‘Wake-up call’: Officials say giant Pacific earthquake serves as warning for local megaquakes, tsunamis

VANCOUVER, Wash. – Daniel Eungard gets a handful of tsunami alerts each month because of his job running the tsunami hazards program for the Washington Geological Survey. Most of them are nothing.

“Every time my phone dings with an alert noise, I look at it,” he said. “Usually, it’s a quick swipe it away and go on with my day.”

But when he got the initial alert in the afternoon on July 29 about the earthquake that had just struck off the coast of Russia – one of the strongest quakes ever recorded at a magnitude 8.8 – he looked at the preliminary data and knew this time was different.

“I realized … I’m going to be working for the next 12 to 18 hours,” Eungard recalled.

He said Wednesday that Washingtonians are fortunate the quake didn’t direct its energy toward the Pacific Northwest and that the resulting tsunami was small.

But Eungard and other emergency response officials said the quake is a warning to people along the Pacific coast and the lower Columbia River about our own looming megaquakes – and the need for the region to prepare.

“It’s a wake-up call, hopefully, to people everywhere in our coastal communities to help them recognize, if they haven’t previously heard, that there’s a tsunami risk in Oregon and Washington,” Eungard said.

1-foot tsunami

The quake sent a 20-foot tsunami to parts of coastal Russia, damaging infrastructure, causing power outages and knocking out mobile phone service.

The impacts, however, were modest on the Washington and Oregon coasts and up the Columbia River.

The tsunami swell ended up being 1-2 feet when it hit the coast and mouth of the river, said Colby Neuman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s office in Portland.

While that caused a day of strange currents and unusual tides, the impacts weren’t felt on the coast or Columbia like they will be when the region is eventually hit by tsunamis caused by quakes on the Cascadia and Aleutian subduction zones.

The Big One

Unlike the July 29 quake off the coast of Russia, a tsunami from an earthquake in the Aleutian subduction zone near Alaska is aimed straight at the Pacific Northwest, Eungard said.

“The potential for an event on the Alaska Aleutian subduction zone is very high,” he added, “and the potential of that event reaching a high magnitude and directing its energy towards us is also very high.”

Models show that a strong quake approaching a magnitude 9 there or closer to home in the Cascadia subduction zone will cause immense damage and disruption on the coast and up the Columbia River, Eungard said.

For Wahkiakum County’s Puget Island, he said such a tsunami would go over its dikes, “and, for the most part, fill it up like a bathtub.”

Communities as far up river as Longview will be hit with flooding, and even the Vancouver area may see some mild impacts.

The situation would be worse if the tsunami was caused by the Cascadia subduction zone, said Neuman of the National Weather Service in Portland. That’s because there will be less warning time, and the region will have to also deal with the impacts of the earthquake, which research shows will include collapsed bridges.

He added people in tsunami danger zones need to understand that because cell towers may go down, the earthquake itself will be all the warning they get and they should immediately evacuate to higher ground.

“The modeling shows, you have less than 20 minutes to get to higher ground,” he said. “And that includes the four or five minutes of shaking.”

That means people on most of the Long Beach Peninsula won’t be able to make it to the 50-foot elevation the state recommends they reach within that remaining 15 minutes.

“I hesitate to be too dark about it, but it will be something that we just have not experienced in this country’s history for natural disasters,” Neuman said, speaking about the broader regional impacts of a large Cascadia quake. “There will be loss of life, and it will be a logistical nightmare for rescues and resources.”

A good practice run

When he heard about the July 29 quake, Neuman’s first thought was, “I needed to get into work to help.”

After arriving that evening, he quickly took over creating a forecast for firefighters battling a wildfire in the Cascades so colleagues could work to understand the local impacts of the Russian quake and its tsunami.

“It’s an all hands on deck, because we still have our normal things that we do on a daily basis,” he said. “And then we’re doing these conference calls and trying to communicate information to emergency managers and answering phone questions.”

Neuman said the good news is everything went smoothly. Staff received timely and accurate information from weather buoys – despite Trump administration cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office that runs many of them – and communicated that information to the people who needed to know it.

Lt. Cmdr. Jacqueline Hunnicutt, emergency management division chief at the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Columbia River, said the event should serve as a reminder that the Pacific Northwest has large earthquakes in store and preparedness is crucial.

“It’s not an ‘if this is going to happen,’ it’s a ‘when it’s going to happen,’ ” she said. “And the best thing we can do is to prepare ourselves, our families and friends.”

Eungard, the tsunami hazards program lead, echoed Hunnicutt. And, like Neuman, he spent the day following the tsunami and working to get emergency responders the most accurate information about its local impacts.

“Because of the relatively low risk that this event provided, it was a good opportunity, if nothing else, as an active practice,” Eungard said. “Now, the next event, we may not be so lucky.”

About the project: The Murrow News Fellowship is a state-funded journalism project managed by Washington State University. Local partners are The Columbian and The Daily News. For more information, visit news-fellowship.murrow.wsu.edu.