Tsunami Alert!

     "If you are in an inundation area, you must head to high ground immediately when the shaking stops. Do not wait for a warning. THAT IS YOUR WARNING that a tsunami is on its way. You have approximately ten minutes."

                 Tourist information: City of Langlois, Oregon.

Click: Explanation of earthquake and tsunami

A California earthquake is in today's news. Oregon didn't have an earthquake, but Oregon, too, is in the news. 

The Oregon legislature passed and the governor signed HB 3309.  

What? Me worry?

The new law allows buildings of emergency services, hospitals, schools, and nursing homes in the tsunami inundation zone along the Oregon coast.

Oregon has a problem. The Atlantic Ocean is spreading, which pushes North America to the west at a rate of about as fast as fingernails grow, an inch a year. It is pushing into the Juan De Fuca plate that is part of the Pacific plate system, and the Juan De Fuca plate is sliding under Oregon. It creates the Coast Range and the Cascades, along with intermittent earthquakes. They happen irregularly, at an average rate of one every 300 years. The last big one was in the year 1700--319 years ago.

Earthquakes cause damage from shaking as we are seeing on TV today from the southern California 6.4 Rchter scale event. They also cause tsunamis which inundate low lying coastal areas. Tsunamis are not just big, surf-able waves--a big splash. They are a mix of water and debris--houses, trucks, trees--wiping out everything in their path. They killed tens of thousands of people in Japan and Indonesia in recent years.

Inundation

"There aren’t many injuries in the tsunami zone,” one seismic expert told The New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz. “People just die.”

Schulz has just published a follow up of an earlier story about the risks to the Pacific Northwest of another "Cascadia Event," which is the term in common use now in Oregon for the eventual earthquake/tsunami event. North America's westward move is real and measurable from GPS satellites. 

Pressure is building up. Something has got to give. And when it gives it will be a major disaster. We don't get small, frequent trembles. We get nothing, then a big one.

Oregon had regulations in place to restrict building in the coastal inundation areas. Those restrictions were an impediment to coastal development, which was no accident. It was the very point to stop development in dangerous places. It was bad for business. Shultz quotes Oregon coast legislator David Gromberg asking: “Who will buy a house in a neighborhood too dangerous for a police station? Who will start a business in an area where fire stations are not allowed?”

Tsunami awareness is bad PR and bad politics. It runs counter to what people want, and where the coastal towns have developed. People who live on the coast want to be on the coast, not inland. No one likes to think that their dream house could vanish in a moment, with them inside it. So coastal legislators requested the Oregon legislature to end the ban on building hospitals, jails, schools, and emergency services facilities in the inundation zone. The lack of those facilities were awkward for town planning.

Besides, there was a workaround: when an earthquake comes, move uphill. Simple.

Moving to high ground immediately may not be possible. Tsunamis come in the aftermath of a disaster itself, the earthquake event, and earthquakes come without notice. Children and the elderly cannot be moved quickly. Roads uphill will be congested, and those roads may be damaged. Power lines are down and will cause panic and block exits. In the aftermath of an earthquake, with damaged buildings, people may be injured or trapped. Under the best of circumstances, people will all want the same thing at the same moment: get to high ground.

Click: 2015 Wake up call

Think of stadium traffic after a sporting event. The people, public safety organizations and facilities that are most critical to deal with the  disaster may be subject to the disaster themselves. 

Schulz's 2015 article, The Really Big One,  caused a stir as it reminded Pacific Northwest residents that we live under a threat of the loss of life and tens of billions, possibly hundreds of billions, of dollars of loss if--when--the inevitable happens. But it hasn't happened yet, and preparing for something that has not happened is expensive and inconvenient and feels pointless in the moment. Buildings need to be retrofit. Infrastructure needs to be reinforced--for no apparent purpose. 

And on the coast, people are told to do expensive, un-intuitive things, like build their towns away from the very thing that makes the towns desirable. 

Click: The New Yorker

A transfer of wealth is taking place, which should be acknowledged. People who live and build schools and hospitals in an area that will be damaged are getting the present value of the superior location. They get their view and beach access now, and that amenity is theirs. If they sell their property they are selling view-site coastal property, at the premium such property gets. The value is personal to them.

When the inevitable happens, the devastation will be enormous. Some will die, and pay the highest price for the coastal amenity they enjoyed. Some will face injury and thousands will have property losses which will overwhelm personal and community resources. 

Those costs will be socialized. Everyone will be asked to pitch in, via insurance costs and taxes.

The public has an interest in prohibiting people from building on flood planes, fire zones, and inundation areas. Some of the lives that will be lost will be "innocent" ones, children who trust adults not to let them play in traffic, eat poison, ingest lead, breathe asbestos, or drown in a tsunami. They have a right to life.The state has an interest in protecting them.

Some of the costs will be paid by fellow Oregonians or fellow Americans, who taxes will be used to repair the damage that could have been avoided or mitigated, but was not.