re: #203 Cheechako

Want to have nightmares tonight? Read this article about the potential Cascadia Earthquake. (If you value your sleep, you may be better off waiting until tomorrow.)

The Really Big One:
An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.

From that article:

Thanks to that work [studying Japanese tsunami records and Native American oral traditions], 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.