The Next Tsunami: Living on a Restless Coast

On a March evening in 1964, ten-year-old Tom Horning awoke near midnight to find his yard transformed. A tsunami triggered by Alaska's momentous Good Friday earthquake had wreaked havoc in his Seaside, Oregon, neighborhood. It was, as far as anyone knew, the Pacific Northwest coast's first-ever tsunami. More than twenty years passed before geologists discovered that it was neither Oregon's first nor worst tsunami. In fact, massive tsunamis strike the Pacific coast every few hundred years, triggered not by distant temblors but by huge quakes less than one hundred miles off the Northwest coast. Not until the late 1990s did scientists fix the date, hour, and magnitude of the Pacific Northwest coast's last megathrust earthquake: 9 p.m., January 26, 1700, magnitude 9.0 - one of the largest quakes the world has known. When the next one strikes - this year or hundreds of years from now-the tsunami it will generate is likely to be the most devastating natural disaster in the history of the United States. Illuminating the charged intersection of science, human nature, and public policy, The Next Tsunami describes how scientists came to understand the Cascadia Subduction Zone-a fault line capable of producing earthquakes even larger than the 2011 Tohoku quake in Japan-and how ordinary people cope with that knowledge. The story begins and ends with Tom Horning, who grew up to be a geologist and returned to his family home in Seaside - arguably the Northwest community with the most to lose from what scientists predict will be an "apocalyptic" disaster. No one in Seaside understands earthquake and tsunami science-and the politics and psychology of living in a tsunami zone-better than Horning.