Pacific Northwest: 9.0 earthquakes irregularly every 500 years: last 10,000 years

Geologists now know that the Pacific Northwest has been having these earthquakes and tsunamis irregularly every 500 years or so; their oldest record in sediments goes back at least 10,000 years. The evidence is massive: subsided marshes, drowned forests, sediment layers showing enormous landslides that flowed out on the ocean floor, seismic profiles of the Juan de Fuca plate, and satellite measurements of a coast deforming from the stress of a plate that’s once again locked. In the next 50 years, the chance of another magnitude 9 earthquake there is 1 in 10.

In the cities of the Pacific Northwest, the impact will be terrible. Many buildings were built before architects knew the area had earthquakes; later buildings were built with short, sharp California earthquakes in mind, not the Northwest’s longer, larger ones. “The ground’s going to shake for 3 minutes,” says Thomas Heaton, geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and one of the first to propose the area’s earthquake potential. “And [in simulations] it’s easy to come up with ground motion that would collapse tall buildings.” Then comes the tsunami, and “with magnitude 9 earthquakes,” says Heaton, “you always get tsunamis.”
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Native Americans' Terrifying Tsunami Stories Show What the Pacific ...

So, according to this we have a 1 in 10 chance of a 9.0 within 50 years and also separately we have an even higher chance of an 8.0 between San Francisco and Los Angeles as well. 

And we have likely a 100% chance of having an Arcstorm like in 1862 within 100 to 200 years right now.

Living anywhere from California to Canada on the coast this is something you probably should be thinking about to some degree, especially if you are buying property you want to live on or property you already live on on the west Coast.

 

Because all these things are not IFs they are only Whens. So, one day if you are an intuitive and you get really strong to drive inland or take a plane inland or to another country, this might be the reason.

During the Loma Prieta Quake in Fall 1989 that hit San Francisco and the Surrounding area I put myself and my children and wife on a plane because I knew it was coming and didn't want to lose anyone when it hit. When I reached Maui I met many others who told me they felt it coming too and had to leave the mainland because it just didn't feel right to be in northern California right then. 

From my present vantage point of everything I have studied on these subjects I believe the main reason there were not big cities on the West Coast of the U.S. or Canada when white explorers came is likely there were big cities built as colonies from Hawaii or China or other Pacific nations but then they were destroyed every 100 to 500 years in one of these extreme events that have occurred somewhat regularly for 10,000 years or more.

And the only reason we here in the present day U.S. might be able to deal with this is we are such a large nation and technology is more advanced now than at any time in the last 10,000 years here on earth.

But, that doesn't mean millions on the west coast might not die in each such an event WHEN it occurs sooner or later.

So, imagine something like the San Francisco Earthquake and what the 1862 floods did to Sacramento with the Sacramento river being 20 miles wide or more from Sacramento (the capital of California) all the way to Redding.

What would happen to Oregon and Washington and parts of Canada would likely be worse than what will happen generally to California because a 9.0 earthquake is something like Chile and Japan sometimes get. There aren't many places on earth that tend to have quakes this big.

The biggest quake I have ever been in was 1971. This is the only quake I was ever in that I believed I was going to die for several minutes and it was only a 6.5 or 6.7 but it was the longest quake and shook and shook and shook and just wouldn't stop. So, after about 30 seconds it was so strong that I believed it was a nuke going off rather than any earthquake as I bounced around the room I was in while it woke me up at around 6 am or so. It had a really high intensity they call
maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme).

1. 1971 San Fernando earthquake - Wikipedia, the free...

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_San_Fernando_earthquakeCached

   The 1971 San Fernando earthquake (also known as the Sylmar earthquake) occurred in the early morning of February 9 in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in ... 

   
   

   If you grew up in California (almost anywhere in California) you are used to quakes any day from 1 to 3 going off and most of them won't even wake you up at night but might get the chandeliers to swinging and stuff like that. When you start to worry a little is a 4.0 or a 5.0

   When you get to 6.0 it can get pretty scary and anything beyond about 6.5 is likely to give many people who haven't been through one before a heart attack or stroke. If you have ever hit bumps in a plane where everything goes every which way. Imagine that happening at any odd moment day or night to you on the ground in your car or truck or swimming in your pool or walking down the street. This can be what it is like to be in a larger earthquake.