As winter advances, and other folks dream of sugar-plum fairies and Yuletide cheer, my thoughts once again turn to earthquakes and tsunamis. I’m not quite superstitious enough to subscribe to the “disasters come in threes” rule, but I am sailor enough to feel a little uncomfortable that each March for the past two years has seen a great earthquake along the Pacific Rim with an equally devastating tsunami accompanying it. In the wake of last year’s Tohoku event in Japan I sketched out some of my thoughts on dealing with a potentially similar event generated off the Washington coast by the Cascadia subduction zone. Those thoughts have never entirely faded, and, disappointed with the data and predictions I could find on local effects of a similar tsunami, I’ve kept an eye open for better information on what we can expect in the waters and along the shoreline of the Salish Sea.
So I was intrigued when I came across the website of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup. CREW is a non-profit organization of representatives from the public and private sectors working together to envision and reduce the effects of earthquakes and related hazards. They have put together a number of good resources for understanding the effects and preparing for them; most interesting are the scenario papers discussing the most likely local quake effects from a big-picture perspective. They factor in not just the first-order effects but also many of the likely secondary effects, such as major passes being blocked by landslides, ferry service disruption from terminal damages, and state-wide economic effects from port disruptions.
Unfortunately, like every other source, they either haven’t calculated or haven’t published any detail about Puget Sound tsunami effects or timing. It shows how far our region has to go that even the basic data isn’t available; without it, planning is going to be haphazard at best. So I’m left with my original speculation, which is that there just isn’t much time to react if you live on the water and significant event occurs. The warning time could be so short, and the shaking last so long, that it could prove impossible to get up the dock before it hits. Should we make it that far, there’s no guarantee that the ramp up to the parking lot would still be attached shoreside; the recent remodel here at Shilshole beefed up our docks quite a lot, but they don’t look to me like they were designed for lateral sheer. If the ramp is out, the seawall would be insurmountable in the time available. But, if even after all that we made the parking lot, high ground still requires a 100 meter sprint across train tracks, through brambles, brush, and weed, and finally onto a hillside that might well be coming down to meet us at the same time we headed up it… local landslides are predicted to be extreme.
I’m beginning to think that our best option may be simply to stay with the ship, as it were. While it’s true that a lot of boats are demolished in tsunamis (particularly those in marinas with lots of stuff to bash into; concrete floats, pilings, other boats), it’s equally true that a lot of them stay afloat for quite a while after the waves. Most sailors are familiar with the axiom that one should always step up into a liferaft; maybe it’s also best to step up ashore in the wake of a tsunami. Certainly our hull would fare better beating against other boats and debris than our frail carcasses would. Getting rattled around during the ride would be unquestionably dangerous, but it’s not entirely unlike getting bashed around in heavy weather, which is something we’re reasonably equipped to cope with.
This seems a little unorthodox and runs contrary to every published bit of advice I can find. On the other hand, none of the published advice seems to contemplate the situation faced by boaters here in Puget Sound.
Staying aboard has other virtues as well: you retain all the resources of home. Emergency management people suggest a gallon of water per person per day for three days, but as long as we have the boat, we have about thirty, along with fuel, limited electricity and generation capacity, communications gear, regular and emergency food stuffs, and tough, warm clothing and footwear. In fact, we will have pretty much everything we have now, with the caveat that it may be damaged. But damaged is not missing entirely, as it would be if we abandoned it for high ground. A run for the hills precludes much more than a backpack, if that.
Even if the hull is breached, a dinghy or liferaft to get ashore with plus the ditch bag still probably provides most boaters with a more complete emergency kit than most lubbers will have in their homes. If you’re equipped to deal with sinking off-shore and surviving in a life-raft or on a desert island, you are certainly equipped for sinking right in the marina and living in a parking lot until help can arrive.
What I have realized is that I was looking in the wrong places for answers about preparing for disasters as a liveaboard or cruiser. For one thing, there just aren’t enough of us to make it worth the while of any official or agency to look specifically into the matters that most affect us. But more importantly, this is a lifestyle that requires self-reliance. There is a great community of boaters, most of who will go to great lengths to help one another, but at the end of the day you have to be able to count on yourself, your boat, and your crew in tight spots. If you don’t have the resources or cannot make the decisions yourself when disaster strikes, there is little chance that anyone else can do so for you. That is a lot of responsibility, but it goes hand in hand with the freedom that comes with the lifestyle.
When it comes to earthquakes and tsunamis, then, I need wake up and check my own lifelines, just like the rest of the time. Hunkering down or running for high ground isn’t a decision I can expect anyone else to make for me; I can debate it with others, look for every bit of relevant information I can find, and put some consideration into the options and consequences, but if the moment comes, it’s just as surely my sole decision to make as if I were facing a storm at sea. Unorthodox or not, I’ll have to come to terms with rolling my own dice and taking my own chances if this winter brings the third in the set of Pacific Rim mega-quakes.