Live data from Hacker News

The Really Big One

newyorker.com

11–20 of 286 posts

Re: The Really Big One

#11
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To read one article once every few months at best is not worth it. Edit: I spoke my opinion. Down vote me!

(If you only read one article every few months, you wouldn't be hitting their pay wall)

I am hitting their pay wall by occasionally clicking links from HN. I never read the full articles, but I skim roughly 4x the amount of information provided before the pay wall. It's not worth the full price for me. I'd like a happy medium.

Re: The Really Big One

#12
post #5

"The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a…

They are contrasting what they describe as weekly small quakes in Japan with long periods of inactivity in the Pacific Northwest. A significant quake in one city in the region 14 years ago doesn't invalidate the claim that you could spend a significant time in the northwest without feeling a tremor.

But the article says you could spend many lifetimes.

Re: The Really Big One

#13
post #5

"The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a…

I agree. There are regularly 4.0-5.5 earthquakes along the oregon coast, and the seismologists that report on these say that they are a result of the Cascadia Subduction... I was interested until I got to this point as the local reports on earthquakes are counter to what the article suggest. I mean there was even a 4.2 in Springfield, OR within a week. just check the US geological data. Claims seem dubious without having a full text report of what the difference between the types of quakes are, and difference in areas as related to 'the big one' without this, anyone looking at past earthquake data will say this guy is nuts, because we do have regular quakes in the Northwest, especially coastal.

Re: The Really Big One

#14

Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways! While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itse…

I don't think a tsunami is going to flatten the city. A wave has a lot to go through (peninsulas, narrow straights, etc) before it could reach the city, all of which would likely lessen its impact significantly. Where the area will get hit hard, though, is liquifaction and landslides.

Re: The Really Big One

#17

Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways! While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itse…

I don't think a tsunami is going to flatten the city. A wave has a lot to go through (peninsulas, narrow straights, etc) before it could reach the city, all of which would likely lessen its impact significantly. Where the area will get hit hard, though, is liquifaction and landslides.

There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound, though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast. Everything is going to shift 30 to 100 feet west over the course of a couple minutes - the water in Puget Sound is going to slosh around like crazy.

Re: The Really Big One

#18

Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways! While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itse…

The viaduct's collapse in the next big earthquake and the ~80 lives it'll take is the _reason_ we're building something as a replacement! Granted, Bertha is a huge fuckup.

A MBA in my python night class said that one approach to the viaduct problem would be to: fund a "victims of the viaduct" fund, today, with a couple million. And then pass a law that the compensation for families of the victims is limited to what's in the fund. It is appealing in a weird evil way.

Re: The Really Big One

#19
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(If you only read one article every few months, you wouldn't be hitting their pay wall)

I am hitting their pay wall by occasionally clicking links from HN. I never read the full articles, but I skim roughly 4x the amount of information provided before the pay wall. It's not worth the full price for me. I'd like a happy medium.

So, your medium is free content as often as you want it? What's in it for them?

Re: The Really Big One

#20
Hmm, in the spirit of thinking of worst-case scenarios, most of the engineering talent for Amazon and Microsoft is in Seattle and Redmond, respectively. There's even a sizable percentage of Google cloud platform in Fremont and Kirkland.

Even if most of the employees live, it's likely basic infrastructure will be a disaster for quite a while. Maybe Google would be able to offload ops work to Mountain View, but it seems likely Amazon.com, AWS and Azure would go down, possibly for months. I wonder what the effect would be on the global economy.

Post reply on HN