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An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest

7/14/2015, in The New Yorker:

… we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.

… By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, …

OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities.

7/4/2015: UO has no public records on earthquake certifications of buildings?

The RG’s report on July 4th’s little one is here:

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UO student reporter Noah McGraw’s prescient July 3 story about the big one is in the Emerald, here:

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His June 30th public records request is here. Obviously UO has plenty of reports on the seismic hazards of its buildings, but apparently McGraw didn’t use the appropriate magic words in his request, and Dave Hubin’s PR Office is not going to make it easy:

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While we’re on the subject of UO’s strange obsession with hiding documents about earth movement from our undergrads, there’s this one:

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In contrast, EWEB’s PR officer Lance Robertson seems to have no problem with letting the public know what’s down there:

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6 Comments

  1. Cheyney Ryan 07/04/2015

    When I was co-chair of the FAC in the late 1990s, soon after one of the last earthquakes in Oregon. We commissioned a study of all the U of O buildings for their earthquake safety. My hope was to get PLC condemned and force them to build a new building; I thought this would get me a new office, plus earn me the eternal gratitude of lots of people who otherwise hated me.

    The study was done by Professor Christine Theodoropoulos, (It should be available somewhere.) We learned that PLC was indeed unsafe but other buildings were even more unsafe; if your office was in Hendricks Hall, for example, you were (are) doomed.

    But we were also told that the U of O did not have the money to fix any of this. One of the administrators on the FAC chirped up, “Just hope you’re not in Hendricks when the big one hits!” (The UC system fixed all its buildings after the Northridge earthquake.)

  2. Bacon 07/05/2015

    For rent. My PLC office.
    I will henceforth work elsewhere… my personal life-saving evacuation plan.

    (Outside of athletic interests space on this campus is at such a premium that I may get bids. Sad, that.)

  3. XDH 07/14/2015

    Be glad you’re not in Onyx – that sucker is going to pancake like the Oakland and San Francisco freeways did in Loma Prieta in 1989.

  4. anonymous 07/14/2015

    Oregon doesn’t even have money to make its Capitol safe, where would money come from to fix the buildings at UO?

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