We all dodged a serious bullet on this one.
I was at my consulting job in Bellevue. My wife katrina was in the Health Sciences library at the University of Washington. We all went for a ride, and then the rest of the day was shot. No damage whatsoever to our house; just a few of our several thousand books ended up on the floor. (I take the region’s seismic activity fairly seriously, and have spent a lot of time securing our shelves, water heater, wine rack, etc.; it paid off.) And katrina even found the cat curled up sleeping peacefully on the bed, barely an hour after the quake.
This event was simultaneously the best possible earthquake, as well as the worst. Here’s why.
It was the best possible earthquake because despite its magnitude and coverage area, damage and casualties were astonishingly limited. A few hundred chimneys, a couple of small landslides, a few masonry buildings, one stretch of rural freeway, a blocked river, a couple of dozen cars, two hundred injured people, one death. All of that, for a 6.8 quake. Truly incredible.
The epicenter was deep and inland, meaning (1) minimal risk of aftershock, (2) no risk of tsunami, (3) significant energy distribution, (4) epicenter strength kept away from major population centers. Our public officials have spent a lot of time and money on preparation, upgrading building codes, drilling emergency personnel, retrofitting bridges, and so on. It all paid off. Less than twenty-four hours after the quake, only a handful of buildings have been deemed unsafe, most of our bridges are open, our largest airport is already up to about half capacity… we’re recovering nicely.
It was the best possible quake because the people of the Pacific Northwest aren’t fully cognizant of the seismic danger we all live in. Sure, we all know we’re “due” for “the Big One,” but it’s kind of a joke. The general population was woefully unprepared for this event. Standing around in the parking lot following the evacuation, talking to people, I found that almost nobody knew what to do during the quake. Many people went into doorways, even though this old advice is now outdated and even considered dangerous by many disaster experts. Nobody considered the risk of explosively shattering windows. Virtually nobody had a first-aid kit in the car, or food or water back at the house. Nobody I talked to had anchored their shelves, strap-secured their water heater, or anything else.
This region desperately needed a wake-up call. We’re not like Southern California; we don’t get a small quake every now and then to keep the danger fresh in our mind. We see occasional reports on the news, we hear about the latest research and we know our officials are running drills and drafting plans, but we in the general population don’t really internalize the risk. We get a quake of this size every thirty to forty years; with that kind of gap, it’s very easy to forget about it, to push it to the back of the mind, to dismiss the danger as being so rare as to not be worth thinking about.
We needed a wake-up call, and we definitely got one. And as I said, with the quake’s depth, distance, and duration, and with our surprisingly low rates of damage and casualty, we got the best possible wake-up call we could have hoped for.
But in many ways, it was also the worst. We got very, very, very lucky. We were not adequately prepared, and we were extraordinarily fortunate. One purely random factor, for example: We’ve had very little rainfall this winter. The water table is low, and the ground is much drier than it usually is at this time of the year. Therefore, by sheer luck, the earthquake created much less mudflow/slippage than it otherwise might have in a normal year, and the number of landslides was cut to a fraction of the potential.
We cannot confuse our outrageously good luck with adequate preparation. We cannot get complacent. We cannot look at the minimal damage and the few casualties and assume that we’re ready for another one, that we did just fine and don’t need to do anything more. We’re here because of good fortune, and good fortune alone. This event could have been much, much, much worse. That it wasn’t is due to luck, random chance, the grace of God, whatever you want to call it – not because of anything we did.
Our officials demonstrated incredible organization, planning, and efficiency; this is one aspect of our city, county, and state governments in which we can legitimately, for once, take pride. However, they’re only part of the picture. We as citizens must take responsibility as well, and must participate in necessary preparations. When the next earthquake hits, one that may well be stronger, shallower, longer, we can’t expect the government to take care of us. In a major quake, we’re all on our own. We have to take responsibility for our own lives and safety.
If this quake had been just a little shallower, if it had been on a different fault, if it had lasted just a little longer, we would be looking at a very different outcome. We have no emergency food stores in our region; we have huge warehouses dedicated to this purpose, but they stand empty. We have a complacent, undereducated, unprepared population. This quake was just big enough, just long enough, and in just the right location to scare the hell out of us without crippling the region. We need to take advantage of our incredibly good luck, and prepare ourselves for the next one.
We dodged a major bullet. We have absolutely no assurance that we’ll be anywhere near as fortunate the next time.