Good question! Blake estimated tsunami risk for Bellingham a few days ago; he’s on vacation now, but I’ve passed this paper to him to see if it’s new info to him. Thoughts about this kind of thing (eg, attempts to calculate micromorts) are useful here. It will be a surprising update to me if tsunami risk ends up looking high enough to rule out Bellingham.
I’ll defer to Blake if he’s done the math, but it does seem worth weighting correlated risks more strongly if they could take out all of MIRI. The inundation zone doesn’t look populated, though, so you’re probably fine.
Our quick and low-confidence conclusion was: something in the neighborhood of 3% chance of major earthquake every ten years; not a major tsunami risk to Bellingham because we aren’t directly exposed to the Pacific. The wave has to travel through the de Fuca strait, after which it will spread out, then move between the islands in front of Bellingham in the middle of the sound before reaching Bellingham.
This was a quick and low-confidence conclusion, so I expect our conclusion can be improved on (possibly massively) by someone who has more background knowledge or spends more time on the problem. This was just a first-pass look.
Correction from Blake: “that thing you said about [the wave having to get through the strait, etc.], maybe that’s kinda true but not the main thing, the main thing is people probably shouldn’t live right on the coast at sealevel—if you do you need to be ready to get out somehow if the siren sounds, which maybe is hard? But the property is way above sea level and some miles inland.
“The thing about the strait and islands might be true but not very relevant, and [might] be wrong. I think it was my conjecture at the time and I haven’t checked it.”
Not clear if you mean he’s independently estimating the earthquake risk, or researching previous expert estimates of that risk. From this source, estimates of “an earthquake” in the next 50 years is anywhere from 7.4%-41%, depending on assumptions that are controversial within the earthquake prediction field. I put “an earthquake” in quotes because while they’re definitely talking about a Juan de Fuca plate subduction, this source doesn’t model the range of magnitude estimates based on these assumptions—just the chance of a quake happening at all.
What I see is estimates that such a quake would be magnitude 8+ to 9.
Bellingham has some info on how they expect the quake to affect it, but it sounds like the main thing w/ regard to tsunamis is to check that the building, and the homes of the researchers, are not in the inundation zone. For earthquakes, if it’s relatively recent architecture, it should avoid collapse, though it may be unusable afterward. I’ve spoken with one expert who was involved in retrofitting older brick Seattle buildings for earthquake preparedness. It seems like something you should be able to consult with prior to any building purchase.
This seems like a very confused way of thinking about earthquakes.
In the past month, there were 4 earthquakes associated with the Juan del Fuca subduction. All were around Richter 2.5 and no one cared.
While I suppose it’s possible for a fault to produce small and large earthquakes both more often than in between, this strikes me as rather unlikely. Generally an analysis of earthquake risk should begin be deciding what magnitude earthquakes to care about, and then calculate probabilities.
(When we say that the Seattle area is particularly at-risk, that’s because architecture standards there contain very little earthquake-resilience. Which may not be relevant here. The actual fault line is among the less active on the west coast of North America.)
Good question! Blake estimated tsunami risk for Bellingham a few days ago; he’s on vacation now, but I’ve passed this paper to him to see if it’s new info to him. Thoughts about this kind of thing (eg, attempts to calculate micromorts) are useful here. It will be a surprising update to me if tsunami risk ends up looking high enough to rule out Bellingham.
I’ll defer to Blake if he’s done the math, but it does seem worth weighting correlated risks more strongly if they could take out all of MIRI. The inundation zone doesn’t look populated, though, so you’re probably fine.
Our quick and low-confidence conclusion was: something in the neighborhood of 3% chance of major earthquake every ten years; not a major tsunami risk to Bellingham because we aren’t directly exposed to the Pacific. The wave has to travel through the de Fuca strait, after which it will spread out, then move between the islands in front of Bellingham in the middle of the sound before reaching Bellingham.
This was a quick and low-confidence conclusion, so I expect our conclusion can be improved on (possibly massively) by someone who has more background knowledge or spends more time on the problem. This was just a first-pass look.
Correction from Blake: “that thing you said about [the wave having to get through the strait, etc.], maybe that’s kinda true but not the main thing, the main thing is people probably shouldn’t live right on the coast at sealevel—if you do you need to be ready to get out somehow if the siren sounds, which maybe is hard? But the property is way above sea level and some miles inland.
“The thing about the strait and islands might be true but not very relevant, and [might] be wrong. I think it was my conjecture at the time and I haven’t checked it.”
Not clear if you mean he’s independently estimating the earthquake risk, or researching previous expert estimates of that risk. From this source, estimates of “an earthquake” in the next 50 years is anywhere from 7.4%-41%, depending on assumptions that are controversial within the earthquake prediction field. I put “an earthquake” in quotes because while they’re definitely talking about a Juan de Fuca plate subduction, this source doesn’t model the range of magnitude estimates based on these assumptions—just the chance of a quake happening at all.
What I see is estimates that such a quake would be magnitude 8+ to 9.
Bellingham has some info on how they expect the quake to affect it, but it sounds like the main thing w/ regard to tsunamis is to check that the building, and the homes of the researchers, are not in the inundation zone. For earthquakes, if it’s relatively recent architecture, it should avoid collapse, though it may be unusable afterward. I’ve spoken with one expert who was involved in retrofitting older brick Seattle buildings for earthquake preparedness. It seems like something you should be able to consult with prior to any building purchase.
This seems like a very confused way of thinking about earthquakes.
In the past month, there were 4 earthquakes associated with the Juan del Fuca subduction. All were around Richter 2.5 and no one cared.
While I suppose it’s possible for a fault to produce small and large earthquakes both more often than in between, this strikes me as rather unlikely. Generally an analysis of earthquake risk should begin be deciding what magnitude earthquakes to care about, and then calculate probabilities.
(When we say that the Seattle area is particularly at-risk, that’s because architecture standards there contain very little earthquake-resilience. Which may not be relevant here. The actual fault line is among the less active on the west coast of North America.)