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Experts Knew a Pandemic Was Coming. Here’s What They’re Worried About Next.

For emergency planners, there’s a simple maxim: “If you’re ready for an earthquake, you’re ready for a lot of different things,” Barb Graff (no relation), head of emergency management in Seattle, once told me. But for her in Seattle, it’s also a necessity: The most real threat the Pacific Northwest faces is a megathrust earthquake along what’s known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

California’s “Big One,” along the San Andreas Fault, gets most of the attention, but there are three other U.S. faults that cause emergency planners perhaps even more heartburn.

First, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault about 700 miles off the Pacific Coast of Oregon and Washington, or what the New Yorker called in 2015, “The Really Big One.” The fault, when it goes, might unleash “only” an earthquake between 8 and 8.6 magnitude, which itself would rank as one of the most powerful and destructive quakes to ever hit the United States. But a so-called full margin rupture of the fault would prove truly catastrophic, potentially topping 9.0. Beyond the quake’s damage from the shaking, it could cause a multihundred-mile tsunami to inundate the West Coast with just 15 minutes warning. FEMA’s projections show 13,000 initial deaths from the quake and the tsunami, and upward of a million people displaced. These are hardly abstract threats; geologists say there’s a 1-in-3 chance of an 8.0 earthquake in the region in the next 50 years. “The amount of devastation is going to be unbelievable,” Oregon geologist Rob Witter said in 2009, after calculating that a full 9.0 quake has a 10 percent to 14 percent chance of occurring in the next half century. “People aren’t going to be ready for this.”

Second, the New Madrid Seismic Zone—named for a Missouri town and running from Arkansas up to Illinois—has historically produced the strongest earthquakes in the lower-48 states. In the winter of 1811-1812, a series of three quakes shifted land more than 15 feet, liquified the ground and caused whole islands to disappear. In a 2019 regional exercise, known as “Shaken Fury,” local, state and federal officials drilled on how to respond to a 7.7 magnitude New Madrid earthquake. Daniel Kaniewski, a managing director at Marsh & McLennan who until February served as the No. 2 at FEMA, recalls visiting one major state emergency operations centers and discovering that officials there refused to even simulate a quake of that strength; they’d determined that the local devastation would be so great that emergency planners would have no adequate response, even in a tabletop exercise. “Just the exercise alone could so tax the system that there wouldn’t be valuable lessons learned,” he recalls. “That earthquake is one that we as a nation are very vulnerable to.”

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the New Madrid Seismic Zone has roughly a 7 percent to 10 percent chance of a catastrophic-level 8.0 quake in the next 50 years, but given the region’s lack of preparedness, weaker building codes than California, and a civilian population largely unaware, even a 6.0 earthquake—which has a 25 percent to 40 percent chance of occurring in the next half-century—might prove devastating.

“What has been so unique about Covid is the national impact—it’s the first time we’ve seen simultaneous emergency declarations in all 50 states—and the closest thing to that level is a New Madrid event. It would be a large-scale significant disruption across the heartland—a lot of your protein production, your food and agriculture, goods that get shipped via the Mississippi, or across the country on tractor-trailers,” Krebs says.

Third, and probably least known of all, is the Wasatch fault zone, stretching across Utah and Idaho, tracing the rough outline of the Salt Lake Valley, and which has been active even just in recent days; in March, it recorded a 5.7 magnitude quake. “The earthquake in Idaho and Utah was a big wake-up call,” Phoenix, the volcanologist, says. Larger earthquakes in the region might quickly prove devastating. “Wasatch is every bit as concerning as a Southern California quake, not simply because of the magnitude potential but because of the vulnerabilities present there,” Kaniewski says. “Much of the building construction in Salt Lake City is unreinforced masonry—URM—and it crumbles when a quake happens.”

Of course, California’s “Big One,” whenever it arrives, will be no walk in the park either. In 2008, the U.S. government released the results of an extensive, multiyear effort by 300 experts to model a devastating earthquake in Southern California. Known as the “Great California Shakeout,” the report modeled a 7.8 earthquake on a southern portion of the San Andreas Fault that last shook in 1690. “The Shakeout” would result in 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries, and more than $200 billion in damage; many of the deaths would come in the fires afterward. The U.S. Geological Survey currently estimates that there is a 60 percent chance of a 6.7 magnitude or larger quake in the next 30 years in Los Angeles and a 72 percent chance of a 6.7 or larger quake in San Francisco.

As Krebs, Kaniewski and Graff all point out, any major quake isn’t just about the shaking—it’s a regional economic calamity and humanitarian crisis delivered without warning in just a minute or two. The systemic impacts are huge; the headquarters and major operations of the nation’s four trillion-dollar companies—Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google—exist in these high-risk quake zones, and much of the nation’s imports and exports come into ports on the West Coast that could be rendered unusable by a large quake.

Then of course there’s the most frightening scenario emergency planners could face this year: several of the above. As FEMA preps for a hurricane season made all the more complex by the Covid outbreak, it faces the entirely foreseeable (even likely) possibility of confronting three or more large-scale disasters unfolding simultaneously this summer and fall: Wildfires out West, hurricanes in the Atlantic, and Covid-19 anywhere and everywhere. Add in the always-real possibility of, say, an earthquake (Kaniewski’s maxim, informed by his years working in FEMA, is simply, “It’s always earthquake season.”) a string of powerful tornadoes, or a geopolitical event like a cyberattack, as Phoenix says, “You get the exponential growth of awful.”

Matheny says one of the primary worries many forecasters have is just how little we actually know about the world around us. As science and technology advance, we’re constantly learning about new threats and pushing the boundaries of human interactions with the physical world.

It may seem easy now to dismiss scientists on the Manhattan Project who considered the theoretical possibility that the first nuclear test—the so-called TRINITY blast in New Mexico—might ignite Earth’s atmosphere (it didn’t) or those who worry that the Large Hadron Collider experiment might open a black hole on Earth (it hasn’t—so far), but there are all manner of unimaginable things that could pose an existential threat to modern society. “It’s worrisome how many catastrophic risks have been discovered only relatively recently, like supervolcanoes and space weather,” Matheny says. “There’s a lot we don’t understand.”

No one knew that the Cascadia Subduction Zone even existed half a century ago, and when scientists in the 1980s first posited it was responsible for mega-earthquakes, they were met with skepticism. Now it stands as the nation’s possible biggest natural disaster-in-waiting of all time.

The unknown is particularly challenging for policymakers and business leaders, who are often driven by short-term incentives like elections and shareholders, often causing them to be more reactive than active. “The fact that we don’t have any large-scale effort to understand existential threats to the U.S. or the world seems like a failure,” Matheny observes. “We’re already not that great at prioritizing risks that we know about; we’re even more negligent thinking about risks that we haven’t categorized that are over the horizon.”

Moreover, Gordon says, advances in science leave us exposed to structural challenges we have never even considered. “I always worried about what would happen if we discovered that DNA could be manipulated—what does that do to our legal system?” she says. “If our adversaries did something that forced us to consider whether anything DNA-wise could be trusted in our legal system, what does that do to our ability to seek justice?”

Richard Clarke, a former White House national security official during the Clinton and Bush administrations, proposed in his 2017 book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes, establishing a “National Warning Office” to work on imagining such risks. The closest modern-day analogue might be the Department of Homeland Security’s National Risk Management Center, part of the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is trying to master and define the nation’s critical functions, understand how the U.S. economy actually works and overlay those systems with how they’d be impacted by various events, from cyberattacks to earthquakes. Last year, CISA published a list of 55 critical functions, things like generating electricity to conducting elections to transporting cargo. “We are working to get a better understanding of the infrastructure itself,” explains Krebs, CISA’s founding director. “And then you start layering the scenarios on top.”

Identifying those critical functions to keep the economy humming is especially important as every disaster seems to unveil new, unexpected and unknown interconnections between supply chains and industries. The long-term power outage in Puerto Rico that followed Hurricane Maria led to unexpected national shortages of IV bags and saline for hospitals because the nation’s main manufacturing plants were located there. The Covid crisis, similarly, is making clear how seemingly mundane business moves—like the market consolidation of the meatpacking industry—can lead to large-scale consequences in a disaster: Today, pork and beef are running short in large sections of the country.

“It’s highly likely that we’re not going to see the next thing coming, so we need to build more resilience into our society and ensure we’re adaptive to whatever comes,” Matheny says. “The fact that everything is unraveling amid what’s actually a relatively mild pandemic does not bode well.”

Source: politico.com
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