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...
Imagine the life-raft bundled around a central high powered air pump and heating unit which could deploy in seconds and heat enough air to generate the lifting power to get 6-10 adults/children (plus raft/heater/pump) in the raft to 15 meters in air within the remaining time before the wall of water/debris crushes you all. You would only need to maintain that altitude for long enough to get a tow from a helicopter (or drone) to safety or for the waters to recede.
It's doesn't seem like an easy engineering problem and I didn't even do any back of the envelope calculations to see the power required to lift 1000-1500lbs 15 meters in 10 minutes, but my gut says it's totally within the realm of our current engineering capabilities.
If we could build such a device that could be mass-produced for a reasonable cost and deployed en masse to schools and other highly populated areas within the subduction zone, it could potentially save thousands of lives that would otherwise have 0 chance of survival.
The problems that would need solving and the potential life-saving potential has me kind of excited and my brain is already getting ahead of itself thinking Kickstarter. So if you or anyone else would like to talk some more about this, I'd be more than game to start getting technical.
If anyone sees a glaringly obvious problems in this, please don't hesitate to call it out rather than just rolling eyes and moving on... wish I'd put this up when it was still on the front page.
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.
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.
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.
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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...