Thousands dead, Portland razed to the ground and a 50-foot tsunami: What will happen WHEN the Pacific Northwest megaquake hits
Experts say the Pacific Northwest is overdue for a devastating earthquake and tsunami that could leave thousands dead
Seismic event has potential to be greatest natural disaster ever experienced in the country, displacing a million people, expert said
Scientist described the major quake as ‘five or six Katrinas all at once, up and down from California to Canada’
DAILYMAIL.COM
7 March 2016
A magnitude 9 earthquake and towering tsunami killed more than 15,000 people along Japan’s northeastern coast and left more than 2,500 missing on March 11, 2011.
The subsequent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant left the nation’s prime minister on the brink of evacuating Tokyo after the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Now scientists say it is only a matter of when a devastating earthquake and massive tsunami hits the U.S., specifically the Pacific Northwest, potentially killing thousands, CBS News reported.
Experts also say the seismic event has the potential to be the greatest natural disaster ever experienced in the country, displacing one million people.
‘This would be like five or six Katrinas all at once, up and down from California to Canada, would be the closest thing I can think of,’ Chris Goldfinger, a paleo-seismologist at Oregon State University, told CBS.
Goldfinger, whose research indicates much of the region is overdue for a major quake, estimates there is a one-in-three chance it will strike in the next 50 years.
When asked how prepared the country would be for it, he replied, ‘we’re not completely unprepared, but we’re pretty darn close,’ adding on a scale of one to ten ‘we’re probably a little shy of one.’
The paleo-seismologist explained that Ground Zero is the 700-mile long area off the Pacific Coast called the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
There the North American tectonic plate is met with another plate, the Juan de Fuca.
One of the plates is sliding under the other plate, causing them to converge, but they are stuck.
‘And so what happens is the weaker plate, which is North America, buckles,’ Goldfinger said.
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