The Pacific Coast is tip-toeing around not one but two of the largest seismic triggers of the region’s modern history. Even with the infrastructure plans championed by policymakers in the West, major coastal cities are woefully unprepared for such an event. Idle politicians are more reactive than proactive to the looming threat of megathrust earthquakes. In an era of slow-moving environmental policy in the United States, the West Coast is set to become a story of too little, too late.
When discussing major earthquakes, many point to the San Andreas Fault. Referred to in earnest as the “Big One” on news broadcasts and heroically manhandled by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in a 2015 thriller, this potential earthquake overshadows a much more disastrous seismic threat: the Cascadia subduction zone, a fault that runs under the Pacific Ocean from Northern California to Vancouver, Canada. An earthquake caused by this fault could be devastating for California and the Pacific Northwest. To put its potential power into perspective, Japan’s 2011 Tohoku earthquake was listed as having a magnitude of 9.0. Waves as tall as 40 meters pummeled the Japanese coastline, and the nation suffered over $220 billion in property damage. Eighteen thousand people died, and several thousand victims were never recovered. San Andreas pales in comparison, holding only 6 percent of the energy of Japan’s 2011 disaster. Yet, in a full-margin rupture of the Cascadia, the region could experience an earthquake reaching magnitudes of 9.2—almost twice as powerful as the Tohoku earthquake on the exponentially increasing Richter Scale. The quake would flood and upend major sections of a West Coast that is far less earthquake-ready than Japan. Both tsunamis and shock damage would travel far east, all the way to the I-5 freeway. Major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and San Diego could effectively be wiped off the map.
With a record 15 seismic earthquake sequences occurring in Southern California just this year (the largest figure in 65 years), an increase in earthquake frequency has prompted fears of major tectonic plate activation. Think of it like this: You crash your Honda Civic onto the side of a steep bluff, teetering like a scale on the edge of a cliff. The large drop beneath you represents the activation of Cascadia and San Andreas. As you clutch the backseat in fear, leaning backward to counter the weight as much as possible, seven soda cans roll toward the front of the car. These cans, much like the smaller seismic quakes in California, are just enough to pull your Civic off the cliffside, dropping you toward the depths of the activated Cascadia below.
As terrifying as the potential for a catastrophic earthquake may seem, little government action to promote earthquake preparedness has been taken in the past 20 years. Recent history shows that political will is reactive, not proactive. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquakes shocked San Francisco, killing 63 people, injuring 3,757, and causing about $6 billion in damage, a number of multi-unit buildings and significant San Francisco structures, including the Bay Bridge and Hetch Hetchy Water System, were retrofitted with supplemental steel frames, thickened walls, and added base isolation to better prepare for the next shock. In the wake of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti pushed for earthquake safety legislation in the 2010s, leading to over 8,000 vulnerable buildings in Los Angeles being retrofitted as well. Yet, as time goes by, officials like Garcetti have dropped their interest in environmental hazard safety, as building more multi-family housing in an ultra-tight California housing market has taken top priority. Nonetheless, even if earthquake preparedness comes with an increase in housing costs, confidence in infrastructure security is crucial in an area so frequently jolted by seismic activity. Loma Prieta has become an event of the distant past, while future tectonic disasters are sorely overlooked.
In truth, the West Coast has no control over or idea of when the true “Big One” may open up. Studies from the state of Oregon show that there is a roughly 37 percent chance of a Cascadia megathrust earthquake occurring in the next 50 years as pressure continues to build under the Juan de Fuca Plate. Yet when the waters start towering along the coastline, the birds scatter from the trees, and dinner plates fall from the top shelf and shatter, both officials and constituents alike will realize the importance of preparing for such an event earlier rather than later. Oh, how the years flew by.