Written in 2012 from an Oregon perspective, today 2015 they are saying it's going to be worse then what they thought in 2012 when this piece was given to Oregon Emergency planners
Minute Zero
It's 9:30 am on a sunny Thursday morning in late May. Because of the nice weather, you have decided to get off the bus early and walk along the riverfront just before heading into work in your downtown office. And it's a good thing, too. This decision will save your life. You are standing in Waterfront Park when the first wave zooms past you like a phantom. Fifteen seconds later, slower, more powerful seismic waves wash in from the Oregon coast in an undulating pattern. That's when you notice the shaking.
Just off the coast, pressure that has amassed between the region's tectonic plates for more than 300 years has hit its breaking point. The entire coastline, from Northern California to Vancouver Island, is now riding the energetic deluge of a 9.0 earthquake that will last for just four minutes, but the effects of which will be felt in the Northwest for decades to come.
From your spot in Waterfront Park, as you attempt to stay upright on the rippling ground, you watch as Portland crumbles.
10 Seconds Since the Shaking Started
You hear a deep rumbling all around you. Car alarms go off everywhere.
Looking down, you see cracks form in the pavement. Across the city, garden walls of stone and stacked brick collapse. The city's wood-frame houses—most of which will hold up in the quake—lose many of their chimneys. In this way, Portlanders luck out. If the tectonic rupture had come in the winter, when the chimneys were in use, those wood-frame houses would have burned.
20 Seconds
The electricity goes out. It will stay out for the next two months. Portland hospitals immediately switch to back-up power, as does the airport.
45 Seconds
Unsecured eaves, parapets, and other decorative features start falling from buildings. You watch as an overhang cripples a woman huddling underneath it for protection.
One Minute
The rumbling sound has cascaded into a deafening, cacophonous white noise of alarms, collapsing buildings, and screams.
During the next two minutes, as the shaking continues, Portland's most brittle buildings, including many historic structures, are severely damaged or destroyed. In the weeks that follow, your fellow Portlanders will tell you engineers had warned that these un-reinforced buildings are "killers" in major quakes. Today, they live up to their reputation. All across the city, un-reinforced masonry buildings shed their outer walls onto streets and sidewalks; passersby are badly hurt, some are killed. In the buildings themselves, one in five people die.
Many un-reinforced concrete and cinderblock buildings are also reduced to rubble. Across the river several Southeast Portland warehouses cave in. A cloud of concrete-and- brick dust engulfs the city. You cover your mouth, using your shirt as a makeshift mask.
Two Minutes
Unbeknownst to you, on hillsides—still highly saturated from the winter rains—landslides begin, taking houses and their foundations with them. Roads are buried. Portland's West Hills are the worst hit.
Across town, teachers evacuate students from structurally deficient schools. The drills they have performed dozens of times save many, as do the schools' seismic upgrades. But not all the children are so lucky. Many are injured and some die when their schools buckle and fall down. Children who do survive wait outside on playgrounds, where teachers and administrators will work for weeks to reunite them with their families.
As the powerful quake continues to pummel the city, the intense energy begins to resonate in Portland's steel-frame high-rises, transforming them into oversized tuning forks. You watch as the tops of these buildings sway back and forth; the effect is mesmerizing. The same phenomenon also strikes the city's bridges.
The first to go are the bridges' on- and off-ramps. As seismic engineers observed in Chile's 2010 earthquake, the tops of overpasses wobble off their columns. They drop in sections, stacking on one another like fallen dominos. In the next two minutes, following Oregon Department of Transportation's (ODOT) predictions, almost all of Portland's concrete ramps and raised highways are dangerously weakened or fall down from the shaking. The Fremont Bridge—which holds its own against the incoming seismic forces—nonetheless loses its ramps to the earth's convulsions. Sections tumble onto a Portland Bureau of Transportation building. Drivers smart enough to stop in the middle of the bridge are stranded.
In the Willamette Valley, fallen overpasses riddle I-5, blocking aid to the city from the south. In Portland, you watch raised sections of I-5 give way and crash to the ground.
Three Minutes
Portland's iconic bridges—St. Johns, Broadway, Steel, Burnside, Morrison, Hawthorne, Ross Island, and Sellwood—are all damaged or destroyed.
Inside steel cages high atop the Hawthorne, the Steel, and the I-5 Bridge to Vancouver, massive counterweights used to raise the bridges start to swing uncontrollably. Moments later, the incredible force tears the structures apart. From where you stand, you watch the Hawthorne Bridge succumb to this fate.
Having undergone severe stress to its anemic foundation, the St. Johns Bridge isn't useable again for years.
The Ross Island Bridge completely collapses, plummeting into the Willamette along with a number of unfortunate morning commuters. The Sellwood and its daily users come to the same end.
Only the Sauvie Island and Marquam Bridges hold firm against the seismic storm.
Morrison and Burnside are both heavily battered when the harbor wall they rest on bursts in sections and plunges into the river.
You watch as water seeps from the park's grass, collecting in pools. You think it must be a broken water main, but then you notice what look like miniature volcanoes made of sand forming all around you. What you are seeing is a phenomenon called liquefaction, which not only forces ground water and sand to the surface, but also makes once-solid sediment behave like quicksand. In the ground just below you, liquefaction is placing intense pressure on Portland's aging harbor wall, which here and there begins to bulge, crack, and tumble into the Willamette River. As this happens both the Morrison and even the seismically retrofitted Burnside are ruined, while half a mile away, the Broadway Bridge's foundations are enveloped by the liquefying ground. Inspectors from Multnomah County will later declare the bridges dangerous and unusable.
In other parts of the city, liquefaction is forcing up not only groundwater, but also sewer and water pipes. Small ponds form in Portland's streets, while in Old Town, what's left of the Shanghai Tunnels fill with raw sewage.
The most catastrophic effects of liquefaction happen north of you, just past the Fremont Bridge in the seven-mile stretch that forms Portland's Northwest industrial section. There, aging docks as well as a vulnerable pipeline are used to import almost all of Oregon's liquid fuel and natural gas. Massive tanks holding the precious supply sink into the ground. The pipeline, which carries gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from Puget Sound, crumples like tinfoil while several docks descend into the river.
In the same area are a series of high-voltage transmission towers including some that carry electricity from Bonneville Dam. One by one they are knocked off balance and crash to the ground.
North of town, Portland International Airport has gone into emergency mode. The Federal Aviation Administration has closed both the Portland and Seattle airports. The airwaves fill with chatter as air-traffic controllers redirect incoming flights to airports as far away as Denver and San Francisco. Out-going flights are grounded on the cracking runway.
Four Minutes
The shaking stops. All around you hear the eerie sound of buildings creaking and cracking as they settle.
Immediately following the earthquake, you try to call your partner on your cell phone. It doesn't work. The building housing the fiber optics that run the city's phone traffic has collapsed. People hoping to rely on satellite phones find the network jammed from increased demand. In the following weeks, services will come back online, but they will be reserved for emergency personnel. It will be three weeks before you make another call.
Unable to reach friends and family by phone, Portlanders rush to their cars and bikes. Men and women in orange reflecting vests, who are setting out traffic cones, stop them at the city's bridges. Following emergency protocol, the employees from Multnomah County and ODOT close the bridges for spot inspections. With the majority of the city's bridges either in the Willamette or barred from use, the mass exodus soon turns into a mass traffic jam. Hours later, frustrated drivers abandon their vehicles. In the coming weeks, bikes will be the best way to get around.