In The Northwest: Don't look now, but scientists think Big One is just about due

MomSeattle · DadSeattle · SPI · MySeattlePix · My account

Local

US/World

Sports

Business

A&E

Life

Comics

Photos

Opinion

Blogs

Buy Ads

NWsource

In The Northwest: Don't look now, but scientists think Big One is just about due

Friday, March 2, 2001

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

THE REAL POWER of cataclysmic seismic events in the Northwest is best felt not by rubbernecking at Starbucks' battered headquarters in Seattle, but by quietly seeking out long-dead cedar snags near the mouth of the Copalis River on the Olympic Peninsula.

Resistant to disease and insects, the trees have provided scientists with a vital tool in determining the exact time at which the Northwest last experienced The Big One -- what is called a "megathrust" or "subduction" quake with a magnitude of 9.

The Big One struck at about 9 p.m. on Jan. 26, 1700, according to calculations, aided by radiocarbon dating of trees' root systems, done by researchers from Canada, Japan and the United States.

Quake photos

Seattle damage

See the newspaper

Share your stories

More coverage
The massive shaking took place about 80 years before European explorers began "discovering" and naming places along the coast. Indian legends described the event, and written records in Japan told of its aftermath. A tsunami, spawned across the Pacific, damaged homes and inundated rice paddies at about midnight on Jan. 27, 1700.

We can expect a Big One every 300 to 500 years along what is called the Cascadia Subduction Zone. According to scientists, we're just about due. What happened two days ago doesn't give us any time off for good behavior.

The Wednesday quake, centered 11 miles from Olympia, seemed big and long enough, as did the 1989 tremor that struck San Francisco just as fans gathered at Candlestick Park for the third game of the Bay Area World Series between the Giants and A's.

But the Big One, when it comes, will be longer, broader in scope, and surely will stir up the sea.

"Unlike the Bay Area disaster ... the quake of 1700 did not have an epicenter as we know it, but ripped open the subduction zone along the entire coast," Larry Pynn wrote in his fine book "Last Stands," published last year by Oregon State University Press.

"The rumbling and creaking would have lasted for more than a minute, an eternity to the tens of thousands of aboriginal people who flourished on the Pacific Northwest coast then," Pynn wrote.

The Big One left its footprint all the way from Port Alberni on Vancouver Island to Humboldt Bay near Eureka, Calif.

Prospects of the next Big One aren't just a big scare. We live in one of the Earth's most active seismic regions. Out beneath the Strait of Juan de Fuca, two tectonic plates -- the North American Plate and the Juan de Fuca Plate -- grind against each other. The North American Plate is sliding underneath, which causes pressure to build.

Big Ones have hit places, both to the north and south, in the past century. San Francisco has twice been jolted. This columnist happened to be in Babylon by the Bay one year on April 18, anniversary of the 1906 quake that set off the fire that burned the city. A small elderly band dubbed "The Survivors" met at Lotta's Fountain on Market Street at 5 a.m. (the hour the quake struck) to sing, pour Bloody Marys and hear speeches.

In more recent times, I flew over Lituya Bay, an incredibly stark place on the coastal side of Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park where ice plunges from 15,530-foot Mount Fairweather to the sea. It is uninhabited, but fishing boats sought its sheltered waters one night in 1958.

That Big One triggered a huge landslide, which sent waters of a tidal wave 1,700 vertical feet up the opposite slope -- the scar is still visible -- before the water carried boats over the sandspits enclosing the bay and out into the Gulf of Alaska. A few people miraculously survived.

The coverage of America's worst tanker disaster took me to the Alaskan town of Valdez, 25 years after the 9.2 Good Friday earthquake of 1964. That Big One destroyed much of downtown Anchorage, but caused its greatest loss of life nearly 100 miles away. The quake triggered a tsunami that roared up Valdez Arm, wiping out the port, destroying 325 homes and killing 33 people.

Northwesterners have been lucky in a way. Quakes here have been large enough to jolt us out of our complacency, but not of the magnitude of Alaska's '64 jolt or recent cataclysmic quakes in California.

A rolling, out-of-control feeling has come to me on two occasions: One --appropriately -- was when I was in geology class at Bellingham High School in 1965. The second came at the P-I two days ago.

All evidence from Wednesday indicates that the region has heeded past warnings. At Bellingham High, books fell all over the place in the '65 quake. Lately, however, my old high school has received a full retrofit designed in part to make it earthquake resistant. Seattle voters decided in November to pay for a costly Harborview Medical Center retrofit aimed largely at quake impacts..

Yesterday, as she inspected damage from this year's quake, Sen. Patty Murray noted that one school after another has used federal money to bolt down bookshelves. "Everyplace we have gone, we have seen how past actions mitigated potential damage," said Murray. "The investment has saved lives, and money, in many, many places."

Murray was making sure the lesson was not lost on Joe Albaugh, newly named director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On Wednesday, in an example of nightmare timing, the Bush administration proposed elimination of Project Impact, the federal program that has provided money for Western Washington to retrofit schools and government buildings, and to establish emergency communications networks.

"I have asked every place we've gone how Project Impact money was used. I don't understand how he (Albaugh) can walk away without an understanding of this," Murray said.

Similar "savings" have been proposed in the recent past. Leading voices in Congress actually talked about privatizing the U.S. Geological Survey back in 1995. They were, however, shot down by an unusual alliance between conservationist U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and rabidly pro-development Alaska Rep. Don Young. Young's state has more earthquakes and more active volcanoes than any other. Babbitt used a Vancouver, Wash., visit to make the point that earthquake faults are still being discovered and mapped three centuries after the Big One.

Waiting for the Big One, we can retrofit buildings, cheer on the U.S. Geological Survey as it works on quake prediction, and indulge in a bit of bad humor about whether taking out the Alaskan Way Viaduct might be a good thing.

After all, the '89 quake in San Francisco fatally damaged the Embarcadero Freeway, which cut off views of the bay along much of the waterfront. It was replaced by a sidewalk named "Herb Caen Way" after the San Francisco Chronicle columnist who hated the highway and dubbed it the "Dambarcadero."

P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattle-pi.com