When the tsunami comes
Seismologists warn that a massive earthquake will someday hit the Northwest, triggering a wall of water 60 feet high, said Eric Scigliano in Politico. A Coast Guard station is the only line of defense.
ON THE NORTH shore of Washington’s wild Olympic Peninsula, a scimitarshaped sandspit called Ediz Hook arcs for 3 miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. At its tip, between snowy mountains to the south and Vancouver Island to the north, sits what may be the nation’s most scenically sited military installation— and its most vulnerable.
U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles is the very first of first responders when something goes wrong, as it often does, on the state’s tangled straits and inlets and stormy outer coast and, sometimes, on the peaks and bluffs overlooking them. The station’s three MH-65 Dolphin helicopters are the only aircraft the Coast Guard, America’s frontline coastal defense and search-and-rescue service, bases along Washington’s 3,026-mile coastline. In 2021, they undertook 195 search-and-rescue missions. Ediz Hook is also home base for four seagoing cutters, 87 to 110 feet long, and one 210-foot medium-endurance cutter, plus two short-range response boats to deal with local emergencies.
Many Coast Guard rescues are routine— boats adrift with stalled motors, empty gas tanks, or scrambled navigational equipment. Others become Discovery Channel legend. One helicopter pilot, Lt. Thomas Loftis, told me about his first: a father and son who got swept out into Bellingham Bay, 70 miles away, on a little johnboat one January night when the temperature was 24 degrees and the wind blew 40 miles an hour: “We got there in 30 minutes,” Loftis says proudly.
But those exploits are just a warm-up for the disaster to come. Someday—next week, next year, maybe next century—a sudden and deadly marine shock will strike the Northwest coast: what locals call the Big One, a circa magnitude-9.0 offshore earthquake generating tsunami surges reaching 60 feet high or more.
Just how ready Coast Guard rescuers are for the big wave to come is a question with life-and-death implications, for them and for those they defend. As Lt. Kyle Cuttie, who was the station’s communications officer when I first visited it nearly eight years ago, told me, “It’s hard to say whether we’ll be first responders or victims.”
ABOUT 130 MILES west of Ediz Hook, 70 miles past the outer coast, two slabs of planetary crust are locked in a titanic struggle. One, the offshore Juan de Fuca Plate, is what’s left of a continentsize plate that has for the past 200 million years been intermittently sliding under the larger North American Plate, an actual continent, in a process called subduction. The Cascadia Subduction Zone thus formed stretches for more than 700 miles, from California’s Cape Mendocino past the northern tip of Canada’s Vancouver Island.
The sliding-under movement of subduction is very different from the side-to-side grinding of the San Andreas Fault to the south. There, frequent movements, experienced as earthquakes, release tectonic tension before it builds to catastrophic levels. Along the Subduction Zone, however, this tension builds for hundreds of years and releases with explosive force. The greatest strain has accumulated off Washington, making it the likeliest target zero for the next megaquake and tsunami. When the Juan de Fuca Plate jams farther under the North American Plate, it will push it up 30 feet or more and displace vast quantities of seawater. And a tsunami will be born.
The last Cascadia earthquake, with an estimated magnitude of 9.0, occurred around 9 p.m. on Jan. 26, 1700, a date known precisely thanks to meticulous Japanese records of an extraordinary “orphan tsunami” with no known source. Native peoples on this side of the Pacific, from California’s Yurok to the Nuu-chah-nulth of Vancouver Island, told corroborating tales of a great shaking and the sea pouring in and taking everything in its path. The Hoh and Quileute, who live at two of the most vulnerable points on Washington’s Olympic Coast, credited the waves to a titanic battle between Whale and Thunderbird. But the Pacific Northwest’s written history didn’t begin until the late 1700s, and these oral histories, together with a Native tradition of locating villages safely upland from the beach, were ignored.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that scientists began piecing together the region’s violent seismic history. They’ve now identified more than 40 earthquakes along the subduction zone in the past 10,000 years. “Megaquakes” of magnitude 8.7-plus, capable of generating large tsunamis, have averaged 430-year intervals. Five appear to have reached the magnitude (9.1) of Japan’s 2011 Tohoku (Fukushima) Earthquake and the 2004 Sumatran quake whose tsunami killed 228,000 people in 11 countries. After 323 quiet years, another could strike anytime.
When it does, it will send waves surging outward at initial speeds of up to 600 miles an hour. Less than an hour after the quake, they will inundate the coast up to an elevation of 100 feet above sea level in some spots, more typically 30 to 60 feet, depending on water depth, tides, and other factors. They will sweep up buildings, trees, vehicles, people. Anyone along the shore who feels the shaking will need to head immediately for high ground, and they will need to do so on foot—roads will likely be damaged and even if they aren’t, traffic will quickly snarl. Those who dawdle, walk too slowly, or pause to collect keepsakes or help the injured will court disaster.
According to Washington’s Emergency Management Division, 112,555 residents of the four counties lining Washington’s ocean coast and the Strait of Juan de Fuca live in the inundation zone—land that tsunami waves will overrun. Earlier benchmarks suggest that 23 percent will be unable to reach higher ground in time and 18 percent— perhaps 20,000 people, more than 10 times the number who died in Hurricane Katrina—will be washed out to sea or
crushed by debris. U.S. Geological Survey data and the current scientific consensus suggest a 15 to 24 percent likelihood that such a megaquake will occur in the next 50 years.
JUST OUTSIDE THE gates of the Ediz Hook Coast Guard station, about 2.5 miles out on the spit, sits a second vital marine-safety operation: the Puget Sound Pilots. The Pilots are 50-plus elite mariners who shuttle out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca to meet the freighters, tankers, and cruise ships steaming toward Seattle and other ports and guide them through the twisting channels of the
Salish Sea. Each year they guide about 7,000 passages—inbound or outbound— carrying $80 billion in cargo between Ediz Hook and the ports on Puget Sound.
For years both the Pilots and Coasties assumed that when the ground started shaking they would escape the Hook the way they came to work: driving out on the two-lane road to the mainland. That’s in keeping with the traditional advice for those living in what’s called the inundation zone: As soon as you get the warning— shaking ground, a blaring alarm, the sea pulling back from the shore—hurry to the highest ground you can find.
A land exit might be a reasonable response for the more common sort of waves generated by a distant earthquake or volcanic eruption, most likely in Alaska. Not so for the much larger tsunami generated by a Cascadia Subduction Zone quake, which would arrive an hour or less after the shaking starts. The shaking, which can last as long as five minutes, will also eat into the short window of time before a wave arrives. It will likely make driving impossible and walking and running difficult. The U.S. Geological Survey calculates that it would take 90 to 100 minutes to walk from the Coast Guard station to safe ground on the mainland—nearly twice as long as the tsunami will take to arrive. A runner could make it—if the way is clear and he or she can sustain the pace for nearly 4 miles.
But the Pilots’ case is also special.
They have two 70-foot boats that they use to meet incoming ships and deboard from outbound ones, and those vessels will be needed for the recovery. In early 2015, the Pilots decided to conduct a trial escape in the opposite direction—out to sea. They decided to invite their Coastie neighbors to participate.
On a crystalline morning, about 55 officers and seamen mustered around the Coast Guard station’s flagpole. Lt. Cuttie introduced Ian Miller, a geomorphologist and expert on coastal hazards, who explained the hazards and choices involved and concluded, “I want you to be safe. More important, I want you to be functional, so you can save me and my family.” Cuttie and a few other Coasties then trooped down to the Pilots’ dock and boarded their boat, which shoved off. They rounded the Hook and made it to safe water in 16 minutes.
That was encouraging. But it was no guarantee that they’d be able to get there under actual quake conditions—escaping tumbled buildings, gathering personnel scattered around various facilities, crossing jumbled, sunken ground and roiling water. The boats would have nearly no time to stop at the Coast Guard station’s docks on the way out.
RATHER THAN REDUCING their stake in Ediz Hook, the armed forces have compounded it. In 2015, just as tsunami concerns were heating up, the U.S. Navy announced it would build a new “Maritime Force Protection Unit” pier and support complex at the Coast Guard base. This facility, completed in 2018, serves as an advance base for the armed escort ships that protect the eight Trident submarines (which bear an estimated quarter of the nation’s nuclear arsenal) as they shuttle between their base at Bangor, Wash., and the open sea. Bangor, situated on a long fjord called the Hood Canal, is shielded from tsunamis; the escort station that guards the subs is not.
The Puget Sound Pilots were aghast at this decision. Then they began to see possibilities. Unlike the Pilots’ much smaller response boats, which would strain and perhaps fail to evacuate everyone from the Hook, just one of the 250-foot escort ships could easily accommodate everyone likely to be on the sandbar. The escort vessels are also kept ready to go at all times. They’re docked beside the Coast Guard facilities and could load their personnel faster.
The Pilots would love to pass rescue honors on to the Maritime Force Protection Unit. “Now that they have those Navy ships, we want to make sure we’re not the first line of defense,” says Pilots president Ivan Carlson. “We’d like to be there just as backup.” But they have no idea whether the Navy facility is ready to take on that responsibility.
Repeated email and phone inquiries to Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, the subs’ home port, brought no substantive response save one public document that’s no longer posted online: the final environmental assessment for the Ediz Hook facility. All it says about tsunami hazards is “In the event of a tsunami, for all action alternatives personnel at the TPS [Transit Protection System] pier and on TPS vessels docked at the pier would follow the USCG emergency response plan in force” at the air station.
Senior Coast Guard officers also referred me to that plan, called the Sector Puget Sound Natural Disaster Plan, saying it would clarify the agency’s tsunami strategies. I filed an obligatory FOIA request for it, which bounced between local, regional, and national Coast Guard offices before being rejected on what seemed flimsy grounds. I appealed and, five months after filing, finally obtained the plan last August, with minor redactions. It defines missions, roles, communications, and emergency contingencies for natural threats ranging from “heavy weather” to earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.
But it looks toward a smaller local quake along a Puget Sound area fault or a tsunami generated by an Alaskan quake, which would give several hours’ warning. It does not contemplate a Cascadia megaquake immediately followed by a tsunami.
This outdated, inadequate plan may soon be replaced. Since I made my inquiries last August, the District 13 administration has formed a Tsunami Working Group, with members from the Washington and Oregon sectors as well as district specialists. The new plan is expected to be completed this autumn. Sometime after that, the Coasties for the first time will conduct their own trial evacuation—nearly 10 years after the Pilots first invited them aboard theirs.
Meanwhile, 130 miles to the west, a kilometer deep beneath the dark Pacific, the North American and Juan de Fuca plates continue their long, slow dance, building to a catastrophic release.