The Next Tsunami: Living on a Restless Coast

Epilogue

305 Epilogue In June 2013, just three weeks after a magnitude 8.3 earthquake rocked the Pacific Plate under the Sea of Okhotsk north of Japan, Cannon Beach Elementary School closed for good. Superintendent Doug Dougherty had hoped to keep it open until the new tsunami-safe campus he envisioned in Seaside could be built. But declining enrollment and tight budgets forced his hand. Plans were made to bus kids from Cannon Beach to Seaside Heights Elementary, six miles to the north and seventy feet higher on the hillside, beginning the following September. Some parents were deeply disappointed at losing their small town’s school, and they redoubled their efforts to find a site in or near Cannon Beach where they could build a new charter school. Meanwhile the City of Cannon Beach began conversations with the school district about acquiring the abandoned elementary school’s scenic shoreline campus, which they planned to turn into a city park after demolishing the school buildings. The same week that tearful goodbyes were playing out at Cannon Beach’s old school—just days before a magnitude 6.5 quake off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua and a magnitude 5.8 temblor ninety miles south of Mexico City—Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries provided the newspapers in Astoria and Seaside with a preview of its new tsunami inundation maps for Clatsop County. Even in communities well aware of their vulnerability to a tsunami, the new maps were a bit of a shock. In Seaside, the orange zone—the worst-case scenario for inundation from a distant tsunami—included the entire business district, every school but Seaside Heights, and all but a few homes clustered on the hillside east of town. In a very large local tsunami, according to the new maps, even Seaside Heights and the hospital could end up under water. The map for the community of Warrenton, arrayed on the flat coastal plain south of the mouth of the Columbia River, was overwhelmingly yellow and orange, with just a few strips of green, indicating high ground, on the highest dune ridges. The picture was even bleaker for the town of Gearhart. Unique among DOGAMI’s Oregon coast tsunami inundation maps, the Gearhart map had no patches of solid green but, rather, green cross-hatching in a few spots to indicate “optional high ground assembly areas”—dune ridges that, geologists figured, would stay dry in all but the very biggest tsunami. But in 306 The Next Tsunami an XXL tsunami—the kind generated by, say, a magnitude 9.1 quake—even those spots could be inundated. “We’re toast,” was the response of one Gearhart city councilor during a presentation by DOGAMI geologist Rachel Lyles Smith. “We’re toast.” “I can’t sugarcoat it,” Smith responded. In a worst-case tsunami, she said, “there will be a lot of fatalities in this area.” But receipt of the new maps didn’t translate into support for the Seaside School District’s $128.8 million bond measure to fund construction of a new consolidated school campus above the tsunami inundation zone. The measure failed decisively, 61 percent to 38 percent, in the November 2013 election. Supporters of the bond measure had focused their campaign on children’s safety and on the advanced technology that would be built into state-of-the-art classrooms; the slogan on lawn signs read “SAFE: Save A Future for Education.” But the bottom line for many no voters seemed to be the cost. Even some supporters were having a hard time swallowing the increase in property taxes that construction of the new campus would have required. Which sent Dougherty and the school board back to the drawing board to consider other options, such as building a smaller campus on the hill for starters, one to house just the elementary school students. In Oregon, all elections are conducted by mail. Between late October, when voters received their ballots, and Election Day, when ballots were due and would be counted, no fewer than four earthquakes large enough to be considered “significant” by the U.S. Geological Survey occurred in the Pacific Basin, off Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, and Chile, ranging from 6.3 to 7.1 in magnitude. None of them made the local papers. Tom Horning was disappointed in the school bond measure failure—he had been a member of the SAFE campaign committee—but he took the loss in stride. One battle lost, but the war—as he...