They talk about it in Southern California; they talk about it in San Francisco and they talk about it in Seattle. “Watch out for the big one, it’s coming.” It’s the idea that eventually a cataclysmic earthquake will take place on the West Coast and we here in Washington state look at Seattle as one of the possible epicenters.
1965 Seattle
I remember the Seattle earthquake from 1965. I was a kid getting ready to go to school on April 29th at 8:28 AM. Everything started shaking and my mom and I stood in the. doorway for safety. It hit 6.7 on the Richter scale.
Now there are new studies saying that we don’t need to look towards the Cascadia subduction zonefor the big one. We need to be more concerned with what are called shallow fault strands through the fault zone from Bainbridge Island to Bellevue.
According to axios.com,‘ Ruptures within the Seattle zone over the past millennia have been dominated by these smaller branching strands, which have slipped about every 350 years, the study found.The most recent of those events likely occurred in the early 19th century, based on radiocarbon dating and tree-ring analysis.By contrast, the Cascadia subduction zone — the source of the feared “Big One” — ruptures every 550 years or so and last slipped around 1700.’
Why the concern?
Stephen Angster, a U.S. Geological Survey geologist says These secondary fault ruptures hit “pretty close to home,” The opinion in general is that Seattle has had earthquakes in the past and will certainly have earthquakes in the future, so they need to plan. Part of that plan is retrofitting. Certain types of buildings in the Seattle area so that they can withstand these earthquakes.
So, get ready, because it may not be “the big one”, but the small one’s underneath Seattle that rock the city?…