Four years ago, former Mercury reporter Nathan Gilles wrote one of the more important and popular stories we’ve ever published, called The First Four Minutes. It was a meticulously researched piece of science/fiction about what might happen in downtown Portland if and when we get hit by that mega quake everyone’s been predicting—and it was all based on science provided by some of the top experts in their field. Here’s a clip:
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.
It’s still a great read, check out the rest of it here.
And yesterday, VICE’s Motherboard published its own version of this story by Adam Rothstein, including a five-part series called Five Minutes—which documents the first five minutes of a calamitous earthquake. Here’s a clip of that:
At 11:46AM, two minutes into the earthquake, the soil on the steep eastern slope of the West Hills, wet and heavy after a recent week of spring rain, comes loose and flows downhill. What was once solid ground becomes liquid, creating a wave of mud and debris, folding buildings over like dominos between West Burnside and SW Jefferson. Nearly everything west of W. 18th Avenue is destroyed as the city right off the mountainside. This single massive landslide is responsible for the vast majority of immediate deaths.
Many people will never be found, as thousands of tons of earth displaces itself as if the the city blocks were flipped by a plow. Smaller landslides are burying roads and rail lines elsewhere, all across Oregon. The single tunnel that allows the majority of road traffic to cut over the West Hills to the the suburbs of Beaverton, Tigard, and Hillsboro is buried at its eastern entrance, due to landslides above it dropping soil onto the roadway of Highway 26.
On this late morning in Multnomah County, the central county of the Portland Metro Area, 154 people die instantly from the collapsing buildings, landslides, and resulting traffic accidents. 2,463 are injured.
This version is also well researched (and has great graphics!), and while I may jokingly refer to both of them as “earthquake porn,” both are important reminders of the potential dangers that surround us, and how we as a city need to be doing everything we can to be prepared. SO READ BOTH AND LEARN!
