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Prepare for tsunamis
Thursday, February 1, 2001
POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
Scientists have been telling us for some time that there's no question about whether Seattle will have a major earthquake. It's a question of when.
But our collective response has been a civic shrug. To be sure, we've updated building codes and agreed to spend huge sums retrofitting bridges, hospitals and the like. Still, few Seattleites have really prepared for earthquakes. And it's a safe bet no one has prepared for a possible 20-foot-high tsunami, which can travel at 500 mph in the open ocean.
Maybe that complacency will change now.
Armed with funds, fancy gadgets and the best brains money can buy, scientists are getting much better at telling us the grim details of what to expect. It's not a pretty picture.
The infamous five-mile-wide Seattle Fault is thought to begin at Bremerton, cross Puget Sound and run under our elegant sports complexes as well as I-5 and major gas, water and sewer lines on its way to Redmond. Turns out it's likely to produce more than impressive shaking. The gelatinous sediments under Puget Sound and Seattle intensify the effect of earthquakes tenfold, scientists now theorize.
Shaking, and the expected upthrust of landscape, set water in motion -- bigtime. "We know we're going to get tsunamis," said Frank Gonzales, head of tsunami research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab at Sand Point. "We just don't know when."
At NOAA, scientists have developed a computer model that shows a 7.6 earthquake off Alki Point creating a 20-foot-high wave that would hit Tacoma -- which would suffer the worst effect of the wave -- in 20 minutes.
Scientists propose that we map areas in Puget Sound at greatest risk of a tsunami so that hazard-mitigation plans and evacuation routes can be prepared. Elected officials and bureaucrats can do at least that much.
Last time Mother Nature dramatically rearranged the furniture with an earthquake and tsunami in the Seattle basin was 1,100 years ago. Human beings then had no advance warning, of course. Even with our modern prediction implements, it may be a foolish conceit to think we can outrun a tsunami.
But it's more foolish not to do what reasonably can be done to lessen the damage.
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