One of the reasons I have gotten into emergency preparedness and communication is that this is a very dangerous place to be living. My house is about 12 miles from a fault-line. Our rivers flood routinely, land moves constantly, forest fires happen every year, we live in the foothills of an active volcano, and of course, there is the Cascadian Subduction Zone.
Timothy Egan has a nice writeup in the New York Times:
Living in the Ring of Fire
The West has been on fire all month, with dream homes falling to a combustive punch, wild horses seared by flame and suffocated by smoke, even a rare “firenado” dancing across a landscape in which seven million acres have been burned this year.
It was shocking to be lazing through the rituals of summer at Lake Chelan, one of the world’s most beautiful bodies of water, in Washington’s eastern Cascades, when wildfires arrived with a cannonade of lightning — blazes that have now taken lives and forced towns to evacuate.
But even as eye-tearing smoke, red sun and yellow-shirted firefighters have become a part of life this summer, many of us on the West Coast can’t stop thinking about a greater threat — earthquakes, specifically the Really Big One. The unclenching of two large plates along the Pacific shore from Northern California to Vancouver Island would be, by consensual predictions, the worst natural disaster in North American history.
It happened once, more than 300 years ago, a magnitude 9 shake that was 60 times stronger than the 1906 earthquake that left San Francisco in ruins. It most assuredly will happen again, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in a hundred years.
Which is why I am taking part in Cascadia Rising excercise next year.
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