In particular, those of us who live in and around Portland. None of the bridges over the Willamette River are fully rated to survive a 9.0 earthquake. Yes, I know about the new Selwood bridge and the Tilikum Crossing. But only their main spans are rated to survive, the approach ramps are not.

So imagine the Willamette River blocked by fallen bridges. And think of the cleanup effort it will require.

I guess what I'm saying is that, in Baltimore, there is an ongoing example of what it takes to clean up a fallen bridge and the impacts it causes. It's a situation worth monitoring.

I love canning and preserving, but I worry that it will all be wasted if the earthquake just rattles all the jars to pieces. Have any of you come up with a good solution?

I live in Seattle proper and don’t have a ton of extra space, but years ago I had some extra space in my garage so I got a 275 Gallon IBC tote to store water in case of earthquake.

Now I want to move my water heater out of another room into this space and will need to forgo the IBC tote, which raises the question of how to store emergency water.

Two ideas would be to:

• get a taller narrower tank like this that can go next to my water heater: https://www.watersupplytanks.com/products/260-gallon-water-storage-tank-by-surewater-emergency-water-tank-with-spigot-for-emergency-disaster-preparedness
• get a second water heater and use it both as additional hot water capacity as well as another tank of potable water that could be utilized in case of emergency.

What are the cons of using a hot water tank as emergency water storage?

I've heard winter will be pretty gross this year. I'm getting ready by having my chimney swept and inspected, stocking up on non-perishable foods and putting away money for a new generator.

In the video, they mention it at about at the two-minute mark.

https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2023/08/16/mourning-thousands-miles-away-family-remembers-beloved-sister-killed-lahaina-fire/

Thinking on camping around Kalaloch, but I've been reading about the tsunami stuff and it's been making me feel pretty concerned in the event of a megaquake.

I've looked at the evacuation routes, for the most part it looks like you'd just be running into the woods and uphill. It's really been making me anxious before my trip to the point of me considering not going. What should I do?

Also, how much time do you get before the waves hit in the event of an M9? And how long would it feasibly take to get to somewhere safe around Kalaloch?

Do folks here camp out on the coast? Not sure if I'm just being paranoid.

I’m very sorry for posting an anxiety post here when it’s probably not a good use of this space.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been doing prepping. Doing everything I should have done long ago and making sure I know what to do in the case of the big one. I also plan to be more involved with the shakeout this Oct.

The thing is I can’t relax at all, and prepping is honestly overwhelming. I know what I need and I’m slowly gathering supplies by following the prep in a year guide. But the apartment I live in is not modern (1900, with an overhang with two thin wooden pillars holding the backside) and I can’t afford to move to a new building; my wife is not on board with my prepping; and I don’t have space for all the food and water we need if/when it happens. We also walk everywhere (no car) and live in downtown Tacoma, WA.

I know I can’t ask for reassurances because that’s hiding from facts (though yes, I’m talking to a specialist about my anxiety now), yet is there anything that can help me relax? I know chances are unlikely (but possible) but it really feels like any second now to me and I know very well I can’t live in fear.

I should trust my instincts because I did the right thing without thinking back in 2001. I think a lack of trust in this building is part of it?

You can't prep unless you know what you're prepping for.

For many of us in western PNW cities, the biggest disaster we know will happen eventually is a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake and the associated tsunami and landslides. Or if you're in Seattle, a large Seattle fault earthquake, which is less likely but would be more damaging locally.

What assumptions do you make in order to focus and simplify your prep?

Here are some of mine:

• I'm in the middle of Seattle, so bugging out would just take me further away from aid. My best plan for survival is to shelter in place.
  • Figuring out what to do if I'm at work (in Redmond) when it hits is a tough choice. Getting home by car would likely be impossible; the most reliable way would be to walk all the way around Lake Washington, which takes 10 hours minimum. Access to aid would probably be about the same in both places, but you'd have hundreds of office workers in the building and no food there, so it's probably worth it to trek home.
• Getting in or out of Seattle will likely be nearly impossible anyway, due to damaged bridges and roads. Airports and seaports will also be closed due to damage. If runways aren't damaged too badly, we may have at least one airfield open within a week, but only emergency responders will be permitted to use it.
• However, that doesn't mean aid won't reach us. With the help of the military, there are many ways to get supplies in. For the most urgent stuff, they can set up depots relatively nearby (e.g. in undamaged areas east of the Cascades) and airlift by helicopter. Larger supply drops can be done by parachute from cargo aircraft; airfields that aren't in use for air traffic would be perfect as drop zones and depots. Road travel will probably be possible if they can find a route, but it will probably be circuitous and congested, and not ideal for extended use by heavy vehicles. Longer-term, they can park cargo ships in the Puget Sound and ferry cargo to shore.
• That being the case, I only expect to need 1-2 weeks of food before supplies start coming in. I keep my pantry reasonably stocked. Before grocery stores even have a chance to implement a response to ration and give away their food (without power, all that refrigerated food is use-it-or-lose-it anyway... not that refrigerated food is the best thing to grab) they'll likely be mobbed and looted, and I have no qualms about doing so myself.
• Water is a much bigger problem; transporting it as cargo is very prohibitive. Water infrastructure will almost certainly be damaged, and I expect I'll have to go at least 1 month without resupplies of fresh water.
• Power will almost certainly go out, and repairs will take a long time because of the extent of damage and because damaged roads will make it hard for crews to get around. I'm in the middle of the city, though, so I expect it will be no more than a few days before my neighborhood or adjacent ones have power.
• Natural gas will also go out. This will be more similar to water, that it may take a month or more to repair. I have multiple sources for heating (hydronic radiant floors heated by gas, and mini-split heat pumps) and cooking (gas range, electric induction burner, and propane grill if I need to), so I only need to last a few days until power is restored.
• Gasoline will not be available to the public for at least a month. They'll likely bring some in by land or sea before that, but it will be limited to emergency responders and prioritized essential services only.
• Communication will be difficult. Cell phone service may or may not survive the initial disaster, and will die within a few hours as generators run out of fuel. Some people's landline Internet may survive (until they or their provider lose power), but anyone who loses it will be out for a month or more. (It will be interesting to see how self-healing the Internet really is as major network exchanges and data centers in the PNW go dark over the course of a day. Too bad I won't be able to hear the results until long after the fact.) Even local radio and TV will probably go dark for a couple of days until power is restored. Until then, I expect to send someone from our household once or twice a day to neighborhood hubs to gather news.
• Fire fighting will be unavailable for at least a few days. :-( In the immediate aftermath, they will be busy with bigger problems than a house fire. For the next few days or even weeks, they might be unable to reach me due to road damage, and in any case I'd have no way of calling for help without phone service.
• Hospitals and urgent care centers will be overwhelmed for at least a few days. Initially there will be a surge in urgent cases of injuries. Generators will only keep essential services like ICUs running; everything else will have to make do with field conditions for a couple of days. If we have a critical injury, we'll have to stabilize it and figure out how to hobble to an ER (car, bike, shopping cart, walking, etc.). For anything less urgent, even up to a minor broken bone, I expect we'd be rejected in triage, so we'd do our best to dress it at home and wait a few days before seeking treatment. (At least there'd be a chance of getting a badass scar out of it.)

If you're in major city or suburb, are your assumptions similar?

If you're in a small town or rural area, what assumptions are you making, and how does it affect your prep?

(edit: formatting)

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/02/07/cascadia-earthquake-portland-fuel-subduction-zone-oregon/

This record breaking amount of refined fuel gas released into the air by the expected fires and the immediate impact to human health isn't addressed in any post-Cascadia government document I've seen yet. Anyone else? Anything close to this spill disaster size hasn't happened in a metropolitan area before.

With no published government plans to evacuate the Valley post quake, and no way for people to evacuate themselves -- this air pollution might be the bigger disaster in terms of human life than the quake itself.

Kudos to Portland Senator Michael Dembrow for getting the mentioned bill passed that requires the storage owners to at least do their own report by 2024 on the state of their equipment and describe needed the remediation effort. But the reports are not transparent to the public, including the names of the companies that own them and there are no deadlines for remediation, just bi-yearly updates to the legislature. Unless I missed something.

Contact your state rep to ask about remediation deadlines and accountability, keep the pressure up.

Hey all. What are the most viable options to get out asap?

I'm assuming cars will not be a viable option out for months (but feel free to argue that), so this is probably the routes most viable for walking, boats and/or biking. The biggest challenges will be downed bridges and possibly broken dams.

Another assumption is that several entrepreneurs will pop up and offer to ferry people across rivers with their own boats. Hopefully. Depending upon the state of the Bonneville dam, passenger boats up the Columbia will probably be the most popular way east?

North-South: are any of the bridges across the Columbia between Oregon & Washington retro-fitted for earthquake?

Major east-west arterials from the Valley include Hwy 26 over Mt Hood, Hwy 22 over the Santiam Pass, 126/242 over McKenzie, 58 & 138. The biggest challenge I can imagine for them since they snake and are carved through the Cascades are landslides and broken bridges. Any of them better than others?

And what about Forest Service and BLM roads? Any ideas about those?

I live in a house that was built in 1890. The house is in questionable condition in the first place, floors slant downward in certain areas and some of the walls also are tilted and not straight. I currently rent and plan on finding out from the landlord if our house is seismically retrofitted, and if not seeing if it can get done. So here are my questions:

1. Is there any law in Oregon that require a landlord to retrofit a house?
2. How much of a concern should the floors be? My worry is them collapsing during an earthquake, is this something I should be worried about?
3. Is there anything I can do as a renter to have my landlord take steps to make my house more safe legally speaking?

Thanks in advanced! I'm not really a paranoid person but the earthquake in Turkey really makes me want to be prepared as possible in case this does happen in next few years. I love my house (mostly the cheap rent) but I would be willing to move somewhere safer!

They keep telling me not too worry about it, and that it'll be in like 50 years. I point to the turkey earthquake and tell them that 30,000+ people never woke up or were trapped underground for days till they died, and if they knew about it they wouldn't be stupid enough to sit on their asses. We know about "the big one" but nobody gives a shit. I just cant bro ...

In 2013 the Oregon Resilience Plan was published - as I'm sure many on this sub know, a really informative document describing the Cascadia quake and how Oregon in 2013 was (and is today?) woefully underprepared for it.

It looks like there has been some positive but slow progress (HB 2017 for transportation infrastructure improvements, for example), but also some of the worst aspects remain relatively unchanged (critical energy hub on the Willamette river in-fill, from what I can tell).

I did a decent amount of searching and couldn't find any updates of this assessment from a government agency or otherwise - specifically on the time to service restoration estimates, which present what seems to be an extreme hardship even with significant preparedness (we are mostly two weeks prepared with drinking water and food, but the numbers below make me second guess if that is enough). We're in the valley zone. These are the 2013 estimates from the resilience plan:

​

• One to three years to restore drinking water and sewer service in the coastal zone.
• One month to one year to restore water and sewer in the valley zone.
• Six to twelve months to restore partial function of the top-priority highways in the valley zone.
• Two to four months to restore police and fire stations in the valley zone.
• Eighteen months to restore healthcare facilities in the valley zone, three years or more in the coastal zone.
• The Oregon Resilience Plan – Cascadia: Oregon’s Greatest Natural Threat – February 2013
• One to three months to restore electricity service in the valley zone.
• Three to six months to restore electricity service in the coastal zone.

I just moved back to Oregon 9 months ago and have not tracked this closely until recently. Has anyone come across a publication of updated estimates for these figures? Or, with better knowledge of the incremental legislation and/or infrastructure projects in the last decade, is it safe to assume these estimates (and the report more generally) can still be considered accurate?

I can't seem to find anything online. Maps made by OR seem to completely omit the area even though it is closer to Portland than, say Hillsboro, which generally appear on the map.

Say all cell towers go out. How would I be able to communicate between Shoreline and Centrallia ? What devices would I need ? Is this something reasonable or affordable to set up ? What if it is something closer, across a 10 to 15 mile stretch of town ?

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc73821036/executive

No tsunami warning.

We got an earthquake warning on our phones and felt mild shaking way over in Redding.

Has anyone tried or looked into this? I read there’s a process to make acorn flour but I wonder if there’s anything beyond that.

There’s this video on bark cambium. I have not tried it yet.

I created a free course teaching how you can navigate using coordinates without a GPS. Here it is:

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