Catastrophic Cascadia

Not an if, a when, and it'll be relative soon.

The U.S. west coast gets a massive megaquake, worse than Fukushima, about every 300 years. Sometimes they’re merely region wreck 8.3 to 8.5s, but eleven of them in the last 7,000 years have been 9.0+, including the most recent. The ground shook so hard at 9:00 PM on January 26th, 1700, that Japanese coastal villages caught an orphan tsunami.

This report goes to a place most coverage has not - the massive number of industrial facilities around Portland, Oregon. We could have a Deepwater Horizon sized oil spill there, and it would happen not in months, but in minutes.

The U.S. west coast is going to be building for artificial intelligence and fusion. Since we’re forward looking and reality based, we’ll be factoring in climate change. If we’re wise, and I think we might just get there, we’ll be preparing for the inevitable day the San Juan de Fuca plate lunges eastward. The 300 year average is just an average; it could be tomorrow afternoon, it could wait until the 500 year anniversary of the last megaquake.

Fukushima, in 2011, had almost 20,000 dead and 2,500 gone, never to return. We’re a thousand years behind them in terms of preparedness. We’d better get moving.