Earthstorm (2022) s01e03 Episode Script
Earthquake
[rushing air]
[deep rumbling and thudding]
[shouting]
[woman in Japanese] Quickly!
[woman] The tsunami was right behind me
and I was worried
I wouldn't make it in time.
[tense music playing]
[woman] I thought
I'd be safe if I got to the hill.
[breathless] But I realized
I was in the water.
I didn't know how.
Instead of escaping,
I started looking up
at the sky and floating.
- [ominous tone plays]
- [opening theme music starts playing]
- [jittery music playing]
- [panicked screams]
- [screaming]
- [crashing]
[screaming]
[narrator in English] Earthquakes are
the deadliest of natural disasters.
[crash]
[narrator] Destroying buildings.
Causing tsunamis.
Ripping apart the very fabric of a city.
[unsettling music playing]
[narrator] They have the power
to turn lives upside down.
This is the story of three seismic zones.
Each has experienced
deadly earthquakes in the past.
Each faces the certainty
of another disaster in the future.
[foreboding music playing]
[narrator] Los Angeles.
City of Angels.
City of Earthquakes.
Every year, ten thousand
tremors happen in this region.
- [crashing]
- [glass shattering]
[narrator] Most are harmless.
But the threat is serious enough
for the city to be on constant alert.
[resounding alarm blares]
[simulator] Earthquake.
Light shaking expected in 56 seconds.
Hold on. Protect yourself now.
[resounding alarm]
[simulator] Earthquake, earthquake.
Drop, cover
So you can see the yellow waves are
those primary waves, the ones that rattle.
The red waves
are the big waves that shake hard.
Those primary waves are fast
[man] When I became mayor,
it was on Week One,
I can just remember thinking,
"What will happen
in the four, or if I'm lucky,
eight years that I'll sit in this office?"
And as an Angeleno,
my mind immediately went to an earthquake.
I just remember that feeling
of like praying it wouldn't happen
but realizing
that prayer wouldn't be good enough.
That you can't just hope
it doesn't happen on your watch.
You have to assume that it will
and get ready for it.
[resounding alarm]
[simulator] Earthquake, earthquake.
Protect yourself now.
[resounding alarm]
[Eric] I was shocked
by the sheer number of buildings
that hadn't been reinforced.
I could see a city
completely cut off from itself.
I saw a place
that people wouldn't want to be
and a place of immense suffering
for those who couldn't leave.
[ominous music playing]
[narrator] The worst earthquake
in LA's history happened one night
just before dawn,
in the suburb of Northridge.
[man] I just happened to be
in the newsroom, working on another story
on a hostage situation.
I'm looking at my script and
then I look at the editor, and he says,
"Okay. Go into the narration booth."
So I ran into
the narration booth, and then
you know, "Testing, one, two, three.
Check. One, two, three.
Okay. Here's first take one,
take one at three, two,
and all of a sudden
[white noise scratching]
[man] Let's go! Come on.
Let's get out of here!
- [man] Standby, Joe!
- [Joe] Give me a pen!
[Joe] Somebody's yelling,
"We've gotta get out of here quick."
And I said, "Yeah, we do."
4:30.
And then I realize, "Oh crap.
I'm the only reporter in here."
- [rumbling]
- [beep]
I can't tell if we're on the air or not.
[man] You are, Joe.
[Joe] And I just went
and grabbed my earpiece,
and I'm looking around several times.
I said, "Here goes."
I just started talking.
There's no surprise
for any folks this morning.
We've been hit with a major earthquake.
Right now we're trying
to basically gather some more information,
trying to figure
out where this has been centered.
I'm not sure if we can take
a look around that right now,
but half the newsroom
behind me has been disheveled.
A lot of television monitors
knocked off the shelves.
Oops. Hang on one second.
This is a very sharp aftershock
that just hit us right now.
[electric scratching]
[Joe] To anyone who says in, uh,
Southern California and says,
"Oh, we get used to this." Baloney.
You do not get used to that.
- [dramatic tone plays]
- [siren wails]
[Joe] It just hits you
in the middle of nowhere.
[girl screams] Listen to me, somebody!
My daddy's in there!
[man] Get out of the house!
[foreboding music playing]
[narrator] The shaking of an earthquake
can trigger a cascade of effects.
Debris, fires, and floods,
that spread throughout the city.
[foreboding music continues]
[explosion]
[Joe] Tornadoes, you get a warning.
Hurricane, you know it's coming.
Earthquake is an intruder in the dark.
It just coldcocks you in the side
of the face,
and it just butchers you.
What we've estimated is that
the fault is slipping somewhat
shallowly in the western edge
and it's getting deeper
and deeper over towards the east.
[reporter] Currently,
we've got four receivers out right now
[woman] When the earthquake occurred,
I didn't have time to watch the news.
I immediately called my colleagues
and we drove in the field
and we saw the damage.
And that was really shocking.
It looked like a war zone.
[helicopter rotors whirring]
[Andrea] And I think people finally
understood that Earth is moving.
[troubled music playing]
The Earth is layered. We have
the core, the mantle, which is hot,
soft rock, and then the crust,
which is the thin cold layer on top.
The mantle is actually
convecting, so the hot part is rising,
the cold part is falling,
and then the plates ride on top,
and they bump into each other,
they slide against each other
and that causes
earthquakes where those forces occur.
[narrator] In total, the Earth's crust
is made of 15 different plates,
which form the bedrock
of the world's oceans and continents.
California is at the boundary of two
plates moving in different directions.
One heading
northwest, the other southeast,
causing a buildup of stress that makes
Los Angeles so seismically active.
[reporter] This is
not a good story to tell you.
This is an apartment complex
that you're looking at
around the 9500 block
of Reseda Boulevard in Northridge.
You see some men in yellow jackets
working in the rubble.
[man] There was a guy there and he was
he was clawing
at the stucco at the base of the building.
And I said, "What are you doing?"
And he said, "Well,
there's somebody trapped underneath here.
I'm talking to him."
And as I followed the roof line across,
I saw a big one-story drop,
and then I realized
that we had a major collapse.
Do you believe there are
people inside the building,
and if there are, where might they be?
It's hard to answer that yes or no.
If they're in the building,
they're most likely on the first floor,
which has been compressed
by the second and third floors above.
[clanging]
I remember just screaming,
just not knowing what's going on.
I'm facing straight up.
There was nothing
I could do in terms of movement.
So left and right, aside from
wiggling around, that was it.
[dreaded music playing]
[Jason Lee] It felt like a coffin.
And I grabbed my left thigh area
and I just yanked my leg out
and I remember feeling a big pop,
and I had flipped over on my stomach and
the next thing was to just crawl and
just try and get out as soon as possible.
[fireman] Move back.
Put this in there before
[Jason Lee] And I could hear voices
outside saying,
"Hey, I think somebody is
underneath that crawlspace there."
And I was pulled
out in just one fell swoop.
[fireman] Come on, let's get out of here!
Let's go!
We gotta go. Come on.
Let's go! Let's get out of here.
[Jason Lee] The next thing I remember,
I had just seen another firefighter
pull my mom out of the building.
And she was just
running all over the place,
trying to find somebody, a firefighter,
anybody to do anything they could to try
and see where my brother and father were.
[indistinct talking]
[Mike] A woman
by the name of Hyun Sook Lee,
she was trying
to convey that her son, her other son
was in the building
and he needed to be rescued.
Uh, eventually, we did get to
the bedroom and we cut a big hole over it.
Unfortunately, he was home visiting for
the Martin Luther King holiday, and, uh,
his mother put him in her bed
so that he'd have a bed to sleep on.
She slept on the floor.
And so that saved her life, and it
and it didn't save her son's life.
So, um, that was, that was tough.
Even to this day, we
don't talk much about it just because, uh,
personally,
I don't want to ask her about it.
Um, so the bits and pieces
that I've gathered together,
I've actually read through Time magazine.
You know, she was on the cover of Time.
You know, there's a firefighter
informing her at that moment that,
uh, my brother and father were gone.
It was the blink of an eye,
really, for me.
Went from, uh,
being a big, full happy family to just
having everything taken away from us.
[narrator] The Northridge
earthquake killed 57 people.
And caused $44 billion worth of damage.
[unnerving music playing]
[narrator] It registered six point seven
on the Moment Magnitude Scale.
That scale is calibrated exponentially.
So a Magnitude One earthquake
is the equivalent of a pound of TNT.
But a Magnitude six point seven
releases 350 million times more energy.
[unnerving music swells]
[narrator] The biggest earthquake
in California's history, happened in 1906.
It destroyed 80% of San Francisco
and became known as "The Big One."
[somber music playing]
[narrator] It was
a Magnitude seven point nine.
Releasing 60 times more energy
than the quake at Northridge.
It's only a matter of time
before LA experiences
its own "Big One."
New building codes are designed
to protect the city's infrastructure
from such a disaster.
Where we're standing now
is the very east end approach of the,
new viaduct that's being constructed.
This bridge
is designed and built to account
for a seismic event up
to a 1000-year capacity.
[jackhammer rumbling]
If there was an earthquake,
the movement would be, uh,
absorbed by the bearings that have
been installed on this bridge structure.
These bearings
are allowed to move up to 30 inches
in any direction in a seismic event.
Never been done before.
[Andrea] Los Angeles
is a very shattered landscape.
In all of California, the most
complex in terms of all the faults.
There is a fault in Hollywood.
There's a fault called
the Raymond Hill. Fault in Pasadena area.
There's the Puente Hills Thrust Fault,
the Newport-Inglewood Fault,
the Elysian Park Fault.
it goes on, and on, and on.
The San Jacinto Fault, San Andreas Fault.
So, there are many, many faults.
There are networks
of faults, and in some ways,
they're all connected
to be part of the same system.
[edgy music playing]
[Andrea] What we don't understand
well is, which fault is likely to rupture,
so that we're prepared for the next one.
[jackhammer banging]
[reporter] It is roughly eight hours
now after the violent earthquake
that hit Southern California.
The terrible toll
is just now becoming apparent.
[Eric] It's not the daily occurrence
of seismic activity that scares us.
It's that once in a generation
one that scares us.
The longer we wait without one,
we kind of wonder, "Hmm.
When will that be and how bad will it be?"
[unsettling music playing]
[narrator] On the other side
of the Pacific Ocean,
Japan sits
at the junction of four different plates.
[narrator] It's the most seismically
active location in the world.
[foreboding music playing]
[narrator] Because the plates
meet offshore,
many of Japan's earthquakes happen at sea,
and bring with them
the threat of a tsunami.
[teacher in Japanese] Good morning.
[children] Good morning.
[narrator] In the region of Tohoku,
children grow up preparing for the worst.
[resounding alarm]
[narrator in English]
Learning what to do in an earthquake,
but also any tsunami that follows.
[woman in Japanese] A drill. A drill.
- [alarm blares]
- [helicopter rotors rumbling]
[woman in Japanese] Mega tsunami warning.
Please evacuate.
I repeat. Emergency, emergency.
[boy] I was born in 2011.
That year there was a big tsunami
caused by the Tohoku earthquake.
If you get washed away by a tsunami,
you can't see your family
anymore and you can't go to school.
I think tsunamis are scary
because earthquakes
and tsunamis can destroy houses.
Also, people die.
So I think they are very scary.
[somber music playing]
[deep crash and rumbling]
[indistinct screaming]
[stark music playing]
[man] The magnitude
of the earthquake was nine point zero.
It was the most powerful
earthquake ever recorded in Japan.
This is the Pacific Ocean.
Offshore, the Pacific plate
is moving towards us
from America
at a speed of eight cm per year.
It is sinking under
the Japanese Archipelago,
which is getting
caught on top of it like this.
Over time, it becomes
increasingly strained
until it rebounds
and there's an earthquake.
[narrator] The epicenter of the earthquake
was 70 miles off the Tohoku coast.
It released 3000 times more energy
than the Northridge quake in 1994.
The ocean floor rose
by 30 feet in a matter of seconds.
A huge bulge
of water spread in every direction.
This was the tsunami.
[Kenji] The speed of a tsunami
depends on the depth of the water.
Where it's very deep in
the open sea, it's as fast as a jet plane.
But as it gets closer to the shore,
it slows down.
And as it slows down, the waves keep
coming and it grows larger and larger.
[indistinct shouting]
[Kenji] "Tsunami" means "Tsu" and "Nami."
"Tsu" is a place where the sea
is shallow and "nami" is a wave.
[water gushing]
[man] The earthquake was around 02:45 p.m.
The fire station was over there,
near the embankment.
And I got there
a couple of minutes before 03:00 p.m.
[siren wails]
[man] Hurry up and get out!
[Yuchi] There
was still one person evacuating.
[melodic music playing]
[Yuchi] By the time he got
to the sea wall on his bike,
the water level was rising rapidly.
[man] It's coming over the wall!
[indistinct talking over boat intercom]
Unlike a movie, where
there's a tidal wave like this,
here the water kept flowing in,
constantly getting higher and higher.
[siren wails]
[Yuchi] When I saw that,
I thought it was over.
I'd be swallowed by the wave and die.
So I ran to the fire truck.
[man] Go!
[man] Let's get on!
[man] This is a disaster alert.
[man] Go! Hurry.
[Yuchi] I was filming from the beginning.
But being in a position
of disaster prevention,
that was an inappropriate move.
- [first man] It's over the wall!
- [second man] No! It's over the wall.
It's over the wall!
[Yuchi] If I survived this,
people would be able to see the footage.
That's the feeling I had inside.
That's why I kept on filming.
[serious music playing]
I was driving, and the car
in front of me got caught in traffic,
so I had to stop.
The water level was still
low on the surface of the road,
and I imagined
it would start receding soon.
I didn't feel like I was in danger.
[serious music continues]
[Yu] The person in front
of me got out of his car.
He then rushed back
to close the door and ran off.
Within a few seconds,
my car was surrounded
by the tsunami and was out of control.
I'd missed my chance to escape.
At that moment
I realized that this was serious.
My life was in danger.
[troubled music playing]
[Yu] Then I saw
a person in front of me
who was trapped in a black car.
He later broke the window
and got out onto the car roof.
[creaking and crunching]
[urgent music playing]
The sea had risen to this level,
so I thought this is the tsunami,
and I started running.
People standing over there must
have thought, "Why is she running?"
I was running and shouting, "Quickly!"
- [shouting]
- [Akiko] Quickly!
[Akiko] The tsunami was right behind me
and I was worried
I wouldn't make it in time.
[panicked shouting]
[Akiko] I thought
I'd be safe if I got to the hill.
[screaming and shouting]
[Akiko] But I realized I was in the water.
I didn't know how.
- [water gushing]
- [vehicles thudding]
[Yu] I used to think about
death sometimes in the bath,
and when I'd go to bed,
I'd be scared about it.
But at that moment,
when I had death right in front of me,
I accepted it.
The car started moving
backwards towards a storage unit
and into debris.
Water came gushing in
from the window that I had opened.
So I grabbed the window frame
and pulled myself out.
Then, I felt my hand breaking the surface.
I thought, "Oh, it's right there,"
and my face popped out.
I'd made it. I was
literally seconds away from death.
For a moment,
I thought I was going to die,
and soon after that I passed out.
When I came to,
I was near that building by the hill.
And then I saw
our shuttle bus floating by the hill.
I climbed on top of its tire.
Then the water stopped for a moment.
And I escaped onto the hill.
This is what happened after the video.
I am alive. [giggles]
- [deep rumbling and crushing]
- [sad piano music playing]
[shouting]
[Yuchi] The sight of a tsunami that size,
smashing houses as it moves.
[sad piano music continues]
[Yuchi] It was something
beyond human understanding.
[indistinct shouting]
I will never forget it.
[sad music fades]
[solemn music playing]
[narrator] Almost 20,000 people died
as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.
More than half of them were elderly.
Leaving loved ones behind,
to process the grief.
My dear, oh my dear.
It's been a while.
[exhales loudly]
[woman] Many people spin the dial
and talk into the handset.
Of course the line isn't connected,
so you can't hear anything
or have a real conversation,
but this simulated experience helps them
remember those they have lost.
- It's a trigger for them to talk.
- [man whimpers]
I waited for you all night,
but you never came home.
[sighs]
[moving music playing]
It can take a very long time
to come to terms
with what you've actually lost.
[whimpers] I miss you so much.
[inhales sharply]
Thank you.
[sniffs]
[moving music continues]
[man] I pray at the Buddhist shrine
with my hands together every day,
but when I come here,
I feel the joy
and comfort of talking to her directly.
It's a feeling I can hardly express.
[ethereal music with gong tone plays]
[narrator in English] Over time,
Japan has lost at least 130,000 lives
to tsunamis.
[spooky music playing]
[narrator] The Japanese have the most
detailed tsunami records in the world.
Stretching back over a 1000 years.
But there's one
tsunami that doesn't fit the mold.
A seismological mystery
with implications for millions of people.
[Kenji in Japanese] This is the Morioka
Domain's Book on Miscellaneous Subjects,
the official record of this area.
It says that at midnight
on January 27, 1700,
a tsunami occurred
in a place called Kuwagasaki.
As a result, 20 houses burned down
and 13 houses were washed away.
[narrator in English] The
strange thing about this tsunami,
is there's no record
of an earthquake at the time.
So it's known as an orphan tsunami.
It must've been triggered by a
seismic event beyond the coast of Japan.
[spooky music fades]
[narrator in English]
In 1960, a massive earthquake in Chile
caused a tsunami to cross
the Pacific and reach Japan.
Might something
similar have happened in 1700?
[waves crashing]
[curious music playing]
[Kenji in Japanese] We didn't know where
this tsunami had come from.
There was no record
of an earthquake anywhere in the world.
We wanted to find out where it was.
[narrator in English] The solution
to this puzzle lies not in Japan
but back on the other side of the ocean,
in North America.
[calm guitar music playing]
There is no written record
of an earthquake in January 1700.
But there is a legend,
passed down by the Quinault people
of the Pacific Northwest.
[speaking Quinault]
[in English] Long time ago,
the world would shake,
the ground would shake,
and the ocean would,
would be rough
and the waves would hit the shore.
And what was happening
was the Thunderbird, Xanissah,
he would leave his lair
and he would go out over the sea.
He would look for the biggest whale.
And then he would pick that whale up
and he would fly high up
into the sky towards the mountain
and when he got there,
he would drop that whale
and that whale would hit the land so hard
- [loud thud]
- [screech]
[Guy] that it would shake
and cause an earthquake.
And that's our story
of where the earthquake is from.
It's from Xanissah, the Thunderbird.
[deep mystical music playing]
[Guy] I mean, over time, I believe
that there's been many earthquakes
that have hit our coastline here.
And that Thunderbird and Whale story, um,
the interaction of those two
is what causes that every time.
That's what we believe.
[crow caws]
[narrator] While some look to legend,
others look for evidence.
If there was an earthquake here
in 1700, it should've left telltale signs,
somewhere among the trees.
[woman] All of these trees
are actually what we would call subfossil.
Which means they're not yet fossilized
but they're dead
and downed for many hundreds of years.
And so, these really charismatic pieces
of evidence for past landscapes
are one of the first indicators
that something dramatic
must have occurred in this area.
In the mud and the sediment
that covers the roots of these trees,
we can actually look with a microscope and
find these little critters called diatoms.
So, diatoms are little bugs
in the ocean that have a shell,
and some like to live
really close to the surface of the ocean
and other types of diatoms
like to live underneath more water,
closer to the bottom of the ocean.
And the diatoms
that we find right above that soil
that these trees are rooted in,
like to live in about
six feet of water or even more.
[lively music playing]
[Jessie] So, what we're talking about
is that the whole land subsided
under at least six feet of salt water,
killing the trees
and then depositing those diatoms.
And really,
the only thing that could do that,
that could cause that much subsidence
along the coast, is a massive earthquake.
Trees are these incredible data recorders,
and each
and every year they put on a growth ring.
And we can utilize the pattern
of those growth rings to determine
when these trees died.
And what's incredible about
this ghost forest and other ghost forests
along the coast of Washington and Oregon
is that all of these trees
died at the same time.
Their final ring was the year 1699,
and this tree did
not grow in the year 1700.
So, somewhere between the fall
and winter of 1699
and in the spring of 1700,
this massive event must have occurred.
And that very tight
time frame overlaps perfectly
with the orphan tsunami
that we see in Japan.
And the real ringer here then,
is the trees themselves,
because they had the code,
that barcode that helped us date the
event that allowed us to tie it to Japan.
[cool guitar music playing]
[Jessie] This is why I love my job.
I get to be a detective who figures out
what happened here 300 years ago.
[narrator] A cold case solved.
The orphan tsunami and ghost forest,
were created by the same event.
Immortalized by Native American legend.
[mysterious music playing]
A Magnitude Nine earthquake
along a fault between the
North American and Juan de Fuca plates.
This fault has a name: Cascadia.
[bleak music playing]
[narrator] If a similar sized
earthquake struck today,
it would devastate the Pacific Northwest.
But how likely is that?
If it's happened before,
could it happen again?
This laboratory contains
samples of sediment drilled
from the seabed, under the Cascadia Fault.
[man] The reason we take these core
samples is to look back in the past
and see what the frequency
of earthquakes has been over time.
Since we can't predict earthquakes,
the best thing we can do is make forecasts
based on probabilities
that we've derived from the past.
The cores
are typically six to eight meters long
but we cut it into meter
and a half chunks for storage.
We can reassemble them, so we have
the complete picture of that sample.
In this core, there's a record
of layer upon layer upon layer
of events in the deep sea,
like tree rings or like a tape recorder.
Just everything that took
place over that time, thousands of years.
And we get up toward the top of the core,
we see a significant event up at the top.
This is the layer
that was laid down by the 1700 earthquake.
Goes from about there to there,
with a little bit
of sediment just sitting on top.
But this layer from
the 1700 earthquake is not alone.
It's not unique.
We have the ability now
to collect thousands of years
of layer upon layer upon layer.
A total of 46 earthquakes,
uh, we think are represented in this core.
About 20 very large ones,
and about 26 smaller sizes.
[curious music playing]
[narrator] When the Magnitude
Nine earthquakes at Cascadia
are averaged across time,
it turns out
they occur once every 430 years.
[Chris] We have an average, but
that's just an average. It's statistics.
We have intervals that are much,
much closer together, 200 years or so.
And we have
several more that are, uh, 1200 years.
So, this could be,
either good news or bad news.
We could be looking at a
1200 year interval to the next,
really, big earthquake.
And, uh, but on the other hand,
we could be well overdue.
We could be looking at, uh,
an interval that ends today.
The one thing that we can be certain of,
is that after this many earthquakes
repeated over thousands of years,
that the next earthquake is inevitable.
It's coming. It's just a matter of when.
[pressing music playing]
[narrator] In the last 100 years,
there have been
only five Magnitude Nine earthquakes,
- anywhere in the world.
- [unnerving music building]
- [music breaks]
- [sad violin music playing]
[narrator] Cascadia
has the potential to be the next.
And if that happens, the Quinault
people would be in the firing line
living at the edge of the ocean.
[Guy] We've always gone to sleep
with the sound
of the wave coming to shore.
And, uh, you know, science has told us,
and history of our own has told us that
the earthquake
and tidal wave will come here again.
[waves crashing loudly]
[Guy] And when that tidal wave comes,
it's going to change things drastically.
I mean, it could be catastrophic here.
So that forces us to think outside of
our traditional view of where we put our,
our homes and villages and
you know, now we're looking at,
moving our people up on the hill.
The logistics of that is huge.
We have to look at the best science,
we have to look at our traditions,
and understand
that this is going to happen.
[sad piano music playing]
The Native Americans have legends
about the 1700 earthquake
that have been passed down.
But for the rest of us,
who've essentially moved
in since the last earthquake,
we're completely clueless.
[foreboding music playing]
[Chris] In a place like Portland,
it's not the big tall skyscrapers
that are built
with building codes that are the problem.
We have a huge number of four, five
six story unreinforced masonry buildings
that simply weren't
constructed to withstand earthquakes.
It really doesn't take very much shaking
for those buildings to come apart.
They'll probably be heavily damaged,
so there will be a lot of casualties.
[narrator] According to
the Emergency Management Agency,
a million buildings could be compromised
by a major Cascadia earthquake.
There could be 13,000 deaths,
and twice as many injuries.
Potentially the worst
natural disaster in US history.
I don't enjoy being, uh,
the prophet of doom,
and bringing bad news all the time.
Uh, people, uh, don't want to hear
these messages for the most part.
I don't want
to hear them either, for that matter but
it's our reality
and it's our job as scientists,
really, to bring this out
and let people know what reality is,
and then it's up to society
to decide what to do about that.
[ominous ticking music playing]
[Chris] When I look
at a city like Portland,
it's hard for me
to not see piles of rubble everywhere.
Most people don't see it that way,
don't think of it that way.
And it's a bit of a curse to be able
to just look out and see that future.
[narrator] The danger is not confined
to the Pacific Northwest.
Off the coast of Northern California,
the Cascadia Fault connects
with the San Andreas Fault.
And over the last 3000 years,
the timing of earthquakes
on both faults has been so similar,
they appear to be in sync with each other.
[Chris] This is kind
of a startling and stunning thing.
It implies that one fault may have
influenced or triggered the other.
Perhaps a few months later
or days or weeks.
We see this in geology
in other places around the world,
but I don't think anyone
had ever considered that this might
actually happen here with a
mega thrust earthquake
and a giant San Andreas earthquake,
more or less at the same time.
[resounding alarm]
[Chris] The entire West Coast is
living under the shadow of "The Big One"
that lies in our future.
[calm piano music playing]
[Guy] We believe that nature
has a mind of its own.
That the movements of the Earth
will occur whether we know it or not.
And in certain times
in our existence, there's earthquakes.
Those things will repeat themselves.
That's what we've grown to accept.
You know, it's been that way
for us since the beginning of time.
[menacing closing theme music playing]
Subtitle translation by: Antoinette Smit
[deep rumbling and thudding]
[shouting]
[woman in Japanese] Quickly!
[woman] The tsunami was right behind me
and I was worried
I wouldn't make it in time.
[tense music playing]
[woman] I thought
I'd be safe if I got to the hill.
[breathless] But I realized
I was in the water.
I didn't know how.
Instead of escaping,
I started looking up
at the sky and floating.
- [ominous tone plays]
- [opening theme music starts playing]
- [jittery music playing]
- [panicked screams]
- [screaming]
- [crashing]
[screaming]
[narrator in English] Earthquakes are
the deadliest of natural disasters.
[crash]
[narrator] Destroying buildings.
Causing tsunamis.
Ripping apart the very fabric of a city.
[unsettling music playing]
[narrator] They have the power
to turn lives upside down.
This is the story of three seismic zones.
Each has experienced
deadly earthquakes in the past.
Each faces the certainty
of another disaster in the future.
[foreboding music playing]
[narrator] Los Angeles.
City of Angels.
City of Earthquakes.
Every year, ten thousand
tremors happen in this region.
- [crashing]
- [glass shattering]
[narrator] Most are harmless.
But the threat is serious enough
for the city to be on constant alert.
[resounding alarm blares]
[simulator] Earthquake.
Light shaking expected in 56 seconds.
Hold on. Protect yourself now.
[resounding alarm]
[simulator] Earthquake, earthquake.
Drop, cover
So you can see the yellow waves are
those primary waves, the ones that rattle.
The red waves
are the big waves that shake hard.
Those primary waves are fast
[man] When I became mayor,
it was on Week One,
I can just remember thinking,
"What will happen
in the four, or if I'm lucky,
eight years that I'll sit in this office?"
And as an Angeleno,
my mind immediately went to an earthquake.
I just remember that feeling
of like praying it wouldn't happen
but realizing
that prayer wouldn't be good enough.
That you can't just hope
it doesn't happen on your watch.
You have to assume that it will
and get ready for it.
[resounding alarm]
[simulator] Earthquake, earthquake.
Protect yourself now.
[resounding alarm]
[Eric] I was shocked
by the sheer number of buildings
that hadn't been reinforced.
I could see a city
completely cut off from itself.
I saw a place
that people wouldn't want to be
and a place of immense suffering
for those who couldn't leave.
[ominous music playing]
[narrator] The worst earthquake
in LA's history happened one night
just before dawn,
in the suburb of Northridge.
[man] I just happened to be
in the newsroom, working on another story
on a hostage situation.
I'm looking at my script and
then I look at the editor, and he says,
"Okay. Go into the narration booth."
So I ran into
the narration booth, and then
you know, "Testing, one, two, three.
Check. One, two, three.
Okay. Here's first take one,
take one at three, two,
and all of a sudden
[white noise scratching]
[man] Let's go! Come on.
Let's get out of here!
- [man] Standby, Joe!
- [Joe] Give me a pen!
[Joe] Somebody's yelling,
"We've gotta get out of here quick."
And I said, "Yeah, we do."
4:30.
And then I realize, "Oh crap.
I'm the only reporter in here."
- [rumbling]
- [beep]
I can't tell if we're on the air or not.
[man] You are, Joe.
[Joe] And I just went
and grabbed my earpiece,
and I'm looking around several times.
I said, "Here goes."
I just started talking.
There's no surprise
for any folks this morning.
We've been hit with a major earthquake.
Right now we're trying
to basically gather some more information,
trying to figure
out where this has been centered.
I'm not sure if we can take
a look around that right now,
but half the newsroom
behind me has been disheveled.
A lot of television monitors
knocked off the shelves.
Oops. Hang on one second.
This is a very sharp aftershock
that just hit us right now.
[electric scratching]
[Joe] To anyone who says in, uh,
Southern California and says,
"Oh, we get used to this." Baloney.
You do not get used to that.
- [dramatic tone plays]
- [siren wails]
[Joe] It just hits you
in the middle of nowhere.
[girl screams] Listen to me, somebody!
My daddy's in there!
[man] Get out of the house!
[foreboding music playing]
[narrator] The shaking of an earthquake
can trigger a cascade of effects.
Debris, fires, and floods,
that spread throughout the city.
[foreboding music continues]
[explosion]
[Joe] Tornadoes, you get a warning.
Hurricane, you know it's coming.
Earthquake is an intruder in the dark.
It just coldcocks you in the side
of the face,
and it just butchers you.
What we've estimated is that
the fault is slipping somewhat
shallowly in the western edge
and it's getting deeper
and deeper over towards the east.
[reporter] Currently,
we've got four receivers out right now
[woman] When the earthquake occurred,
I didn't have time to watch the news.
I immediately called my colleagues
and we drove in the field
and we saw the damage.
And that was really shocking.
It looked like a war zone.
[helicopter rotors whirring]
[Andrea] And I think people finally
understood that Earth is moving.
[troubled music playing]
The Earth is layered. We have
the core, the mantle, which is hot,
soft rock, and then the crust,
which is the thin cold layer on top.
The mantle is actually
convecting, so the hot part is rising,
the cold part is falling,
and then the plates ride on top,
and they bump into each other,
they slide against each other
and that causes
earthquakes where those forces occur.
[narrator] In total, the Earth's crust
is made of 15 different plates,
which form the bedrock
of the world's oceans and continents.
California is at the boundary of two
plates moving in different directions.
One heading
northwest, the other southeast,
causing a buildup of stress that makes
Los Angeles so seismically active.
[reporter] This is
not a good story to tell you.
This is an apartment complex
that you're looking at
around the 9500 block
of Reseda Boulevard in Northridge.
You see some men in yellow jackets
working in the rubble.
[man] There was a guy there and he was
he was clawing
at the stucco at the base of the building.
And I said, "What are you doing?"
And he said, "Well,
there's somebody trapped underneath here.
I'm talking to him."
And as I followed the roof line across,
I saw a big one-story drop,
and then I realized
that we had a major collapse.
Do you believe there are
people inside the building,
and if there are, where might they be?
It's hard to answer that yes or no.
If they're in the building,
they're most likely on the first floor,
which has been compressed
by the second and third floors above.
[clanging]
I remember just screaming,
just not knowing what's going on.
I'm facing straight up.
There was nothing
I could do in terms of movement.
So left and right, aside from
wiggling around, that was it.
[dreaded music playing]
[Jason Lee] It felt like a coffin.
And I grabbed my left thigh area
and I just yanked my leg out
and I remember feeling a big pop,
and I had flipped over on my stomach and
the next thing was to just crawl and
just try and get out as soon as possible.
[fireman] Move back.
Put this in there before
[Jason Lee] And I could hear voices
outside saying,
"Hey, I think somebody is
underneath that crawlspace there."
And I was pulled
out in just one fell swoop.
[fireman] Come on, let's get out of here!
Let's go!
We gotta go. Come on.
Let's go! Let's get out of here.
[Jason Lee] The next thing I remember,
I had just seen another firefighter
pull my mom out of the building.
And she was just
running all over the place,
trying to find somebody, a firefighter,
anybody to do anything they could to try
and see where my brother and father were.
[indistinct talking]
[Mike] A woman
by the name of Hyun Sook Lee,
she was trying
to convey that her son, her other son
was in the building
and he needed to be rescued.
Uh, eventually, we did get to
the bedroom and we cut a big hole over it.
Unfortunately, he was home visiting for
the Martin Luther King holiday, and, uh,
his mother put him in her bed
so that he'd have a bed to sleep on.
She slept on the floor.
And so that saved her life, and it
and it didn't save her son's life.
So, um, that was, that was tough.
Even to this day, we
don't talk much about it just because, uh,
personally,
I don't want to ask her about it.
Um, so the bits and pieces
that I've gathered together,
I've actually read through Time magazine.
You know, she was on the cover of Time.
You know, there's a firefighter
informing her at that moment that,
uh, my brother and father were gone.
It was the blink of an eye,
really, for me.
Went from, uh,
being a big, full happy family to just
having everything taken away from us.
[narrator] The Northridge
earthquake killed 57 people.
And caused $44 billion worth of damage.
[unnerving music playing]
[narrator] It registered six point seven
on the Moment Magnitude Scale.
That scale is calibrated exponentially.
So a Magnitude One earthquake
is the equivalent of a pound of TNT.
But a Magnitude six point seven
releases 350 million times more energy.
[unnerving music swells]
[narrator] The biggest earthquake
in California's history, happened in 1906.
It destroyed 80% of San Francisco
and became known as "The Big One."
[somber music playing]
[narrator] It was
a Magnitude seven point nine.
Releasing 60 times more energy
than the quake at Northridge.
It's only a matter of time
before LA experiences
its own "Big One."
New building codes are designed
to protect the city's infrastructure
from such a disaster.
Where we're standing now
is the very east end approach of the,
new viaduct that's being constructed.
This bridge
is designed and built to account
for a seismic event up
to a 1000-year capacity.
[jackhammer rumbling]
If there was an earthquake,
the movement would be, uh,
absorbed by the bearings that have
been installed on this bridge structure.
These bearings
are allowed to move up to 30 inches
in any direction in a seismic event.
Never been done before.
[Andrea] Los Angeles
is a very shattered landscape.
In all of California, the most
complex in terms of all the faults.
There is a fault in Hollywood.
There's a fault called
the Raymond Hill. Fault in Pasadena area.
There's the Puente Hills Thrust Fault,
the Newport-Inglewood Fault,
the Elysian Park Fault.
it goes on, and on, and on.
The San Jacinto Fault, San Andreas Fault.
So, there are many, many faults.
There are networks
of faults, and in some ways,
they're all connected
to be part of the same system.
[edgy music playing]
[Andrea] What we don't understand
well is, which fault is likely to rupture,
so that we're prepared for the next one.
[jackhammer banging]
[reporter] It is roughly eight hours
now after the violent earthquake
that hit Southern California.
The terrible toll
is just now becoming apparent.
[Eric] It's not the daily occurrence
of seismic activity that scares us.
It's that once in a generation
one that scares us.
The longer we wait without one,
we kind of wonder, "Hmm.
When will that be and how bad will it be?"
[unsettling music playing]
[narrator] On the other side
of the Pacific Ocean,
Japan sits
at the junction of four different plates.
[narrator] It's the most seismically
active location in the world.
[foreboding music playing]
[narrator] Because the plates
meet offshore,
many of Japan's earthquakes happen at sea,
and bring with them
the threat of a tsunami.
[teacher in Japanese] Good morning.
[children] Good morning.
[narrator] In the region of Tohoku,
children grow up preparing for the worst.
[resounding alarm]
[narrator in English]
Learning what to do in an earthquake,
but also any tsunami that follows.
[woman in Japanese] A drill. A drill.
- [alarm blares]
- [helicopter rotors rumbling]
[woman in Japanese] Mega tsunami warning.
Please evacuate.
I repeat. Emergency, emergency.
[boy] I was born in 2011.
That year there was a big tsunami
caused by the Tohoku earthquake.
If you get washed away by a tsunami,
you can't see your family
anymore and you can't go to school.
I think tsunamis are scary
because earthquakes
and tsunamis can destroy houses.
Also, people die.
So I think they are very scary.
[somber music playing]
[deep crash and rumbling]
[indistinct screaming]
[stark music playing]
[man] The magnitude
of the earthquake was nine point zero.
It was the most powerful
earthquake ever recorded in Japan.
This is the Pacific Ocean.
Offshore, the Pacific plate
is moving towards us
from America
at a speed of eight cm per year.
It is sinking under
the Japanese Archipelago,
which is getting
caught on top of it like this.
Over time, it becomes
increasingly strained
until it rebounds
and there's an earthquake.
[narrator] The epicenter of the earthquake
was 70 miles off the Tohoku coast.
It released 3000 times more energy
than the Northridge quake in 1994.
The ocean floor rose
by 30 feet in a matter of seconds.
A huge bulge
of water spread in every direction.
This was the tsunami.
[Kenji] The speed of a tsunami
depends on the depth of the water.
Where it's very deep in
the open sea, it's as fast as a jet plane.
But as it gets closer to the shore,
it slows down.
And as it slows down, the waves keep
coming and it grows larger and larger.
[indistinct shouting]
[Kenji] "Tsunami" means "Tsu" and "Nami."
"Tsu" is a place where the sea
is shallow and "nami" is a wave.
[water gushing]
[man] The earthquake was around 02:45 p.m.
The fire station was over there,
near the embankment.
And I got there
a couple of minutes before 03:00 p.m.
[siren wails]
[man] Hurry up and get out!
[Yuchi] There
was still one person evacuating.
[melodic music playing]
[Yuchi] By the time he got
to the sea wall on his bike,
the water level was rising rapidly.
[man] It's coming over the wall!
[indistinct talking over boat intercom]
Unlike a movie, where
there's a tidal wave like this,
here the water kept flowing in,
constantly getting higher and higher.
[siren wails]
[Yuchi] When I saw that,
I thought it was over.
I'd be swallowed by the wave and die.
So I ran to the fire truck.
[man] Go!
[man] Let's get on!
[man] This is a disaster alert.
[man] Go! Hurry.
[Yuchi] I was filming from the beginning.
But being in a position
of disaster prevention,
that was an inappropriate move.
- [first man] It's over the wall!
- [second man] No! It's over the wall.
It's over the wall!
[Yuchi] If I survived this,
people would be able to see the footage.
That's the feeling I had inside.
That's why I kept on filming.
[serious music playing]
I was driving, and the car
in front of me got caught in traffic,
so I had to stop.
The water level was still
low on the surface of the road,
and I imagined
it would start receding soon.
I didn't feel like I was in danger.
[serious music continues]
[Yu] The person in front
of me got out of his car.
He then rushed back
to close the door and ran off.
Within a few seconds,
my car was surrounded
by the tsunami and was out of control.
I'd missed my chance to escape.
At that moment
I realized that this was serious.
My life was in danger.
[troubled music playing]
[Yu] Then I saw
a person in front of me
who was trapped in a black car.
He later broke the window
and got out onto the car roof.
[creaking and crunching]
[urgent music playing]
The sea had risen to this level,
so I thought this is the tsunami,
and I started running.
People standing over there must
have thought, "Why is she running?"
I was running and shouting, "Quickly!"
- [shouting]
- [Akiko] Quickly!
[Akiko] The tsunami was right behind me
and I was worried
I wouldn't make it in time.
[panicked shouting]
[Akiko] I thought
I'd be safe if I got to the hill.
[screaming and shouting]
[Akiko] But I realized I was in the water.
I didn't know how.
- [water gushing]
- [vehicles thudding]
[Yu] I used to think about
death sometimes in the bath,
and when I'd go to bed,
I'd be scared about it.
But at that moment,
when I had death right in front of me,
I accepted it.
The car started moving
backwards towards a storage unit
and into debris.
Water came gushing in
from the window that I had opened.
So I grabbed the window frame
and pulled myself out.
Then, I felt my hand breaking the surface.
I thought, "Oh, it's right there,"
and my face popped out.
I'd made it. I was
literally seconds away from death.
For a moment,
I thought I was going to die,
and soon after that I passed out.
When I came to,
I was near that building by the hill.
And then I saw
our shuttle bus floating by the hill.
I climbed on top of its tire.
Then the water stopped for a moment.
And I escaped onto the hill.
This is what happened after the video.
I am alive. [giggles]
- [deep rumbling and crushing]
- [sad piano music playing]
[shouting]
[Yuchi] The sight of a tsunami that size,
smashing houses as it moves.
[sad piano music continues]
[Yuchi] It was something
beyond human understanding.
[indistinct shouting]
I will never forget it.
[sad music fades]
[solemn music playing]
[narrator] Almost 20,000 people died
as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.
More than half of them were elderly.
Leaving loved ones behind,
to process the grief.
My dear, oh my dear.
It's been a while.
[exhales loudly]
[woman] Many people spin the dial
and talk into the handset.
Of course the line isn't connected,
so you can't hear anything
or have a real conversation,
but this simulated experience helps them
remember those they have lost.
- It's a trigger for them to talk.
- [man whimpers]
I waited for you all night,
but you never came home.
[sighs]
[moving music playing]
It can take a very long time
to come to terms
with what you've actually lost.
[whimpers] I miss you so much.
[inhales sharply]
Thank you.
[sniffs]
[moving music continues]
[man] I pray at the Buddhist shrine
with my hands together every day,
but when I come here,
I feel the joy
and comfort of talking to her directly.
It's a feeling I can hardly express.
[ethereal music with gong tone plays]
[narrator in English] Over time,
Japan has lost at least 130,000 lives
to tsunamis.
[spooky music playing]
[narrator] The Japanese have the most
detailed tsunami records in the world.
Stretching back over a 1000 years.
But there's one
tsunami that doesn't fit the mold.
A seismological mystery
with implications for millions of people.
[Kenji in Japanese] This is the Morioka
Domain's Book on Miscellaneous Subjects,
the official record of this area.
It says that at midnight
on January 27, 1700,
a tsunami occurred
in a place called Kuwagasaki.
As a result, 20 houses burned down
and 13 houses were washed away.
[narrator in English] The
strange thing about this tsunami,
is there's no record
of an earthquake at the time.
So it's known as an orphan tsunami.
It must've been triggered by a
seismic event beyond the coast of Japan.
[spooky music fades]
[narrator in English]
In 1960, a massive earthquake in Chile
caused a tsunami to cross
the Pacific and reach Japan.
Might something
similar have happened in 1700?
[waves crashing]
[curious music playing]
[Kenji in Japanese] We didn't know where
this tsunami had come from.
There was no record
of an earthquake anywhere in the world.
We wanted to find out where it was.
[narrator in English] The solution
to this puzzle lies not in Japan
but back on the other side of the ocean,
in North America.
[calm guitar music playing]
There is no written record
of an earthquake in January 1700.
But there is a legend,
passed down by the Quinault people
of the Pacific Northwest.
[speaking Quinault]
[in English] Long time ago,
the world would shake,
the ground would shake,
and the ocean would,
would be rough
and the waves would hit the shore.
And what was happening
was the Thunderbird, Xanissah,
he would leave his lair
and he would go out over the sea.
He would look for the biggest whale.
And then he would pick that whale up
and he would fly high up
into the sky towards the mountain
and when he got there,
he would drop that whale
and that whale would hit the land so hard
- [loud thud]
- [screech]
[Guy] that it would shake
and cause an earthquake.
And that's our story
of where the earthquake is from.
It's from Xanissah, the Thunderbird.
[deep mystical music playing]
[Guy] I mean, over time, I believe
that there's been many earthquakes
that have hit our coastline here.
And that Thunderbird and Whale story, um,
the interaction of those two
is what causes that every time.
That's what we believe.
[crow caws]
[narrator] While some look to legend,
others look for evidence.
If there was an earthquake here
in 1700, it should've left telltale signs,
somewhere among the trees.
[woman] All of these trees
are actually what we would call subfossil.
Which means they're not yet fossilized
but they're dead
and downed for many hundreds of years.
And so, these really charismatic pieces
of evidence for past landscapes
are one of the first indicators
that something dramatic
must have occurred in this area.
In the mud and the sediment
that covers the roots of these trees,
we can actually look with a microscope and
find these little critters called diatoms.
So, diatoms are little bugs
in the ocean that have a shell,
and some like to live
really close to the surface of the ocean
and other types of diatoms
like to live underneath more water,
closer to the bottom of the ocean.
And the diatoms
that we find right above that soil
that these trees are rooted in,
like to live in about
six feet of water or even more.
[lively music playing]
[Jessie] So, what we're talking about
is that the whole land subsided
under at least six feet of salt water,
killing the trees
and then depositing those diatoms.
And really,
the only thing that could do that,
that could cause that much subsidence
along the coast, is a massive earthquake.
Trees are these incredible data recorders,
and each
and every year they put on a growth ring.
And we can utilize the pattern
of those growth rings to determine
when these trees died.
And what's incredible about
this ghost forest and other ghost forests
along the coast of Washington and Oregon
is that all of these trees
died at the same time.
Their final ring was the year 1699,
and this tree did
not grow in the year 1700.
So, somewhere between the fall
and winter of 1699
and in the spring of 1700,
this massive event must have occurred.
And that very tight
time frame overlaps perfectly
with the orphan tsunami
that we see in Japan.
And the real ringer here then,
is the trees themselves,
because they had the code,
that barcode that helped us date the
event that allowed us to tie it to Japan.
[cool guitar music playing]
[Jessie] This is why I love my job.
I get to be a detective who figures out
what happened here 300 years ago.
[narrator] A cold case solved.
The orphan tsunami and ghost forest,
were created by the same event.
Immortalized by Native American legend.
[mysterious music playing]
A Magnitude Nine earthquake
along a fault between the
North American and Juan de Fuca plates.
This fault has a name: Cascadia.
[bleak music playing]
[narrator] If a similar sized
earthquake struck today,
it would devastate the Pacific Northwest.
But how likely is that?
If it's happened before,
could it happen again?
This laboratory contains
samples of sediment drilled
from the seabed, under the Cascadia Fault.
[man] The reason we take these core
samples is to look back in the past
and see what the frequency
of earthquakes has been over time.
Since we can't predict earthquakes,
the best thing we can do is make forecasts
based on probabilities
that we've derived from the past.
The cores
are typically six to eight meters long
but we cut it into meter
and a half chunks for storage.
We can reassemble them, so we have
the complete picture of that sample.
In this core, there's a record
of layer upon layer upon layer
of events in the deep sea,
like tree rings or like a tape recorder.
Just everything that took
place over that time, thousands of years.
And we get up toward the top of the core,
we see a significant event up at the top.
This is the layer
that was laid down by the 1700 earthquake.
Goes from about there to there,
with a little bit
of sediment just sitting on top.
But this layer from
the 1700 earthquake is not alone.
It's not unique.
We have the ability now
to collect thousands of years
of layer upon layer upon layer.
A total of 46 earthquakes,
uh, we think are represented in this core.
About 20 very large ones,
and about 26 smaller sizes.
[curious music playing]
[narrator] When the Magnitude
Nine earthquakes at Cascadia
are averaged across time,
it turns out
they occur once every 430 years.
[Chris] We have an average, but
that's just an average. It's statistics.
We have intervals that are much,
much closer together, 200 years or so.
And we have
several more that are, uh, 1200 years.
So, this could be,
either good news or bad news.
We could be looking at a
1200 year interval to the next,
really, big earthquake.
And, uh, but on the other hand,
we could be well overdue.
We could be looking at, uh,
an interval that ends today.
The one thing that we can be certain of,
is that after this many earthquakes
repeated over thousands of years,
that the next earthquake is inevitable.
It's coming. It's just a matter of when.
[pressing music playing]
[narrator] In the last 100 years,
there have been
only five Magnitude Nine earthquakes,
- anywhere in the world.
- [unnerving music building]
- [music breaks]
- [sad violin music playing]
[narrator] Cascadia
has the potential to be the next.
And if that happens, the Quinault
people would be in the firing line
living at the edge of the ocean.
[Guy] We've always gone to sleep
with the sound
of the wave coming to shore.
And, uh, you know, science has told us,
and history of our own has told us that
the earthquake
and tidal wave will come here again.
[waves crashing loudly]
[Guy] And when that tidal wave comes,
it's going to change things drastically.
I mean, it could be catastrophic here.
So that forces us to think outside of
our traditional view of where we put our,
our homes and villages and
you know, now we're looking at,
moving our people up on the hill.
The logistics of that is huge.
We have to look at the best science,
we have to look at our traditions,
and understand
that this is going to happen.
[sad piano music playing]
The Native Americans have legends
about the 1700 earthquake
that have been passed down.
But for the rest of us,
who've essentially moved
in since the last earthquake,
we're completely clueless.
[foreboding music playing]
[Chris] In a place like Portland,
it's not the big tall skyscrapers
that are built
with building codes that are the problem.
We have a huge number of four, five
six story unreinforced masonry buildings
that simply weren't
constructed to withstand earthquakes.
It really doesn't take very much shaking
for those buildings to come apart.
They'll probably be heavily damaged,
so there will be a lot of casualties.
[narrator] According to
the Emergency Management Agency,
a million buildings could be compromised
by a major Cascadia earthquake.
There could be 13,000 deaths,
and twice as many injuries.
Potentially the worst
natural disaster in US history.
I don't enjoy being, uh,
the prophet of doom,
and bringing bad news all the time.
Uh, people, uh, don't want to hear
these messages for the most part.
I don't want
to hear them either, for that matter but
it's our reality
and it's our job as scientists,
really, to bring this out
and let people know what reality is,
and then it's up to society
to decide what to do about that.
[ominous ticking music playing]
[Chris] When I look
at a city like Portland,
it's hard for me
to not see piles of rubble everywhere.
Most people don't see it that way,
don't think of it that way.
And it's a bit of a curse to be able
to just look out and see that future.
[narrator] The danger is not confined
to the Pacific Northwest.
Off the coast of Northern California,
the Cascadia Fault connects
with the San Andreas Fault.
And over the last 3000 years,
the timing of earthquakes
on both faults has been so similar,
they appear to be in sync with each other.
[Chris] This is kind
of a startling and stunning thing.
It implies that one fault may have
influenced or triggered the other.
Perhaps a few months later
or days or weeks.
We see this in geology
in other places around the world,
but I don't think anyone
had ever considered that this might
actually happen here with a
mega thrust earthquake
and a giant San Andreas earthquake,
more or less at the same time.
[resounding alarm]
[Chris] The entire West Coast is
living under the shadow of "The Big One"
that lies in our future.
[calm piano music playing]
[Guy] We believe that nature
has a mind of its own.
That the movements of the Earth
will occur whether we know it or not.
And in certain times
in our existence, there's earthquakes.
Those things will repeat themselves.
That's what we've grown to accept.
You know, it's been that way
for us since the beginning of time.
[menacing closing theme music playing]
Subtitle translation by: Antoinette Smit