The Next Tsunami: Living on a Restless Coast

31: Higher Ground

242 31 Higher Ground Seaside, Oregon, 2008 Suddenly, earthquake science stopped being fun, and as a scientist, I began to feel like the watchman on the castle walls warning about barbarians at the gate, begging people to take me seriously. —Robert S. Yeats, Living With Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest The forecast was for possible showers, nothing more than that, and the clouds were high and hardly threatening. So Doug Dougherty grabbed his parka and a large rolled map, stopped at his secretary’s desk to let her know his plans, and headed out to his blue Honda SUV parked outside the Seaside School District administration building. The Honda was uncluttered, and recently washed: neat, like superintendent Dougherty himself, in his khakis and freshly ironed cotton shirt, his waterproof parka mud-free. Only his hiking boots testified to his recent ramblings. He headed north on U.S. 101, then just past the high school turned east onto Crown Camp Road, which cut a twisting route up through clear-cuts stubbled with fresh stumps and stands of tall second-growth forest. He slowed as he passed through what was left of Crown Camp—the white, single-story headquarters building designed by John Horning in the 1950s that now housed an outpost of the timber giant Weyerhaeuser, owner of about one quarter of the land in Clatsop County. From Crown Camp, Dougherty steered the Honda onto the Necanicum Mainline, a gravel road pocked with dark potholes half-filled with rainwater and littered with the previous season’s alder leaves. He continued west and south until he could see, through the fringe of trees between the road and a yawning clear-cut, the ocean beach two miles to the west and several hundred feet down. He slowed, then pulled over at a wide spot, leaving plenty of room for passing log trucks. Grabbing the map and his daypack, he got out, locked up, and began walking west, descending through the clear-cut, threading his way among the Douglas fir stumps. higher ground 243 Dougherty was looking for—well, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for as he picked his way down the slope, staying high to avoid having to climb out of creek-cut ravines. But it would have to be pretty level—a flat piece of ground, someplace without a lot of clay soil that might weaken in a quake. A large, flat area not too far from town, but high up in the hills—at least one hundred feet in elevation. A place too high for the highest possible tsunami to reach, on solid ground highly unlikely to slide in the event of a massive earthquake. That’s why he had driven up into the forestlands east of Seaside: there was no place within the city limits that fit this description, nothing. The land he sought would need to be easily accessible from the center of Seaside, however. Size would matter; he was going to need a lot of ground. Dougherty was no geologist, no engineer—all of his academic degrees, up to and including his PhD, were in education—but he’d grown up on Oregon’s Mount Hood, had always been comfortable in the outdoors, felt he had a sense for the land. And even if he didn’t quite know what he was looking for, he thought he might recognize it when he saw it, or at least recognize when he’d found something worth asking a geologist to investigate. Besides, it soothed him, between seemingly endless meetings and phone calls and e-mails, to just be out looking, hiking cross-country alone on a weekday afternoon like this or even on a weekend with his family. Doing nothing was simply not an option, and talking about doing something but not actually doing it was even worse in Dougherty’s book, given geologists’ recent estimates of the size of tsunamis that have hit this coast in the past ten thousand years, their predictions that something similar is certain to strike the coast here sometime in the foreseeable future, quite possibly within this or the next generation of Seaside School District students. Hopefully not today. Doug Dougherty had beenworryingabout the tsunami since long before he became superintendent. Safety had always been Dougherty’s number one priority—almost something of an obsession. Student achievement was important, of course, but the district’s kids were doing great, with standardized test scores now on a par with the best...