I know the New Yorker is a bit lengthy to read start to finish, so I included some quotes from the article that I found to be pertinent. My general question to all bigger pockets members is as follows: If the bad publicity created by movies such as “San Andreas” and stigmas produced in our culture about the San Andreas fault/1989 Loma Prieta earthquake do not reduce the prices of California real estate currently, how should investors, homeowners, etc. in Oregon, Washington and California feel about the Juan de Fuca plate/the Cascadia Fault expected earthquake to be the big one? Geological time is very different from human perception of real estate markets. Will this article and the trickle of publicity on this subject change anything about real estate markets in these areas? If ‘the big one’ ever does hit and a large portion of the homes are damaged, how do you think this will effect the market? All thoughts and comments are welcome :)

Quotes:

"Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing 'the big one.'"

"Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland."

"In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million."

"...we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten."

"'I’ve been through one of these massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If that was Portland'—Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his head before he finished it with words. 'Let’s just say I would rather not be here.'"

"Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals."

"On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own."

( Kathryn Schulz 2015 - - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-r...)

Would love to hear everyones feedback. Comments, ideas, opinions, criticism, what ever Brandon and Joshua allow.

-Rob

0 Votes