FEMA is planning for an earthquake that would devastate the Pacific Northwest, killing at least 13,000 people
CODY SULLIVAN
BusinessInsider.com
Jul. 14, 2015
To the north of California’s famous San Andreas fault is a less known, but possibly more deadly, fault line. The Cascadia subduction zone runs some 700 miles from northern California to Vancouver.
In a deeply reported article for The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz tells the tale of how this fault lies dormant for periods of 243 years, on average, before unleashing monstrous tremors. The Pacific Northwest is 72 years overdue for the next quake, which is expected to be between 8.0 and 9.2 in magnitude.
At the upper end of that scale, Schulz notes, we would experience “the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.” (The major 2011 earthquake in Japan was a 9.0, killing more than 15,000 people.)
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) already has an emergency response plan for when this earthquake hits. Parts of FEMA’s quake expectations are truly terrifying. As Schulz writes:
FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.
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