Important Takeaways:

• It’s Only a Matter of Time Before a Tsunami Hits the Northwest. Why Is It Missing from FEMA’s Risk Analysis?
• Scattered like driftwood along the coast of Washington state is a string of Native reservations, tourist havens and faded timber towns whose names bespeak their geography: Long Beach, Westport, Ocean Shores, the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe. Some lie on nearly naked sandspits with a single point of connection to the mainland. Together with their coastal counterparts in Oregon and Northern California, they may be the most endangered communities in the United States.
• That’s because about 70 miles offshore, a jammed-up 800-mile tectonic seam called the Cascadia Subduction Zone is approaching a shattering shakeout. The odds that it will unleash an earthquake in the next 50 years are estimated at 1 in 4. The odds of an 8.7-plus megaquake that would send a tsunami washing 30 feet or more over those communities is 1 in 6. At the tiny Hoh tribal reservation on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the waves could reach 100 feet and put the tribal center 45 feet underwater.
• Washington State’s Emergency Management Division calculates that nearly 90,000 people live or work in the outer coast’s inundation zone, and there are another 86,000 more along inner waterways that the waves will take longer to reach. On a summer day, they could be joined in the danger zone by up to 248,000 sightseers, clam diggers and other visitors. Western Washington University’s Resilience Institute has calculated that as many as 28 percent would be unable to reach higher ground in time to escape the tsunami and 18 percent — up to 60,000 people — would be crushed or swept out to sea.
• It is, in the words of the Emergency Management Division, “expected to be the largest natural disaster ever in the United States.” And the question isn’t whether there will be a quake and tsunami but when.
• There’s just one problem: the online tool the federal government has built for mapping and gauging disaster risks is oblivious to dangers along the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
• The updated National Risk Index (NRI), announced in March, assigns only a “relatively moderate” tsunami risk to the Quinault Indian Nation, even though the Washington State Geological Survey predicts it will be buried under 30 to 50 feet of water.

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