Paul and I were recently at our favorite Oregon coast retreat, The Surfsand Resort in Cannon Beach, Oregon for 3 days. We both had just finished reading an article called The Really Big One, by Kathryn Schulz, in the July 20, 2015 issue of the New Yorker magazine. I don’t recommend reading this right before you plan to spend any vacation time on the coast in the Northwestern United States.
As long as we had already made the mistake of reading it, Paul decided to download an App on his iPhone called the Tsunami App to see where we might have a chance to run to if the tsunami warning sirens went off while we were at our beach resort. As it turns out, there is a very tall hill not far from us that his tsunami app shows as being in a green, or safe zone. The top of this hill has another resort perched on it called the Hallmark.
I suggested that we should measure how long it would take us to get to safety if we were just walking at a normal pace, and then figure that if the tsunami sirens were going off, we would be running for our lives with adrenaline pumping and we’d make it in far less time than it would take for us to casually walk to it.
Sadly, this sign very accurately depicts how we would actually be moving trying to outrun a tsunami. Yikes!
We decided to try this experiment in the afternoon about 3 PM. The sun was bright and the ocean was heading into a low tide and the afternoon was breezy and gorgeous. It would have been a sad day to have a tsunami come along and wreck it. Paul set the timer on his iPhone, we hooked the leash on our Westie, Yuki, and we headed out of our room. We took the stairs down to the parking lot as we figured the elevator wouldn’t be safe in an earthquake. Once on the ground floor, we began walking briskly up our planned route to high ground. A steady uphill climb. Trying to drive to safety would be useless because the roads are all small 2-laners in the village of Cannon Beach and would instantly turn to gridlock. The route we planned was about the distance of 3 city blocks.
We climbed steadily uphill and when we got to the end of the dead-end road called Fir Street, there was a very steep set of stairs to get the rest of the way to the top of the Hallmark Resort parking lot which was in the safe green zone. This was a steep set of stairs with a couple of switchbacks. At least it looked long and steep to two out-of-shape 70+ year-olds with an elderly dog in tow.
When we finally got to the top of the these stairs, Paul checked his timer and it read 6 minutes and 20 seconds. We could see that the parking lot continued up to an even higher area of the hill, so we kept going until we got to the top of that highest area. Time check again, 7 minutes and 20 seconds. Safety achieved! I was gasping and Yuki’s tongue was hanging out. I rummaged in our backpack pulling out water for all 3 of us. Note to self: Keep a backpack with water close to the door to take with us when we have to quickly escape with our lives.
‘Tsunami’ is a Japanese word meaning “harbor wave.” The Japanese changed the name from the old name of “tidal wave” in 1963, because they didn’t want people to think tsunamis were caused by the ordinary pull of the moon which influences the tides. Tsunamis are far from ordinary tidal waves. When an earthquake and a resulting tsunami happens, what the geologists call “the big one,” people along the Northwest coast will have between 5 minutes and 15 minutes before the tsunami comes ashore. Depending on the strength of the earthquake, it could be upwards of a 100 foot high wall of water rushing at 600 miles per hour – the speed of jet planes. That does not allow a lot of warning or time to evacuate. From our test today, we determined that we would possibly have a chance to get to high ground and survive before everything below this spiky hill (a basalt volcanic neck) was washed away. All of Cannon Beach, the Surfsand, and everything else below this point where we stood panting and gasping in the warm afternoon sunshine, would be gone.
The view from the top of our safe hill was spectacular. Its hard to really imagine that such utter devastation lies skulking in the Juan de Fuca Trench a few hundred miles off-shore. Earthquake experts estimate that in a 9.0 earthquake (a really big one like the one hitting Japan a couple years ago), basically everything in the Northwest will be toast west of I-5. This includes the entire Oregon coast, Eugene, Salem and Portland, the entire Washington coast and inland to Vancouver next to Portland, the Seattle area, Bellingham Washington, and Vancouver in British Columbia and environs. That’s a lot of real estate and millions and millions of people.
We now have information and an informal test to show that we might survive a tsunami. So then what? We would be standing on a small, 2 acre hilltop, with a bunch of local people who probably also know to run there, in a landscape that would be wiped out for 100s of miles or more north, south, and east of us. It would be the equivalent of Masada, only instead of Romans threatening, we would be besieged by swirling sea water and debris. Then what? No food, water, room service, cabana service to bring us food and drinks on the beach, spa robes, or anything else.
We looked back down the long flight of stairs and decided to go down the west side stairs and end up on the beach a short distance from Haystack Rock. The tide was low and friendly and we love looking at the tide pools surrounding this famous Oregon Coast feature. Paul’s original idea was that if the sirens went off, we should just gather up Yuki and all hold on to each other and get swept away together. That sounded romantically fatalistic to me for about 3 seconds. Hell no!! Lets figure out if it would be possible for us to survive, and then if we can determine that it isn’t even remotely possible, I’ll buy into Paul’s original romantic fantasy plan.
We hiked back along the beach to the Surfsand in time for Happy Hour on our balcony overlooking the scenic Haystack Rock. I was hoping the tsunami sirens didn’t go off anytime soon, as we were pretty much beat from our survivability test run. Ah, but we do love coming to the Oregon coast in spite of the risk of being attacked by a tsunami. We’ve already booked dates in June and July of 2016.
carpyharpy 