Earthquake experts say current building codes don’t reflect the riskiest features of the Seattle area’s geology — but the outlook for survivability looks a lot better if the Really Big One can just hold off for a few more years.
That’s the bottom line from a session focusing on Seattle’s seismic hazards, presented at ground zero today during the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting. The session — titled “Is the Coast Toast?” — followed up on a 2015 New Yorker article that painted a grim picture of the possibilities, based on studies of the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia subduction zone.
