The Most Devastating Quake In US History Is Headed for Portland
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The Most Devastating Quake In US History Is Headed for Portland

The chances of a 9.0 earthquake slamming the Pacific Northwest are disturbingly high. Introducing a novel way to engage the threat: reported science fiction.

This week's Terraform is something special: It's a hybrid format, what we've taken to calling "reported science fiction"—a deeply researched, exhaustively detailed story about what will happen when the so-called "Really Big One" (a 9.0 magnitude earthquake) hits Portland, as scientists expect it will in coming decades. (Hint: Read the footnotes!) But I'll let writer and archivist Adam Rothstein explain his creation, "After the Big One," below. Trust me, this one, an epic, 5-part feat of speculation—and the most immersive fact-based fiction you'll probably ever read—is worth diving in deep. -Brian Merchant, Terraform editor

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There is a 22 percent chance that by the time you finish reading this sentence, there will have been an earthquake somewhere on earth. This is a probability that is hard to grasp—it seems both obvious and diffuse. The world is a big place, and most earthquakes are relatively small.

But consider this: Geologists put the chance of a full rupture of the Cascadian Subduction Zone—that's the fault line off the coast of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia—at 7-15 percent over the next fifty years.1 This would result in a 8.7 to 9.3 Mw earthquake. The biggest quake in recorded history, the 1960 Valdivia quake in Chile, weighed in at 9.5 Mw; and the recent 2011 Tōhoku earthquake off the coast of Japan measured at 9.0 Mw. Relatively speaking, there is a significant chance the Pacific Northwest region will see an earthquake of historical magnitude in the not-so-distant future.

Terraform editor Brian Merchant spoke to author Adam Rothstein about this series for Radio Motherboard, which is available on iTunes and all podcast apps.

The chance of a slightly smaller (8.3 to 8.6 magnitude) earthquake is judged to be about 37 percent over the same time frame.2 This is still a massive quake: the 1989 Loma Prieta quake that struck the Santa Cruz area during the World Series was "only" a 6.9 Mw, and the 1906 Great San Francisco quake is estimated to have been around 7.8 Mw. (See here for more on how we measure major earthquakes.) As a resident of Portland, Oregon, I had to take a pause after reading figures like that.

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We shouldn't merely be concerned about the earthquake, but about the uncertainty of probabilities. How can we bet for or against such a large-scale catastrophe? If there was a one-third chance I would be hit by a car if I stepped into the street without looking, would I do it? Being hit by a car would be a terrible way to settle the matter one way or the other.

There have been 41 of these giant quakes in the region in the last 10,000 years.3The last one hit in 1700 AD, coinciding with records of a massive tsunami that hit Japan and Pacific Northwest natives' oral traditions depicting a massive battle between a thunderbird and a whale. This history is written in the local geology: cutaway river banks still show the line of debris and soil that was washed into new locations, and the continental shelf is banded by the flow of undersea landslides. Along the coast of Washington, dead forests still stand, where cedar groves were killed as they land they grew on was dropped more than six feet into salt water.

The Northwest has changed quite a bit in the last three hundred years. A battle between two mythical creatures across the contemporary I-5 corridor would probably involve not just massive floods and shaking, but a massive collapse of local infrastructure. It could destroy the means for sustaining everything we consider to be the bedrock of a normal modern life.

Because Portland has been my hometown for nearly nine years, I went looking for answers about this chance event, if and when it were to happen here. I found thousands of pages worth of studies and reports, written by hundreds of public employees who've long been working on this very question. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Oregon State Office of Geology and Mineral Industries, the Oregon Department of Transportation, the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management, the city Bureau of Transportation and even the Parks Department—all of these agencies and more have taken a crack at telling parts of the story about what might happen during a Cascadia Subduction Zone event. The accounts, informed by geologists, seismologists, geographers, engineers, transit experts, and city officials, are detailed, compelling, and often exhaustive.

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Some of it is quite alarming. One study declared the possibility that of 2,671 bridges in the "strong" shaking zone, 399 would be at least partially destroyed, and 621 heavily damaged.4 That means 38 percent of the region's bridges, out of service, all at once. There are systemic vulnerabilities affecting Oregon as well. Nearly all the petroleum products for the entire state are imported through one particular area of Northwest Portland.5 Despite being a modern state, Oregon is still cut off from the rest of the country by its terrain, and connected by only a limited number of roads, railroads, and sea lanes. I read hundreds, if not thousands of other facts, possibilities, probabilities, and potentialities like this, which remind me how amazing it is that our society holds together even in the best of times.

But these reports, too, are strictly in the language of estimates, in scenarios, in potential plans. And naturally so; there are no guarantees in engineering, let alone in emergencies. It is impossible for anyone to say exactly which bridges will collapse, which roads will be blocked, and which buildings will have electricity and sewer service. Similarly, there is no way to predict exactly how many people will die: either immediately, or in the long and difficult rebuilding process when water and electricity may be scarce. But there are estimates. There are scenarios.

The numbers began to slip through my fingers. To avoid the stress of gambling over the lifecycles of bridges and tunnels, I started to resign myself to fate. I took to telling myself, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen. But fate is a solipsistic wall erected between oneself and the world—a world which is always comprised of confounding, frustrating, and mysterious facts.

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So, instead of trusting in luck or throwing up our hands to fate, let's tell a story. This story routes around probability, by imagining a scenario in which the Cascadia Subduction zone finally shifts, and the earthquake memorably described as "The Really Big One" by the New Yorker's Kathryn Schulz comes to pass. This is the story of what happens next.

I will seek to translate the host of official stories from mathematical possibility into narrative, by using speculative fiction. This is fiction because it has not happened. And it is speculative, because I am collapsing the mathematical probabilities in the official reports, to say something approaching definitive. This is, clearly, a narrow path to walk. This story must re-mold statistics and possibilities into speculative building blocks, to pave a road forward for us, towards a future that will ultimately, one way or the other, be very real.

The story begins like this, with an entirely feasible earthquake scenario, and continues through what would happen as a result, drawn from all the science, records, and emergency response materials available:

On a Thursday in April, at 11:44AM, there is a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, epicentered fifty miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon. The quake has a magnitude of 9.0 Mw, is felt as far south as Northern California, and as far north as British Columbia. In the Portland Metro area, this is felt as a "Strong" VI intensity quake, on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. Over the course of five minutes, one piece of the earth's armor grinds underneath another, and the reverberation of this tectonic motion project outwards for hundreds of miles through the core of a human culture living above it.6

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May we escape this nightmare together, in one way or another.

Click here to see all the serialized installments of After the Big One, or jump right in to Part One: Five Minutes.


1. Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission, Oregon Resilience Plan (2013), 5

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid, 6

4. Oregon Department of Transportation, Seismic Vulnerability of Oregon State Highway Bridges (2009), 32

5. Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, Earthquake Risk Study for Oregon's Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub (2012)

6. This scenario is a composite, very similar to the official scenarios generated by many government agencies for use in their simulations, planning reports, and exercises. It isn't drawn from any single study, but is equivalent to those used in several studies.