South Napa earthquake: 6.

0 temblors relatively rare in Oregon, but 'risk is everywhere'

Stuart Tomlinson | stomlinson@oregonian.com By Stuart Tomlinson | stomlinson@oregonian.com
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on August 25, 2014 at 3:25 PM, updated August 25, 2014 at 6:50 PM
Damage from Sunday's South Napa magnitude 6.0 earthquake was all too predictable, says Oregon's chief earthquake scientist.
"We saw the same pattern of damage that we would typically see and the images you saw on TV -- unreinforced, older masonry buildings that came
down and stores knee-deep in broken wine bottles," said Ian Madin, who studies earthquakes at the Oregon Department of Geology & Mineral
Industries.
The damage also occurred to water, power and natural gas lines and bridges where the worst shaking occurred.
A lack of landslides associated with the quake, he said, appears to be linked to California's drought soil isn't saturated enough to liquefy, which can
cause further damage.
Similar earthquakes are relatively rare in Oregon, Madin said, "but a magnitude 6 is quite possible, in fact likely," based on the historical record.
"Oregon has lots of earthquakes (11,261 between 1844 and 2014), and lots of potentially active faults," he said. "Since 1936, there have been four
damaging earthquakes about the same size as the Napa earthquake, about one every 20 years. That is why a future M 6 earthquake is likely. Of course
likely is a relative term, but our history says that we should see one of these somewhere in Oregon every 20-30 years."
What's less likely is predicting where it will occur here based on existing fault lines in Portland. Oregon, and the Portland metro area in particular, has
had a handful of magnitude 5 earthquakes, Madin said, but none have occurred in millennia on the three major faults running under the city as far as
scientists know.
There is evidence in sediment layers that show one or two strong earthquakes have occurred on the Portland Hills Fault, one of Portland's three major
faults, in the last 15,000 years.
"These faults show evidence of having produced large quakes, but none of the (recent) quakes we've had happened there,'' Madin said. "There is a
disconnect between where they happen and where we expect them to happen."
Instead, a series of small, strongly felt earthquakes have been focused near Kelly Point in 2012, the Laurelhurst neighborhood and in the Portland Hills
toward Scappoose in 1991, Madin said, near but not directly on the faults.
And while the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the Oregon coast (where the Juan de Fuca Plate plunges under the North American plate) gets a lot of
attention, most of Oregon's quakes occur on land, and many in eastern Oregon.
"The risk is everywhere," Madin said.
Still, new research by the U.S. Geological Survey on the Cascadia Subduction Zone has upped the estimated size of earthquakes there from magnitude
9.0 to magnitude 9.3 based on deep sea core samples. The study also found that shaking would be worse that previously thought.
The Cascadia Subduction Zone hasn't experienced a major earthquake in more than 300 years.
And that puts Oregon on the list of 16 states at the highest risk from earthquakes. The others, according to the USGS, are Alaska, Arkansas, California,
Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
In April, thousands of people felt a magnitude 3.3 earthquake when it erupted about 13 miles beneath the earth's surface near Sherwood.
The quake generated a relatively large response because it was so deep underground, Madin said. The deeper the quake, the more widely it's felt
because shock waves move up to the surface in a cone shape, and thus typically cover a bigger territory.
The Sherwood quake also happened quickly, which boosted its impact.
More recently, seismologists are closely monitoring an area about 40 miles southeast of Lakeview that has had an unusual swarm of earthquakes in
the past several weeks and are still occurring this week, Madin said.
The largest temblor, a magnitude 3.7 quake, occurred at 9 p.m. Aug. 18.
-- Stuart Tomlinson
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