Go to the cliff?? Where's the frigging cliff??

Can we really only have foresight in hindsight? Or are we smarter than that?

It’s funny how things tie together. I wrote just last week about how, if we can see that something bad is going to happen, it is our duty to act to prevent it.

And now, this week, the seven Italian geoscientists, engineers and government officials who are charged with failing to give the public adequate warning of a probable earthquake are big international news. (I actually wrote about this case back in June, for the Guardian).

I can’t help but relate this example to the story here in Tofino. (Although I have moved to Port Alberni, I am actually in Tofino at the moment as I write this – my house sale closes today!)

So, over in Italy those officials are being charged with manslaughter – after the earthquake. (The earthquake that occurred there, just six days after the group had released a statement that there was no increased danger of a major quake, killed 309 people).

Over here, we know with 100% certainty that a major quake is coming. We cannot predict exactly when – it could come this afternoon, or not for another 200 years – but there is 100% certainty that it will come. And the destruction of buildings and infrastructure and the loss of human life will be on the scale of what we all witnessed in Japan this past March. It  is most likely that thousands, possibly even tens of thousands, will die.

We cannot prevent that quake. But we can prevent many of the deaths if we educate ourselves, and prepare for it now.

And this is one of the main reasons that I have moved away from Tofino. Port Alberni is not that far away – the earthquake and tsunami will be almost as bad there as they will be here. But how these two communities are preparing for these coming events is completely different.

Tofino came out with an emergency plan in 2007. It was failing in so many ways:

• It had evacuation routes that actually sent people into the tsunami inundation zone rather than out of it
• There was insufficient understanding of the nature of a magnitude 9 earthquake (which means that numerous trees will be down across the roads and driving will not be an option for evacuation). Safe zones must be close enough to reach on foot, within 15 minutes of the earthquake. The plan assumed people would be driving.
• There was insufficient understanding of the events to understand what kind of emergency kits people must have: Two types are required: the so-called “Grab’n’go” kit, which you run with to escape the coming tsunam; and then a long-term survival kit to withstand the weeks or months where access to food, water, and other basic supplies will be limited.
• Their official Grab’n’go kit list contained 126 items! (which included items such as a cribbage board, fire extinguisher, and shower cap) – virtually guaranteeing that anyone who obeyed the official planners’ recommendations would not be able to drag that kit up the hill before the first tsunami wave hit.

I could see that this plan would actually put more lives in danger than if people simply ignored the plan, so I wrote two articles for the community, and made sure that they were published in both of our local newspapers:
Info about the character and magnitude of our expected earthquake and tsunami events (PDF file of text originally published in The Westcoaster and the Westerly newspaper,  April 2007)
A critique of Tofino’s emergency plan (PDF file of text originally published in The Westcoaster and the Westerly newspaper,  April 2007):

I continued to research the subject, and to offer information to Tofino’s emergency planners and to Tofino Council. I published blog articles, I talked on CBC Radio, I was even interviewed on CBC TV’s The National. To this day, four years later, no Tofino official has ever responded specifically to my input (even just to tell me to shut up!).

I tried increasingly provocative blog post titles (from You’re all gonna die: Whatever in June 2010) to an angry but informative rant published last March. By the time of that last one, I had given up on Tofino… I was already half-moved to Port Alberni – but I left it as a bit of a legacy, with all of the links to every article and interview I had done on the subject, in case someone in Tofino ever decides they do want to use my research.

And where has Tofino got with this?

Well, in June of 2010 the mayor, John Fraser, finally mustered himself up to get on CBC Radio to address this subject. Apparently his understanding of the event is so minimal that he does not actually understand that the earthquake will affect the entire west coast region, not just Tofino – so Vancouver will not be dispatching a ship to Tofino within 24 hours, as he is counting on. Vancouver will be digging itself out.

And he believes that Tofitians will survive by eating farmed fish. (Umm, if anyone saw the Japan videos, you might remember that there is a bit of current associated with those tsunami waves. I don’t think those Atlantic salmon will be sticking around). You can listen to that CBC interview with the mayor here.

And then, this past March, the mayor stuck his foot in it again on GlobalTV – saying that locals “should” know where to go to under a tsunami warning (well, if they follow the official Tofino recommendations, sadly, that would be into the inundation zone) – but that visitors will be running around like crazy. (Umm, shouldn’t Tofino take some responsibility in making sure that visitors know what to do too? Not to mention that he is not making a tourism-dependent town look very inviting to tourists!) Unfortunately, GlobalTV seems to have taken down that video clip  but you can read some of the locals’ reaction to it here.

So, back to the Italian case. Scientists and government officials are being charged, the earthquake, for allegedly not providing adequate information and warning. 309 people died.

I want to know about here. I want to know about now, before the earthquake, before people have died. Here in Tofino, government officials are not providing adequate warning or information or planning for an event that we know is coming, and that we know will be deadly.

Must we wait until after the event happens, and hundreds or thousands of people die needlessly, due to inadequate or, in the case of Tofino, also dangerously inappropriate information? Or can we actually act with foresight, rather than hindsight?

Must we wait until people die? Or can we charge them now?

Reference: Map showing official Tofino tsunami evacuation routes.
Brown area is the tsunami inundation zone. White areas are safe areas. Look how much of the inundation zone people are expected to travel through, and how many safe areas they bypass, if they follow this plan. Remember, trees will be down and driving will be impossible. They have 15 minutes to get to safety.

No one else pays attention to this date, but I always do. The anniversary of our earthquake is perhaps not pleasant to think of, but it is important. Kind of like Remembrance Day.

It was 310 years ago today – around 9pm on the night of January 26th, 1700, that the last big quake hit. How do scientists know that? Native people up and down the coast have earthquake stories in their oral history – but as non-written cultures, they are not able to provide exact calendar dates for these events.

Geologists can recognize ancient tsunami deposits by taking core samples in the mudflats – some of their data come from right here beside Tofino, in Browning Passage (pictured in photo). Whenever there is a tsunami, a layer of sand gets thrown up on the mudflats, smothering and killing the vegetation below (eelgrass, algae, etc.) Geologists can carbon-date that killed vegetation layer, thereby dating the tsunami-lain sand layer.

That’s how they know the last big earthquake/tsunami event was in the year 1700, with an error of plus or minus 20 years. By the way, the 1964 tsunami was nothing, in comparison. Click here for a map that shows the reach of both the 1700 and 1964 tsunamis in Port Alberni. You can see that the 1700 one (thick black line) went much higher than the 1964 one (shaded area).

Lower down, the geologists found more sand layers that represent other large earthquake/tsunami events that took place in the years 1310, 810, 400, 170BC and 600BC. All together, they have identified a total of 13 earthquake/tsunami events here, and that is how they know that the average recurrence interval is 500 years. (That is just the average – they have been anywhere from 200 to 900 years apart; this means that, at 310 years, we are in range right now).

So, from carbon-dating below the sand deposits, they had the date narrowed down to between 1680 and 1720. Then they found a trees that were knocked down around that time, preserved under a lake. By dendrochronology – looking for patterns in the sequences of tree rings (that relate to seasons, e.g. harsh winters, droughts, good growing seasons) and comparing them to the ring patterns in living trees today that are greater than about 350 years old, they could count back on the rings and narrow the earthquake down to the winter of 1699-1700.

Then they went to Japan, which has had written tsunami records for centuries (or perhaps millenia, I am not sure), and they found a record that winter of a big tsunami that hit Japan, but with no known earthquake related to it. Back-calculating from the time of the tsunami in Japan, and knowing how fast a tsunami wave travels, they figured out that this big magnitude 9 earthquake hit here around 9pm on January 26th, 1700.

Wondering why we have earthquakes here? North America’s Pacific Rim region is an area where tectonic plates are colliding. The oceanic plate is subducting under the continental plate.

There is no such thing as a fault “line” – you have to think of the Earth in 3D. People think of a fault is a “line” only because that’s how you draw it on a map – but the map only shows the Earth’s surface, and you need to imagine what is going on below the surface. A fault is really a plane – which represents the boundary between two masses of rock – in this case, between the two tectonic plates.

That boundary comes to the Earth’s surface roughly 75 km off the shore of Vancouver Island – under the ocean. You can draw where it comes to the Earth’s surface on a map, and that’s why people looking at maps think of it as a line. But that plane actually angles downward to the northeast, dipping right under Washington State.

This map, from the United States Geological Survey, shows the plate boundaries. The thin red line with the triangles on it (labelled Cascadia Subduction Zone) is where that fault plane hits the surface. The triangles show which side it is angling down towards. Here in Tofino, that fault plane – the top of the subducting oceanic plate – is 25 km below the Earth’s surface, and getting deeper as it moves eastward. Eventually it melts… and that magma rises up to form volcanoes. That’s why all the volcanoes are located in a defined arc, 150 or so km to the east of where the fault “line” is on the map.

So, if you can imagine in 3D that oceanic plate sliding downward, below the coasts of northern California, Oregon and Washington and below Vancouver Island, you’ll find that it makes sense why the earthquakes occur where they do, in the region outlined in black. That is the region directly above where the two plates are moving against one another. The high pressure deep in the Earth makes them get stuck. When the pressure build up to the point that they move, that’s the earthquake.

Subduction earthquakes are the strongest type of earthquakes. (Other types of earthquakes occur from plates moving sideways past one another, rather than downward – such as the San Francisco earthquakes). The earthquake we are expecting here will likely be a magnitude 8 or 9 event - that is between 10 and 100 times stronger than the Haiti earthquake earlier this month.

I hope that this info helps people to understand why we get earthquakes, and how scientists know these things. I don’t think this is talked about enough. If people are not informed, they cannot prepare. When this earthquake comes, it will affect a huge region and the damage (and casualties) will be extensive. We will experience what the people of Haiti are living through right now. If you want to hear more about my views on our emergency preparedness, please check out my post today on the Tofino Residents blog.