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Does anyone here live on the West Coast? Anyone at all?
-- Paravani
This week there WERE additional "foreshock" quakes that warn of increasing seismic instability on the West Coast.
I grew up in California and had to listen to all the doomsday "big one" garbage.
I was in Monterey all last week and don't recall a 8-9+ quake happening.
Hello, All!
This is to notify you that a very large earthquake measuring 8 to 9+ on the Richter scale could strike the West Coast of the United States this week, possibly as early as today.
Note the word "could" in the first sentence of the thread.
I'm very glad that it didn't happen last week! That does NOT, however, mean that it won't strike THIS week, nor that it is LESS likely to strike this week since it didn't strike last week.
The fact is that we haven't gone this long without a Mega-Quake since before humanity invented the wheel... and seismic conditions are ripe for it.
I repeat: This week there WERE additional "foreshock" quakes that warn of increasing seismic instability on the West Coast.
You will note on the USGS live earthquake map that there was a 6.0 in Southern Mexico at 1:20 this morning (PST). That signals increasing West Coast instability both north AND south of the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
This week there have also been many more small quakes on the boundary between the Juan de Fuca and the North American plate than one usually sees. Normally most small quakes in Washington and Oregon are in the mountains, the Cascades and the Olympics. To see so many quakes just offshore is extremely unusual.
There's also a wealth of statistical information regarding historical earthquake activity. The graph below represents the total strength of all earthquakes worldwide of magnitude 4 and above each year. It may be found at dlindquist.com.
You will note that there appears to have been a marked increase in the total strength of worldwide seismic activity beginning with the 2004 Boxing Day quake in Indonesia.
(Much of the decrease that appears in 2008 is an artifact of the data. In 2008, USGS decided to stop archiving quakes below magnitude 5, because there were so many of these smaller quakes being recorded worldwide. Consequently, you will see this dip in 2008 in all graphs that include archived quakes of magnitude 4 or below.)
To see the comparative strength of specific seismic events, you really need to look at each month individually.
In this graph, you can see clearly that the large subduction zone events occurring worldwide since the end of 2004 have dwarfed any of the earthquakes in all of the previous 40 years.
So, while I'm very glad that our CSZ event didn't happen last week, I'm also tending to my preparations every day. I'm going to pick up more of my asthma medication at the pharmacy today, and add a few more canned goods to my stores. Preparing for the largest disaster ever to strike the United States doesn't just happen overnight. I've been preparing for the last three years, and I'm still not confident that we're "ready".
Thank God you personally don't have to be in Monterey right now. If I had a choice, I wouldn't be on the West Coast, either.
-- Paravani
Actually the plates are offshore. A tsunami would drag a bit of the shoreline into oblivion.
I don't even see what the big deal is even if and when an 8 or 9 hits. It happens, its nature. But it's still just an earthquake and not the end of the world. Half of California is not going to slide into the ocean.
Who is doing the predicting. It doesnt seem clear in your post
I am, Avatar. I've been studying the seismic stability of the Pacific Northwest for over three years, and I check into USGS several times daily.
I hope that our long-overdue mega-quake doesn't come this week... I hope that it doesn't come this decade! ... But while the earth is going through a particularly active period, with many more large earthquakes in the last seven years than in all the forty years previous to that, we on the West Coast are at great risk.
So I watch, and prepare, and hope that I'll have time to make sure all my loved ones are safe when the time comes.
I predicted the Japanese mega-quake last year, and recognized that the first three Honshu quakes were foreshocks when everyone else thought that they were the main shock and two after-shocks.
There was another foreshock measuring 4.5 off the coast of Canada/Washington at 1:07pm PST today.
So please, any of you who don't have a disaster plan in place, please take care of that now.
-- Paravani
There was another foreshock measuring 4.5 off the coast of Canada/Washington at 1:07pm PST today.
So please, any of you who don't have a disaster plan in place, please take care of that now.
-- Paravani
Oh boy...you aren't that weirdo from Hannity that went on and on about Yellowstone, are you?
If you're not Nostradamus, you didn't "predict" it. You just took a wild guess and just so happened to be right.I predicted the Japanese mega-quake last year,
I made an educated guess and I happened to be right.
Nostradamus made "wild" guesses (that he couched in sufficiently vague language that people thought he was right.)
You're in Utah anyway, so why would you care?
I notice that all the people who actually live on the West Coast have positive contributions to make to the thread, while most of those who live in areas that won't be affected at all have made negative contributions. Why do you suppose that is?
Anyway, since the first two words in the thread title are "West Coast", you have no one to blame except yourself if you find the thread singularly unsatisfying.
-- Paravani
Does anyone here live on the West Coast? Anyone at all?
-- Paravani
I do, I do!
I'm ill-prepared, albeit, not worried. Earthquakes do not kill people; buildings do. And where I live, and the structure in which I live, is no worry to me, even in THE BIG ONE, should it come.
Plus it's Seattle, where water falls like manna from Heaven. LOL So I doubt dying of thirst is a big worry. Suicide rate? You bet; I worry. And thus frisk myself before entering the house. LOL
(Please notice that all the posters who are most critical of this thread live elsewhere -- in Nevada, New Mexico, Philadelphia, and Utah -- and that all the posters who actually live around here have had something constructive to add to the discussion.)
We all fail because we are feeding into this, true seismologists would read one line and log off after laughing aloud first.
No, they wouldn't. They would say quite simply that predicting earthquakes is currently beyond our ability and then use the thread as an opportunity to educate the readers on earthquake preparedness.
Well, this sounds like a very intelligent and well-reasoned response. I'm impressed with your brilliance.
So now, won't you please tell us all exactly what preparations you think will be necessary to survive a Cascadia Subduction Zone event and its aftermath?
If you lived here on the West Coast, instead of in your safe little hidey-hole in Nevada, what would you be doing to prepare for a Cascadia Subduction Zone event of 9+ magnitude?
Do you even know what the aftermath of the CSZ event will look like? Have you bothered to read the rest of the thread before posting your brilliant critique of its premise?
How much do you actually know about the West Coast and the predicted aftermath of a CSZ event?
For instance, given that the vast majority of our electric power is generated by hydroelectric dams, many of which will fail (as described in posts #50 and #63) in a magnitude 9+ quake, how long do YOU estimate that we'll be without power?
Or water?
Or food?
Or shelter?
Can you predict which areas will flood the worst, and why?
Do you know what most people who have made preparations expect to do when other folks need help in the aftermath of such a quake?
Three guesses -- and the first two don't count, because Huggy already painted an excellent picture of it in his posts.
That's right -- most people who will have food, fuel, and water stored up are prepared to kill the survivors who don't have stores of food, fuel, and water. Don't believe me? Check out the "prepper" forums and ask the folks there what they are planning to do in the event that a disaster strikes.
They will kill to protect the rations they stored in advance.
My hubby and I don't want to have to kill anyone, so we moved to a neighborhood that's isolated from the cities by rivers and bridges, where others who are also prepared have chosen to live for much the same reasons: there's clean water in the creek, the hunting is good out here, the trees are plentiful, and the population is sparse. The power fails several days every winter, so we all know what to do when it happens, and most of us have generators.
So, you were saying ...
Oh, right -- you were saying something about educating people how to prepare.
Great idea! Let's hear it! You sound like you know everything, so go ahead, educate us how to prepare!
-- Paravani
(Please notice that all the posters who are most critical of this thread live elsewhere -- in Nevada, New Mexico, Philadelphia, and Utah -- and that all the posters who actually live around here have had something constructive to add to the discussion.)
No, they wouldn't. They would say quite simply that predicting earthquakes is currently beyond our ability and then use the thread as an opportunity to educate the readers on earthquake preparedness.
Well, this sounds like a very intelligent and well-reasoned response. I'm impressed with your brilliance.
So now, won't you please tell us all exactly what preparations you think will be necessary to survive a Cascadia Subduction Zone event and its aftermath?
If you lived here on the West Coast, instead of in your safe little hidey-hole in Nevada, what would you be doing to prepare for a Cascadia Subduction Zone event of 9+ magnitude?
Do you even know what the aftermath of the CSZ event will look like? Have you bothered to read the rest of the thread before posting your brilliant critique of its premise?
How much do you actually know about the West Coast and the predicted aftermath of a CSZ event?
For instance, given that the vast majority of our electric power is generated by hydroelectric dams, many of which will fail (as described in posts #50 and #63) in a magnitude 9+ quake, how long do YOU estimate that we'll be without power?
Or water?
Or food?
Or shelter?
Can you predict which areas will flood the worst, and why?
Do you know what most people who have made preparations expect to do when other folks need help in the aftermath of such a quake?
Three guesses -- and the first two don't count, because Huggy already painted an excellent picture of it in his posts.
That's right -- most people who will have food, fuel, and water stored up are prepared to kill the survivors who don't have stores of food, fuel, and water. Don't believe me? Check out the "prepper" forums and ask the folks there what they are planning to do in the event that a disaster strikes.
They will kill to protect the rations they stored in advance.
My hubby and I don't want to have to kill anyone, so we moved to a neighborhood that's isolated from the cities by rivers and bridges, where others who are also prepared have chosen to live for much the same reasons: there's clean water in the creek, the hunting is good out here, the trees are plentiful, and the population is sparse. The power fails several days every winter, so we all know what to do when it happens, and most of us have generators.
So, you were saying ...
Oh, right -- you were saying something about educating people how to prepare.
Great idea! Let's hear it! You sound like you know everything, so go ahead, educate us how to prepare!
-- Paravani
You must have 6 months reserve of food, water, and neccessary medicines. You must have a gun, ammunition and know how to use it properly. You must have a generator and enough gasoline to run for at least 20 hours so that you can charge batteries etc. for communication.
Just look at what you need to live for half a year with no support and prepare accordingly.
Hello, All!
This is to notify you that a very large earthquake measuring 8 to 9+ on the Richter scale could strike the West Coast of the United States this week, possibly as early as today.
Water is the most important essential to store. Human beings can only last three days without water -- then our kidneys shut down and we die. Please store water sufficient to last your families for three months, as a major earthquake is likely to knock out public water systems for a considerable amount of time, and to cause widespread infrastructure damage that will delay repairs to our water systems.
The minimum recommended amount of water for drinking and hydration is 1/2 gallon per day per person.
Why do I believe that a major earthquake is imminent?
I've been following earthquake activity worldwide for the last three years, with a particular focus on the Pacific Northwest because we are WAY overdue for our once-every-235-years "Cascadia Subduction Zone" mega-quake.
The last mega-quake here occurred at about 9pm on January 26th, 1700. It was about 9 on the Richter scale, the size of Japan's big quake last March. We know exactly what day it occurred because it generated a tsunami that wiped out Japanese fishing villages, so they wrote about it in their record-books.
It's been 312 quiet years since then... and that's the longest period we've had without a mega-quake on the West Coast since before the invention of the wheel. Source: See the time scale at the bottom of page 8 at the Oregon Department of Geology publication Cascadia Winter 2010
Cascadia Subduction Zone mega-quakes occur when the jagged Juan de Fuca plate "subducts" under the continental plate. Because this earthquake happens all along the coast all at once, the earthquake generated is felt along hundreds of miles of shoreline, and far inland.
Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Medford, and Vancouver and Victoria BC are all at risk of severe damage during a subduction zone event.
Please refer to the earthquake map at USGS. Center it on the west coast of the US, choose "30 days, all" and slide the "Magnitude" button to about 3.0 to see the quakes in the following discussion:
Over the past three years, major earthquakes have been striking the west coast of South America, slowly working their way northward. There have been earthquakes in Chile, Peru, Colombia, and more recently in Mexico.
Two weeks ago, a very large 7.7 earthquake struck off the west coast of Canada, just north of Vancouver Island. Aftershocks of magnitude 4 and above are still occurring almost daily.
At 7:35 PST yesterday morning (Nov. 7), another very large 7.4 earthquake struck the West Coast of Mexico, along the equatorial portion of the same faultline.
Then last night at 6:00pm PST, there was a 6.3 earthquake west of Vancouver Island, Canada. This quake is centered on the upper tip of the Juan de Fuca plate, and it is NOT an aftershock of the 7.7 quake two weeks ago. It's directly on top of the subduction zone fault, and it represents a significant uptick in the area's seismic activity, which has been gradually increasing since I began to study it three years ago.
This earthquake follows the pattern of a foreshock, similar to the magnitude 6+ earthquakes that preceded the mega-quake in Japan last year.
I strongly advise all West Coast residents to prepare for a catastrophically large earthquake, and to store plenty of water, blankets, and food that doesn't need cooking.
Secure your homes; check for heavy objects that may fall; make sure that your first aid kits are complete with splinting supplies and large bandages; and make plans with everyone in your family to meet at a designated place in an emergency.
And please, if you find this thread to be of value to you or loved ones, add a post to bump it up.
-- Paravani
11/19/12 5:21am
11/19/12 5:21am
From the difference between your quoted time and the PST time stamp when you posted, you are located on the East Coast.
If you were located in Portland, Oregon, you might have felt the 3.2 magnitude earthquake that occurred here at 6:15 this morning -- our time, not yours.
3.2 is a small earthquake, but it's big enough to feel -- and unlike California, our usual number of earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater is none. So to have one occur here less than a month after a 7.8 struck near the northern tip of the Juan de Fuca plate --the "subduction zone" plate -- is significant.
-- Paravani
I'm not trying to burst your bubble but a 3.2 is really not much. Washington State actually experiences around 1,000 earthquakes a year. The majority of those are in the west but they have had some real big ones on the eastern side of the Cascades.
There have been three or four intraplate quakes since the 1940's in Washington (your CSZ event) the biggest of which was a 7 or so, while there have been thousands and thousands of Crustal quakes in the same time period.
I'm not trying to burst your bubble but a 3.2 is really not much. Washington State actually experiences around 1,000 earthquakes a year. The majority of those are in the west but they have had some real big ones on the eastern side of the Cascades.
There have been three or four intraplate quakes since the 1940's in Washington (your CSZ event) the biggest of which was a 7 or so, while there have been thousands and thousands of Crustal quakes in the same time period.
Thanks for your post, Westwall; and for your kind visitor message on my profile.
You may be a geologist, but you are no seismologist. I can guarantee you that I am MUCH more familiar with West Coast earthquake patterns than you are.
Yes, there are "thousands and thousands of crustal quakes" -- but there are not thousands of quakes stronger than 3 in either Washington or Oregon. That's the CSZ trade-off, you see: in the hundreds of years between mega-thrust earthquakes, we have very few earthquakes of any size at all. I've lived in the Pacific Northwest all of my life, and I remember only three earthquakes that were big enough to feel (but the one year I lived elsewhere, 2001, we had our "big" Nisqually quake). Two of the three were just larger than a 3 in magnitude; the third was a 4.5. Those were pretty big quakes for this part of the world.
An "intra-plate" quake is NOT the same thing as a Cascadia Subduction Zone event. The Nisqually quake to which you refer was intra-plate along the Nisqually fault that runs east-west just south of Tacoma; the Cascadia Subduction Zone runs north-south between the 600-mile-long Juan de Fuca plate and the North American plate under which it subducts. The rate of subduction is 3-4 centimeters per year; but because the plates lock together, it doesn't subduct gradually, but all at once, in a mega-quake that occurs when the plates suddenly break free.
It has been nearly 313 years since the last CSZ event. In that time, the plates have built up 10-12 meters of un-realized subduction between them. The stress has pushed the N. American plate up, causing it to bow upwards on the coast; consequently, when the stress is finally released, the coast will drop by six to ten feet in elevation, permanently flooding existing coastal communities.
Really, I don't explain it as well as the experts do. However, I've posted some great links to information on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, especially in my first post:
Wikipedia: Cascadia Subduction Zone
(Note: the oft-quoted time-spacing of 500 years in between events is out-dated. It has since been found that the CSZ often breaks only on the north or south half. Essentially, earlier researchers were missing approximately half the data.)
Oregon Department of Geology publication Cascadia Winter 2010 Pay particular attention to the timeline at the bottom of page 8 -- 313 years is WAY longer than the normal time between events. We haven't gone this long without an event since before the invention of the wheel!
Also, the BBC documentary linked in post #33 is excellent. The UK isn't as afraid to discuss our impending disasters as our own government is; they tell it like it is. It's important to remember that they are not exaggerating the danger; if anything, it's actually worse than they show.
As a Nevada resident, both you and Geezer (who lives in Utah) should stay abreast of developments. Although it's possible that either or both of you may feel the earthquake when it happens, the greater threat is to our power generation systems.
You may think that in Nevada you are wholly dependent on the Hoover Dam for your electricity, but that is not how it works. Although there are many power generation facilities across the US, there are only three electrical distribution regions ("grids") that are completely independent of one another -- the West Coast, the East Coast, and Texas. (Don't ask me why Texans have to have their own isolated power grid; they just do.) Within a region, all generation facilities and all consumers are tied into the same grid; so if the grid itself collapses, all its consumers will be without power until it can be stabilized and brought back online -- a complicated process that has historically taken days, and can take much, much longer if the grid has experienced significant losses.
When the CSZ event finally occurs (and as a West Coast dweller myself, I hope against hope that it doesn't occur for many decades) it will bring down the entire West Coast grid. It will do this through the widespread destruction of both transmission and generation facilities.
It will most certainly destroy Boundary Dam, which provides half the power the city of Seattle consumes; but Boundary is just a tiny drop in the bucket.
It will also destroy all the dams on the Columbia, from the Grand Coulee to the Bonneville, and a dozen other dams in between those great ones.
The dams that will cause this disaster are not in the US, but in Canada. There are three Canadian dams that pose the greatest danger to the Columbia valley: Mica Dam, Keenleyside Dam, and Corra Linn Dam. All three dams are now used for both power generation and flood control, although one, Keenleyside, was originally built only for flood control according to the terms of the Columbia River Treaty between our countries.
In addition to being used to generate power and control the floodwaters into the Columbia River, the three dams have two more commonalities: all three are earth-fill construction -- the most vulnerable to breaching in an earthquake -- and all three hold back extremely large reservoirs of water. The Keenleyside and the Corra Linn reservoirs hold more than 7 million acre-feet each, and Mica holds back more than 20 million acre-feet of water!
These dams are between 300 and 400 miles from the coast, but that is not far enough to protect them from a magnitude 9+ subduction zone event. They will experience severe shaking for a period of 3-6 minutes, which will cause settling of their earth-fill barriers and subsequent loss of structural integrity.
If any one of these three dams are breached, the waters released will quickly scour away the remaining dam material, dissolving it into mud. The billions of cubic feet of water will scour the riverside of trees, which will become battering rams against any obstacle in their path. Debris-filled flood-waters that can achieve speeds above 40 miles an hour will rush down the Columbia River valley, removing everything that stands in their way.
Even the Grand Coulee cannot stand against such a force; and when it falls, another 9 million acre-feet of water will be added to the torrent.
By the time the flood reaches the ocean, it will have scoured the Columbia River valley clean of civilization as we know it. The town of Mason City will disappear as soon as Lake Roosevelt overtops Grand Coulee Dam; then the torrent will overtop and destroy Chief Joseph Dam, Wells Dam, and Rocky Reach Dam before inundating the city of Wenatchee. The next dams to fall will be Rock Island, Wanapum, and Priest Rapids; and then the deluge will arrive at the Hanford Reservation.
Hanford remains the single most radioactively polluted site in all of North America, in spite of billions of dollars already spent on the clean up. There are still over 170 huge underground single-walled storage tanks (of the size used to hold our nation's oil reserves) that have been leaking radioactive waste into the groundwater, and thence into the Columbia River. An aerial view of Hanford reveals patchy white areas; if you zoom in, these become visible as massive areas of leaching salts that are slowly flowing downhill, into the Columbia River...
... And then the deluge arrives.
Hanford disappears. The town disappears, the last remaining active nuclear plant disappears, and the poisoned, radioactive soil disappears. It is swept away with the river, to be deposited all along the downstream riverbanks and in the river delta... turning the most heavily polluted radioactive site in America into an environmental disaster of previously unimagined proportions.
More cities: Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco; then the McNary Dam, the John Day Dam, the Dalles Dam... and the city of The Dalles. After passing through and destroying the towns of Hood River and Stevenson, the torrent of mud and debris blasts its way through and over Bonneville Dam, and heads for the really populated areas: Portland, Vancouver, and Longview.
By the time the deluge has reached Portland, it will be over 22 million acre-feet of water -- that's over 7 TRILLION gallons of water -- plus millions of tons of debris from the dams, forests, and towns the deluge destroyed on its way there.
The loss to our generation capacity will catastrophic. Including Boundary dam on the Pend Oreille, the Western region will have lost total generation capacity of more than 21,000 mega-watts -- enough to power ten cities the size of Seattle -- representing trillions of dollars over a century of infrastructure investment.
That infrastructure will not be replaced quickly or easily. It may be a long, long time before the lights go back on again in any western state.
-- Paravani
The CZS mega quake you are so fearful of can certainly occur. However, those quakes are so powerful that they are releasing energy that has been built up over centuries, and sometimes millennia. Whenever large (6.5+) intraplate quakes occur they serve to release the strain buildup. Multiple 6.5's will negate the possibility of a mega quake occurring.
Your concerns are justified and you should certainly be prepared, however, the thought that the valleys will be stripped clean is a on the far fetched side. Damage will be catastrophic at the lower levels to be sure, but property above 50 feet will be relatively safe from the deluge. It will probably be damaged (unless anchored in bed rock) from the quake mind you, but the water won't affect it too much.
