NickCummings.com

One of the best perks about living in the Pacific Northwest is that you probably won’t be murdered by Mother Nature. Floods? Unlikely. Tornados? Almost never. Volcanoes erupting? Well, okay, sometimes. But when you consider that your offspring are probably not going to be eaten by a roving pack of hyenas in the wilds of Oregon or Washington, you start to appreciate just how relatively demure this ecosystem is.

Until you start reading about the Cascadia fault, anyway. It’s a major fault line that runs from Northern California to Vancouver, B.C. along the Pacific Ocean coastline, and every few hundred years it decides to lurch forward and basically ruin everything.

And honestly, “fault” is quite an apologetic word for a massive subduction range that fires off a high-magnitude quake capable of leveling cities. I thought “Massive Catastrophic Pain Generator” might be a better fit, but so far the USGS hasn’t budged.

So what does it mean? According to a New York Times article by Peter Yanev, an earthquake engineering expert, it means we’re in for a more devastating quake than what occurred in Chile or Haiti — and generally speaking, we’re not at all prepared. Apparently if massive earthquakes are a rare occurrence in a particular region — as they are in the Northwest — that area is deemed a lower-risk zone. Earthquake proofing standards are kept lower and are perhaps less rigidly enforced than in a region like California’s San Andreas fault, which puzzlingly has a lower threshold for destruction than our humble Cascadia fault.

This isn’t going to surprise most people in the Northwest, though. Most of us have known about the impending earthquake for years and are fully aware that it could level buildings and kill and injure lots of people. So why aren’t we worried about it? Why am I not worried about it? I guess when there’s something so potentially devastating looming in the unforeseeable future, the most common human instinct is to ignore it. It’s not surprising; after all, how many people avoid the doctor because they’re afraid something is wrong with them?

Arguably the worst part is that we have practically no idea when the next quake will happen. We’re due for another one already, but it could be as much as 100 years away. So while we may not see it in our lifetimes, the next generation most definitely will.

But it’s kind of exciting in a perverse way, isn’t it? I mean, I’m not advocating widespread injuries and destruction, but we’re talking about a high-stakes disaster waiting to happen. And at the very least, we’ve finally got incontrovertible proof that those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest are totally bad dudes.