Yesterday, the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM), our city-run bulwark against catastrophe, released a series of maps revealing Portland’s many hazards. Listed are floodplains, wildfire areas, local fault lines—you name it. PBEM’s maps also list evacuation routes, helicopter landing spots, hospitals, and fire stations. Well that’s reassuring…but wait!
The maps also list a number of buildings that are expected to collapse in a major earthquake. Called unreinforced masonry buildings or (URMs), these are your typical brick buildings. And it’s generally agreed these babies are killers in major quakes. Because we are supposed to get a really big earthquake that will basically destroy Portland as we know it, it might be worthwhile to take a moment right now to familiarize yourself with where these killers are (let’s face it, you won’t be surfing the web looking for them with the power and telecommunications out).
On the PBEM maps, URMs are depicted as blue dots. If you want a good scare—or would otherwise like to join the legion of earthquake paranoids, myself included—take a look at all the blue dots in downtown Portland. Yeah, that’s right, there’s a lot of buildings that ain’t gonna make it through the shaking.
If you’re like me, you looked immediately for your home. And if you’re like me, you didn’t find it. In which case you were probably all self-assured and like, “I’m not going to die, losers!” Well, not so fast. As they say, the map is not the territory.
Not included on the PBEM maps are other dangerous buildings: nonductile concrete buildings. These include some schools, department stores, etc built from about the 1930s to the 1970s, and unfortunately there are also a lot of these in the Portland metro area.
Of course, I’m going to pretend because I don’t see my apartment building marked that some how the place I call home—which was built in the 1920s mind you, has had no seismic work done to it, and shakes violently every time my upstairs neighbor walks across his floor/ my ceiling—is somehow safe. Okay, that’s a really shitty idea. And kudos to the city for starting to map our destruction.
I used to live in an old building above Lionel Ritchie, and my apartment shook every time he danced on my floor/his ceiling.
I wonder how the Port of Portland got PDX Int’l airport excluded from the floodplain / liquefiable soils / moderate-high amplification potential zones?
The airport is only protected from flooding by the Marine Drive levee, which should be expected to fail in ‘the big one’; and the soils in that area, which is basically ‘reclaimed’ swamp land, are most certainly liquefiable.
According to those maps my house is built atop either a piece from the true cross or a slab of concrete containing the remains of Jimmy Hoffa…the symbols are a little confusing.
@1: That’s one hell of a COTW contender.
Looks like the only hazardous buildings in my life are the one I work in every day, and the one where my kid goes to school. Awesome.
Wow. All kidding aside, I just looked at the map, and downtown is just a mess of dangerous blue dots. If you want to know which buildings they represent, too fucking bad, because 90% of the map is devoted to showing you that there are no hazardous buildings in fucking Forest Park. Large format PDF is rarely the best way to distribute information, Portland.
“Large format PDF is rarely the best way to distribute information”
It is a fair method of obscuring it, however.