In a surreal report Monday, The New Yorker's Kathryn Schulz painstakingly warns of a giant tsunami-causing earthquake that is coming to the Pacific Northwest — and maybe pretty soon. There's a one-in-three chance a 140,000-square-mile region will get rocked in the next 50 years, and a one-in-10 chance of an even bigger disaster. Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem, and Olympia and their surrounding areas, home to seven million people, are dangerously close to the Cascadia fault line, which Schulz calls the continent's worst.
But obviously everyone's fully prepared for the worst natural disaster in the history of North America, and nothing that bad could happen, right? Wrong:
FEMA projects that nearly 13,000 people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another 27,000 will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. [The New Yorker]
In particular, the young and the elderly aren't expected to fare well.
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"I'm not going to sugarcoat it and say, 'Oh, yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly,'" Kevin Cupples, a city planner in Oregon, told The New Yorker. "No. We won't."
Steel yourself before you read the entire gripping report here.
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