I love the place - I used to like Cannon Beach about 20 miles to the South but C.B. has been 'di$covered' and is now very gentrified while Seaside has retained its working roots. I have been down there for the last couple of years for a very large amateur radio conference in June. Great coffee, chinese food and a wonderful hole-in-the-wall tavern where the locals hang out. When I lived in Seattle, Cannon Beach and Seaside were some of my favorite places to visit (with the obligatory side trip to Powell's in Portland).
Unfortunately, the town is smack-dab in the sights of a tsunami when the Cascadia subduction zone lets go. The New Yorker has an excellent article about some people trying to make the Seaside schools more tsunami-proof:
THE REALLY SMALL ONES
By their nature, coastal towns are seldom at the center of things. The little boardwalk city of Seaside, Oregon, is in the far northwest corner of the state, four square miles that are not square, bisected by a river and flush against the ocean. In the summer months, nearly everyone there is from elsewhere; given a little sunshine, well over half a million tourists spread their towels along the town’s long shoreline. After Labor Day, though, the candy stores and kite shops close their shutters, the “vacancy” signs blink on, and the beach, gone brown with rain, thins out to seagulls and bundled-up locals walking their dogs. Year-round, some sixty-five hundred people live in Seaside.
But everything is at the center of something. Last year, I wrote an article in this magazine about the Cascadia subduction zone, a little-known fault line that cyclically produces the largest earthquakes and tsunamis in North America—shaking of magnitude 9.0 or higher, waves of a scale and destructive force analogous to the 2011 disaster in Japan. The subduction zone runs for seven hundred miles along the western coast of our continent. At its south end is Cape Mendocino, California. At its north end is Vancouver Island, Canada. In the middle is Seaside.
That centrality is not just geographic. With one possible exception—the similarly unlucky town of Long Beach, Washington—no other place on the West Coast is as imperilled by the Cascadia subduction zone as Seaside. When the earthquake hits, the continent will jolt westward into the Pacific, displacing an enormous amount of ocean. All of that seawater will be forced upward into a massive liquid mountain, which will promptly collapse and rush back toward the shore. That’s the tsunami, which will flood the coastal region up to a mile and a half inland and to a depth of twenty, forty, even a hundred feet, depending on your precise location. The area that will be swamped is called the inundation zone; within it, tsunamis are essentially unsurvivable. Eighty-three per cent of Seaside’s population and eighty-nine per cent of its workforce are located inside that zone. So is its energy infrastructure, water supply, wastewater-treatment plant, hospital, police department, and fire stations. And so, during the school year, are nearly all of its children.
Some really good people, a great gift of land from Weyerhaeuser timber company for the new school buildings and a growing awareness of what can happen and how to cope. Out here, we will experience about a 5.0 Magnitude - building damage, unsecured houses shifting off their foundations, some dams and bridges failing - not as serious as Seaside but still something to prepare and plan for.
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