

------
stokedmartin
"The Cascadia subduction zone stretches from Cape Mendocino in northern
California to Brooks Peninsula on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a
distance of about 700 miles (1,130 km). All along this zone, which begins
beneath the seafloor to the west and extends inland towards the Cascade and
Coastal mountains, the subducting plates are forced beneath the North American
Plate. At a relatively shallow depth (less than about 20 miles/30 km down),
the plates have become stuck. Below this locked zone, warmer temperatures make
the plates more pliable, allowing them to move more readily past each other.
This freer movement deeper down causes strain to accumulate along the locked
zone. Once that strain is great enough to overcome the friction that keeps the
plates locked, the fault will rupture: the edge of the North American Plate
will lurch suddenly upwards and southwestwards as the subducting plates slip
under and northeastwards. With this movement, the deformed western edge of the
North American Plate will flex, causing the land along large sections of
Cascadia" [0]

Also check the diagram(s) for a better understanding.

[0][http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scen...](http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scenario_2013.pdf)

------
NDizzle
As usual, paste this exact url into a google search box to reach a non-
paywalled version of the article.

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2015%2F07%2F20%2Fthe-
really-big-one)

~~~
ForHackernews
or pay for the New Yorker because they do really excellent work.

~~~
skorecky
To read one article once every few months at best is not worth it.

Edit: I spoke my opinion. Down vote me!

~~~
3JPLW
(If you only read one article every few months, you wouldn't be hitting their
pay wall)

~~~
NDizzle
I am hitting their pay wall by occasionally clicking links from HN. I never
read the full articles, but I skim roughly 4x the amount of information
provided before the pay wall. It's not worth the full price for me. I'd like a
happy medium.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
So, your medium is free content as often as you want it? What's in it for
them?

~~~
PaulyGlott
There's no shortage of advertising on The New Yorker.

~~~
freehunter
That killed me when I subscribed to the NYT online. I was paying $15/mo and
seeing as many ads as I would expect from a free site. I love the NYT
journalism and am willing to pay for it, and I understand they have bills to
pay, but it's a lot of money to be sitting on ads. In fact I canceled my
subscription (not a quick or easy process) and have the same amount of
advertising on their NYT Now app whether I subscribe or not. So what's the
point?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
This is how dead tree magazines and papers work. You pay for a subscription
and you still receive ads. Why would they think the web should be any
different?

------
nkoren
I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a
lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with
a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which
will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would
work.

Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the
uncertainty surrounding its timing. " _Maybe it 'll be some other generation's
problem. Maybe we don't actually need to let it affect our thinking about
where we live and what we build._" This kind of thinking is expedient and
economical right up to the point where it gets absolutely everybody killed.

There's a second, somewhat less fundamental problem: the causality count can
depend dramatically on _exactly_ when the earthquake happens. It'll be worse
if it happens at high tide rather than low tide (the tsunami will reach
farther). Worse if it happens at night rather during the day (darkness is
harder for emergency services to cope with). Worse if it happens in the winter
rather than the summer (more deaths from exposure), etc.

These problems aside, a 9.0 with a tsunami is eminently survivable. You just
need to be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right types
of buildings / geology / topography, when it happens.

Anyhow, how do we solve these problems? Stopping the earthquake is out of the
question ... but _making_ it happen isn't. So here's what I propose: we
announce an exact date and time for the earthquake.

Give everybody, say, 30 years to prepare for it. That's a decent-enough
timescale for the sort of population displacements which will need to happen.
So we'll have the earthquake in 2045. Let's have it in the mid-summer, at 10AM
during a low tide, to minimise all the timing-related casualties. Then, at the
appointed time and date -- if the earthquake hasn't happened yet -- we set off
howevermany scores of nukes it's been calculated to take, drilled into the
subduction zone, to lubricate the fault enough for a full-fault rupture.
Shouldn't take _too_ much of a push to get things going.

Over the next 30 years, the absolutely certain foreknowledge of this event
would alter the planning, policy, and insurance environments dramatically.
Tsunami walls etc. would be built in areas which are planned to be defended.
In areas which cannot be defended and must be abandoned, the property prices,
development activity, and eventually population levels would gradually crash.
Within defended / geological stable zones, buildings which you want to be
standing in 31 years would still need to be retrofitted to survive a 9.0
quake; otherwise, they'd be torn down before that point. Finally, on the
appointed day of the quake, everybody could gather in the most geologically-
stable high-grounds they can find, and just sit back and watch the fun.

Of course there'd be a danger that the quake might arrive at a bad time before
then -- but even if it does, the incremental changes in land-use and the built
environment, which such a policy would provoke, would result in far fewer
casualties than our current trajectory.

Alas, it'll never happen, if only because a policy which results in the
_intentional_ destruction of millions of peoples' homes is a bit difficult to
sell in a democracy, even if it _would_ save tens to hundreds of thousands of
lives.

~~~
jsprogrammer
If you are now fully retrofitted to survive a 9.0, why do we _absolutely have
to set off this earthquake now_ using hundreds of nuclear bombs?

~~~
lifeformed
The point was that many optimizations can be made if you make the quake happen
at a specific time of day.

~~~
jsprogrammer
My point is that you can perform all of those optimizations and still not make
the quake happen (since all of the optimizations seem to be occurring before
the quake).

~~~
thedufer
A good chunk of the optimizations are timing related, though. Low tide,
summer, mid-day, etc. Not inducing the quake gives all of those up (not to
mention the moral hazard of lying about it mentioned by others).

------
VikingCoder
After watching the Japanese Tsunami, it got me wondering about a weather-
balloon-like device.

You strap it on like a life jacket, and you wait for the wave to come your
way. As it approaches, you pull the cord. Something that looks like a weather
balloon inflates, extends the length of a tether, and then you float a few
hundred feet in the air, and then float back down a while later.

Why is this a dumb idea?

~~~
freehunter
Where do you get the helium needed to make it fly through the air? If you're
just pumping air, at best you would float on water, which still leaves you
vulnerable to being killed by something else that is floating (possibly a
pickup truck, a growler of Rogue Dead Guy Ale or maybe the Space Needle).

~~~
mirimir
You'd get helium from a tank. But you'd need a regulator with a huge heat
exchanger to get fast inflation. Maybe use a high-volume whitewater kayak as
the "basket".

~~~
VikingCoder
Hmmm - how fast is fast?

Do you know how to actually do this math?

Like, to lift a 200 lb person, without a heat exchanger (or a more reasonably
sized one)?

How long would it take?

------
jchrisa
Portland has an admirable style when it comes to resilience. At least at the
grass roots. It'd be great to see an Apollo program around earthquake
preparedness.

There is a carry-heavy loads around the city cargo bike race that's been going
on for a few years.
[http://disasterrelieftrials.com/](http://disasterrelieftrials.com/)

------
someear
I like to think about how I'd react in the 15 minutes I have between the
earthquake and tsunami.

How tall would this tsunami be? Quick googling shows the tallest one ever is
524 meters. Assuming the tsunami is that tall, going into tall buildings might
not work - tallest building in Seattle, Columbia Tower, is 287 meters (+50m in
elevation increase), and is a few blocks from the waterfront . Best bet is to
run/bike up the hill to Capitol Hill, which is 100m higher in elevation, and
about 2 miles inland (and east of the I5).

Just need some science to figure out how far the wave will go given these hill
angles and elevations in Seattle to find a precise safe spot (assuming the
tallest tsunami ever, and assuming all other variables like me being able to
react instantly and fallen buildings not blocking my path stay constant, which
they of course won't).

~~~
chrisfosterelli
I wish I could find some definitive resources on whether or not a building
would be considered safe in a tsunami, and if it would be better to go for
higher floors or lower floors.

I imagine that after such a large earth quake, many buildings would be
unstable and potentially open to collapse from the force of a tsunami. I'm
sure going to higher ground would be a better idea if possible, but say if it
was iffy to get there in 10 minutes, should I spend that time looking for a
high building instead or just get as far inland as possible?

~~~
protomyth
Remembering a lot of the video from Japan, it looked like most of videos were
from people who went into parking garages (concrete)[1]. Regular buildings
took a pretty big hit, but I'm not sure how the local building code /
materials played in that.

1) I'm going with the logic that surviving video person uploading to youtube
is probably a good sample of the "worked" side of the equation.

~~~
pavedwalden
I suppose parking garages would let a lot of the water flow through the open
sides, whereas a regular building would receive a lot of force against the
exterior walls.

~~~
protomyth
Probably, and they are designed for a higher weight load than a regular
building.

------
sytelus
There are roughly 3 million people in this area. The really big earthquake may
cause death of 13,000 people - or about ~0.5% of the population. Chance of
that happening over next 50 years is 10%. In other words, if you were living
in this zone, your chance of dyeing due to a big earthquake over next 50 years
is about 0.05%.

It occurs to me that your chance of dyeing over next 50 years for reasons
_other_ than earthquake is 90%. Nevertheless, my hope from this article is
that government will invest much more in early warning systems and enact laws
to build structures to withstand such natural disasters. As it appears now,
government is starving off these kind of projects from funding.

------
kenferry
It would be nice if they'd cite their sources. This looks to be one of the
main ones:

[http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_...](http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scenario_2013.pdf)

But this is not nearly as dire. For example, "the Pacific Northwest’s largest
population centers and ports, including Portland (OR), Seattle and Tacoma
(WA), and Vancouver (BC), are not expected to experience any significant
tsunami impacts."

~~~
ryanSrich
I can't speak for any other cities but I do know that Portland is much too far
in land to be hit by a tsunami. The destruction within Portland would come
from the earthquake itself.

Also, here are some sources that seem to coincide with what the author wrote.

\-
[http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_...](http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_Plan_Final.pdf)

\- [http://i.imgur.com/MX7okVp.png](http://i.imgur.com/MX7okVp.png)

\-
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone)

------
graycat
Reminds me of the movie quote: "Wiped clean by the wrath of God.", I suspect
from one of the movies _Indiana Jones_.

Right, at

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark)

> Brody: However, about a year after the pharaoh had returned to Egypt, the
> city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a whole
> year. Wiped clean by the wrath of God.

------
meej
Outside Magazine did a great article about the Cascadia Subduction Zone a few
years ago.

[http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-
ri...](http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-rip-nine)

------
yread
Apparently it also created the Bridge of the Gods
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_(land_bridg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_\(land_bridge\))

------
cdsingh1001
the question I would be asking myself is Am I prepared for such a natural
disaster ? Or What steps can I take on a personal level to be ready ? For eg:
Always have an evac bag ready to take off Or live out of a suitcase so that I
dont have to worry about stuff & data. Or distribute my personal resources
(cards, cash) etc in PO boxes across the country. Ofcourse, in such a huge
disaster these steps wont matter but in small events, there might be of help.

~~~
chiph
ready.gov has some basic steps. But, they don't have enough emphasis on having
clean water, IMO. Having a storage sharing agreement with friends within a day
or two's walk could be useful, so if your home is destroyed (along with your
emergency supplies) your friend's might still be in good shape. And vice-
versa.

~~~
lsllc
Sadly, being well prepared with clean water, food, medicine and shelter does
you no good if someone else takes it from you. The very first item on your
list should be a powerful firearm & sufficient ammo.

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle has a pretty good take on
the post-apocalyptic chaos & breakdown in society that will likely ensue.

~~~
chiph
Agreed. But ... California makes that tough. Oregon & Washington are more in
line with the rest of the country. Something to check is whether your state
restricts carrying when a state of emergency has been declared.

------
astrodust
Worth noting that the state of warning systems there is somewhere between
dismal and non-existent and the disaster preparedness of most cities seems to
vary between unprepared and comically inept.

Is there anything anyone can do to set up an alert for these sorts of things?

If these predictions are true, there's a good chance that the entirety of
Silicon Valley could be utterly destroyed. You'd think people would take more
of an interest in preventing that.

~~~
cossatot
Earthquakes are, for now, impossible to predict so there is little forewarning
(and not for the lack of people trying). However, there is a huge interest in
the geological/hazards community in earthquake early warning systems in the
US, especially focused on California[1][2]. The Napa earthquake last summer
was the first real test of the more modern components and was successful. But
again, you're dependent on warning the populace after the earthquake has
begun, which isn't useful for people near the epicenter.

Tsunami warning systems have been in place for many places for decades;
whether people respond is a different story.

In terms of people preparedness, again, California is the leader in the US but
there are drills in many places[3], though they're generally voluntary and
totally ignored by most.

[1]:
[http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/)
[2]: [http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-
earthquake...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-earthquake-
earlywarning-system-gave-10second-alert-before-napa-quake-
felt-20140824-story.html) [3]

~~~
astrodust
It takes measurable time for communities miles away from the epicentre to get
hit, and in that time you could easily send a warning.

Many of the videos from the Japan tsunami showed people getting alerted well
before the quake hit. All TV stations flipped over to a warning screen with
information on the quake and a map of tsunami danger areas based on computed
projections.

I can see how having the fault line directly under your city is a problem, but
this "mega quake" is projected to originate off-shore.

I guess the US solution is to keep watching Twitter.

------
soperj
"The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast,
an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade
volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up
and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone
has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in
recorded history has it caused a major earthquake—or, for that matter, any
quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major
earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude
4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can
scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You
can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you
had them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver." This is total crap. There
was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Seattle in 2001.

~~~
jameshart
They are contrasting what they describe as weekly small quakes in Japan with
long periods of inactivity in the Pacific Northwest. A significant quake in
one city in the region 14 years ago doesn't invalidate the claim that you
could spend a significant time in the northwest without feeling a tremor.

~~~
jflatow
But the article says you could spend many lifetimes.

~~~
kenbellows
Maybe you could, as long as those lifetimes don't happen to contain that one
6.8 event. I don't think the point was to look back several lifetimes from
right now, but rather to talk about the overall frequency of earthquakes in
recorded history. (Caveat: I know nothing about the seismic history of the
Pacific NW, this is just how i read the statement.)

------
DubiousPusher
Seems the science on this may not be as settled as the article indicates.

nature.com/news/seabed-samples-cast-doubt-on-earthquake-risk-for-pacific-
northwest-1.15655

But I won't fault the author for not getting it quite right on a shifting area
of research.

------
kamilszybalski
These guys need to do a kickstarter - [http://grillo.io/](http://grillo.io/)

------
jebblue
I can't read the article, says I've read my last complimentary issue. That's
in Chrome, I added them to my allowed cookie list. It still doesn't work. I
tried Firefox with cookies enabled and it works so guessing something to do
with the ad cookies from their site I have blocked.

If I open an Incognito window in Chrome it works.

------
rexignis
There's a nuclear submarine base there too :(

------
cdelsolar
So SF is screwed right?

------
michaelvkpdx
Silicon Valley refugees and people complaining about Bay Area prices, please
note that this is 100% true. Portland will be completely wiped out within the
next couple years by a giant earthquake followed by a Sasquatch Apocalypse.

Don't move here. You will die. But please visit and enjoy your stay!

Love, Portland

~~~
callmeed
Also, please don't move to San Luis Obispo / Avila Beach. We have a nuclear
power plant on a bluff near a fault line.

Come visit though. We have great tri-tip and outdoor activities.

~~~
dnautics
not only that, it's called "diabolo canyon". I mean talk about tempting fate.

~~~
Mtinie
At the end of the road through Montaña de Oro State Park there's a warning
siren[1] that will go off if there's a problem at the Diablo Canyon facility.
Every time I get out there and see it there's a part of me that expects it to
start to blare... and I'm totally glad when I'm "disappointed" and it doesn't.

[1]
[http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/ful...](http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/fullsize/IMG_1350.jpg)

~~~
callmeed
Its fun when they test the sirens a couple times a year ...

------
iamjs
Does the New Yorker just inject random comics into their stories? None of
these illustrations appear to be related to the content.

~~~
MrZongle2
It's worse than that: none of those illustrations appear to be related to
_humor_.

Edit: Looks like we've got a couple of _New Yorker_ cartoon aficionados on HN.
I guess I'll have to save my stinging comments for edgier content, such as
Doonsbury and Garfield. /s

~~~
mathgenius
Yeah it is some kind if weird palette cleanse.

------
itistoday2
TLDR someone?

~~~
sswaner
The Really Big One: earthquake wipes out the Pacific Northwest.

Really needed that?

~~~
itistoday2
... this article seemed to be talking about a potential future earthquake. And
it's a very long article.

~~~
freehunter
It discusses why a big earthquake is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50
years with lots of flowery language and science. TL;DR: There's a big
earthquake that is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years.

~~~
itistoday2
Thanks freehunter, I appreciate you taking the time to do that. :)

------
notNow
A heads up: this peace is 6.3K+ word long and according to my estimate it
would take you around 45 mins to finish reading it.

Enjoy!

~~~
antod
Well, its title is "The really big one" after all.

~~~
notNow
Shouldn't it have been "The really LOOOONG one" instead?

------
fizixer
In recent past, I had this thought that Silicon Valley is sitting on top of,
or very close to, potential future fault activity. And I have a hard time
believing that the key component of human civilization (technology) is so
vulnerable, and was built after the 1906 disaster.

It's one of the factors I would consider when deciding if I really want to
move to west coast.

~~~
codingdave
You think technology is the key component to human civilization?

I would have thought of food.

~~~
munificent
Food _is_ a technology. Horticulture, breeding, domestication, threshing,
plowing, sowing, crop rotation, cooking, drying, pickling, brining, canning,
curing, refrigerating, etc.

Modern civilization is massively more efficient at extracting food from a
given piece of arable land than our hunter gatherer forebears were able too,
all thanks to thousands of years of food technology.

------
at-fates-hands
It's interesting to see several articles about this recently. Ever since I was
growing up in the 1970's, they've been talking about "the big one".

Here's the 1979 show "In Seach Of" discussing it:

Leonard Nimoy's narration is top notch as always:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs)

At the time of the video, they said over 15 million people live along the
various fault lines.

