For most of the past three years, I’ve worked as a book critic,
which is not a job that affords me many opportunities to scare the living
daylights out of my readers. (Authors, occasionally; readers, no.) But earlier
this month, when a story I wrote about a dangerous fault line in the Pacific Northwest hit
the newsstands, the overwhelming response was alarm. “Terrifying,” the story
kept getting called; also “truly terrifying,” “incredibly terrifying,”
“horrifying,” and “scary as fuck.” “Don’t read it if you want to go back to
sleep,” one reader warned. “It’s hard to overhype how scary it is,” Buzzfeed
said. “New Yorker scares the bejesus out of NW,” the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote.
Novelists and screenwriters can terrify people, feel pretty good
about themselves, and call it a day. But for journalists, or at least this one,
fear is not an end in itself. At best, it is a means to an end, a way to
channel emotion into action. To achieve that, however, you need to navigate
between the twin obstacles of panic (which makes you do all the wrong things)
and fatalism (which makes you do nothing). In an effort to help people to do
so, I’ve answered, below, some of the questions I’ve heard most often since the
story was published, and also provided a little advice about how best to prepare for the
Cascadia earthquake and tsunami, and their aftermath.
Who will be affected by the earthquake?
The Cascadia subduction zone runs from Cape Mendocino, California,
to Vancouver Island, Canada. Those who live anywhere in that region and west of
the Cascade Mountains are at risk—but how much risk and what kind varies
considerably, based on where exactly you live in relationship to the fault
line, how susceptible your area is to liquefaction and landslides, what kind of
structure you’re in when the quake occurs, and your local seismic codes. In
general, however, the shaking will be strongest on the coast and diminish
somewhat as you move inland.
It’s maddeningly difficult to find a good map of the entire region
showing relative risk. But here’s one, courtesy of the Oregon Department of
Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), that shows the
actual shake map from the 2011 earthquake in Tohoku, Japan, and the anticipated
one for the state of Oregon from the full Cascadia earthquake:
The lightest
shaking, indicated here in pale green, will be just strong enough to wake
people out of sleep and knock over unsecured objects. That intensity will
gradually increase as you move west; in the hardest-hit areas, indicated by
dark red, the shaking will be strong enough to seriously damage even well-built
structures.
Please continue this article here: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-to-stay-safe-when-the-big-one-comes
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