Nobody wants to think about children being hurt or killed during an earthquake. It’s not my idea of pleasure reading, and it surely isn’t yours, either. If you’re opening this story on the bus or over morning tea, you may be tempted to close the paper and go back to doomscrolling.
But the truth is that our earthquake is coming, whether we think about it or not. The Cascadia subduction zone earthquake is a tectonic inevitability, thanks to plates in the earth’s crust that lie beneath the Pacific Ocean just off the Oregon Coast, leaving Portland vulnerable to what could be one of the worst natural disasters in the history of North America.
It’s this simple: If we don’t understand the risk, we cannot prepare. And there’s no risk as important to think about, no matter how unpleasant, than our brick school buildings…