By their nature, coastal towns are seldom at the center of things. The little boardwalk city of Seaside, Oregon, is in the far northwest corner of the state, four square miles that are not square, bisected by a river and flush against the ocean. In the summer months, nearly everyone there is from elsewhere; given a little sunshine, well over half a million tourists spread their towels along the town’s long shoreline. After Labor Day, though, the candy stores and kite shops close their shutters, the "VACANCY" signs blink on, and the beach, gone brown with rain, thins out to seagulls and bundled-up locals walking their dogs. Year-round, some sixty-five hundred people live in Seaside.
But everything is at the center of something. Last year, I wrote an article in this magazine about the Cascadia subduction zone, a little-known fault line that cyclically produces the largest earthquakes and tsunamis in North America—shaking of magnitude 9.0 or higher, waves of a scale and destructive force analogous to the 2011 disaster in Japan. The subduction zone runs for seven hundred miles along the western coast of our continent. At its south end is Cape Mendocino, California. At its north end is Vancouver Island, Canada. In the middle is Seaside.
That centrality is not just geographic. With one possible exception—the similarly unlucky town of Long Beach, Washington—no other place on the West Coast is as imperilled by the Cascadia subduction zone as Seaside. When the earthquake hits, the continent will jolt westward into the Pacific, displacing an enormous amount of ocean. All of that seawater will be forced upward into a massive liquid mountain, which will promptly collapse and rush back toward the shore. That’s the tsunami, which will flood the coastal region up to a mile and a half inland and to a depth of twenty, forty, even a hundred feet, depending on your precise location. The area that will be swamped is called the inundation zone; within it, tsunamis are essentially unsurvivable. Eighty-three per cent of Seaside’s population and eighty-nine per cent of its workforce are located inside that zone. So is its energy infrastructure, water supply, wastewater-treatment plant, hospital, police department, and fire stations. And so, during the school year, are nearly all of its children.
The Seaside School District serves some fifteen hundred students, spread out across four different buildings. One of those, Seaside Heights Elementary, is, as its name suggests, on high enough ground to be relatively safe. The other three—an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school—are between five and fifteen feet above sea level. Seismologists expect that in a full-scale Cascadia earthquake, the tsunami in Seaside will be between forty-five and fifty feet high. It will make landfall roughly fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins, which means that, to have any chance of getting to safety, students and staff will need to start evacuating as soon as the shaking stops.
Unfortunately, even their very first step will be, at best, extremely difficult, because none of the schools in Seaside’s inundation zone have been seismically retrofitted. According to the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, in a major earthquake, all three are likely to suffer catastrophic collapse. Those who manage to escape from whatever is left of the middle school will have to walk uphill for eight-tenths of a mile, through rubble, fires, and flooding, over a bridge that might not remain standing. Those who escape the high school will need to walk a mile in that landscape, likewise over a possibly nonexistent bridge.
As for those at the grade school: they have no viable evacuation option at all. Gearhart Elementary School is sandwiched between the ocean and a wetland, through which no roads exist and none can be built, because the ground there will liquefy in an earthquake. At present, students at the school, together with everyone else in the eponymous Gearhart neighborhood, are instructed to walk to a nearby forty-foot ridge. Seismologists expect the tsunami there to be five feet higher than that, but even if it were five _inches _higher, that would be enough—or rather, too much. At the speed a tsunami travels, three inches of water suffices to knock over a grown man, to say nothing of a third grader.
For the past nineteen years, all of this has been the chief headache and potential heartache of a man named Doug Dougherty, the longtime superintendent of the Seaside School District. Dougherty began his career in Seaside as a teacher at—and later principal of—the now-defunct Cannon Beach Elementary School. That school was situated so close to its namesake that, if you opened the windows, you could listen to the surf all day long. In 1995, as seismologists began to sound the alarm about seismic risk in the region, Dougherty became the first principal in the United States to institute tsunami evacuation drills. That seemed like a life-saving innovation (it attracted national attention, and national praise), until engineers examined the bridge along the evacuation route and determined that it would collapse in an earthquake. The only other route to high ground was almost a mile and a half long. To get to safety, everyone at the school—faculty members, five-year-olds, kids who were on crutches after breaking a leg on the playground—would need to be able to cover that distance in not much more than ten minutes. “It was really clear,” Dougherty said, “that we wouldn’t be able to have even a small chance of getting everyone out.”
In 1998, Dougherty became superintendent; fifteen years later, in 2013, he finally succeeded in closing Cannon Beach Elementary School. That same year, he came up with a plan to protect the district’s other students as well, by buying land outside the inundation zone and building a new K-12 campus there, which would double as a much-needed evacuation site for the entire city. The projected cost was one hundred and twenty-eight million dollars. No national funds were available, because of a ban on federal earmarks. No state funds were available, because, although Oregon provides money to seismically retrofit schools, those inside the tsunami inundation zone aren’t eligible to apply—a strangely cruel provision that leaves the lowest and soon-to-be-wettest schools high and dry. That left the city to foot the bill on its own, which it proposed doing via a tax increase of $2.16 per thousand dollars of property value—less than the price of a latte. The bond measure went up for a vote in 2014. So reasonable was the ask, and so dire the issue, that Dougherty, together with almost everyone involved, felt confident that it would pass. It failed, by a wide margin: sixty-two per cent to thirty-eight per cent.
Next week, another, more modest version of that bond measure will be back on the ballot. This time, the Weyerhaeuser timber company has agreed to donate eighty acres of land outside the tsunami inundation zone, leaving the town to cover only the cost of construction and relocation. The price of the bond has dropped to $1.35 per thousand dollars of property value.
That isn’t much, but, as Dougherty knows by now, it isn’t nothing, either. Many of Seaside’s residents are service employees, working in restaurants or cleaning hotels; more than half of them live below the poverty line. As devastating as the coming natural disaster will be, it is difficult to convince people to put money toward the future when the demands of the present are so pressing. But, of course, the future has a way of becoming the present—sometimes much sooner than we expect. According to seismologists, the odds that a major Cascadia earthquake and tsunami will strike within the next fifty years are one in three.
As for the odds that the bond measure will pass: this time, Dougherty is declining to speculate. Instead, having stepped down as superintendent, in June, he is using his putative retirement to fight for the measure's passage. He has also chosen to stay in his current house, although it is in Gearhart, the area of Seaside from which it is essentially impossible to evacuate. He understands the risk involved in living there, but, he told me, he can’t bring himself to leave as long as others have no choice but to work and study there. “My wife and I have a plan that if we need to climb trees, we will climb trees,” he said. Their home sits atop the neighborhood’s forty-foot ridge; the trees buy them another sixty feet. It is true that trees fare better in earthquakes than homes and hotels and brick elementary schools. Still, as he spoke, I pictured the tsunami—not just coming in but receding, with the terrifying detritus of an entire city smashing around inside it.
To be precariously balanced just above that kind of disaster: that is where Seaside finds itself right now, as it prepares to vote on its bond measure this Tuesday. Either the city will choose to knock down its schools and rebuild them somewhere safer—or, sooner or later, other forces will knock them over instead. For those who live there, for those with loved ones there, for anyone with a school-aged child and an imagination, the issue is as stark as the one at the top of the ballot: a vote for reason or for madness, for relative safety or looming catastrophe.
