Bracing for The Big One Oregon emergency managers to persuade Southern Oregon residents to prepare for a 9.0 earthquake and all it may entail State emergency officials will spend next week urging Southern Oregon residents to prepare for a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that could seriously disrupt food, water, transportation and other vital services. [...] Electricity could be knocked out for up to three months, drinking water and sewers might not be available for up to one year, priority highways could be out of commission for up to a year, and health care facilities could take up to 18 months to be operational. On the coast, essential services could be knocked out even longer. more: tinyurl/lfjxcmv FLASHBACK (last year!) ~ New research on Japanese quake ominous for Pacific Northwest. Detailed analyses of the way the Earth warped along the Japanese coast suggest that shaking from a Cascadia megaquake could be stronger than expected along the coasts of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia, researchers reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The Cascadia subduction zone can be seen as a mirror image of the Tohoku area,” said John Anderson, of the University of Nevada. Anderson compiled ground-motion data from the Japan quake and overlaid it on a map of the Pacific Northwest, which has a similar fault – called a subduction zone – lying offshore. In Japan, the biggest jolts occurred underwater. The seafloor was displaced by 150 feet or more in some places, triggering the massive tsunami. But in the Northwest, it’s the land that will be rocked hardest – because the Pacific coast here lies so close to the subduction zone. “The ground motions that we have from Tohoku may actually be an indication that there could be much stronger shaking in the coastal areas of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon,” Anderson said. Cities like Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, B.C., are far enough from the coast that they might dodge the most violent hammering. But all of the urban areas sit on geologic basins that can amplify ground motion like waves in a bathtub.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:19:23 +0000
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