The Earthquake That Has Already Hit the Northwest 5 Times — And It Isn't the Big One

Sources: https://tinyurl.com/critical21 Emergency Preparedness Guide: https://payhip.com/b/GWENV The Pacific Northwest has been bracing for the wrong earthquake, and the right one has already hit five times. Everyone out there knows about the Big One — the magnitude 9 on the Cascadia subduction zone, roughly every five hundred years. That one is real. It is not the one that has actually put brick into the streets of Seattle. Underneath Puget Sound, a slab of ocean floor is tearing itself apart tens of miles down, and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network describes that kind of earthquake as the most common source of damaging shaking in Washington and Oregon. The record: 1909, 1939, then April thirteenth 1949, magnitude 7.1, eight dead. April twenty-ninth 1965, magnitude 6.5, seven dead. February twenty-eighth 2001, the Nisqually earthquake, magnitude 6.8 at fifty-two kilometres depth, one death and around two billion dollars in damage in forty seconds. The U.S.G.S. puts an 85 percent chance on another magnitude 6.5 or greater deep earthquake in the region within fifty years. Seattle has about 1,100 unreinforced masonry buildings on its own public inventory and no law requiring anyone to fix them. Portland has about 1,600, passed a placard ordinance in 2019 requiring owners to post a sign, got sued on First Amendment grounds, lost in federal court, repealed it, and took its public database offline. And the earthquake in Colombia on August tenth, magnitude 7.4 at 107 kilometres depth, which ran this experiment in public: two cities in the coffee region, forty-five kilometres apart, one rebuilt to a new seismic code after 1999 and one not, and completely different mornings. CHAPTERS 0:00 The earthquake in Colombia that started this 3:26 Two different earthquakes under the Northwest 5:26 Five times since 1909 8:17 The thirty-year number, and what it does not mean 9:54 The brick buildings in Seattle and Portland 12:29 Two Colombian cities, forty-five kilometres apart 14:08 The honest limits 16:52 Three things worth doing If you lived through one of these — 1965 or Nisqually — put it in the comments. What you were doing, what came off the wall, whether anybody talked about it afterward. There are people watching who have never felt an earthquake in their lives, and a paragraph from somebody who was standing in a Seattle office in 2001 does more for them than anything I can say. Subscribe to Critical Latitude for more earthquakes, faults, volcanoes and the rest of what the ground is doing, with the real science behind it. SOURCES AND DISCLAIMER Every figure, agency statement, magnitude, date and death toll in this video is linked in the sources document at the top of this description. Nothing here is a prediction. Twenty-five and a half years against a roughly thirty-year historical average does not make this earthquake overdue, and the video says so directly; an 85 percent probability over fifty years is a probability, not a schedule. The Colombia comparison is a pattern, not a published finding — no engineering reconnaissance report has been released yet, no ground motion has been recorded for those two cities specifically, and the death toll was still moving at the time of recording. #earthquake #cascadia #pacificnorthwest #seattle #geology