Fear that climate change may make Earth uninhabitable by 2100 could spur cities into action?or make people feel hopeless In 2015, a New Yorker story by Kathryn Schulz entitled ?The Really Big One? spelled out, in paralyzing detail, what will happen when a very large earthquake strikes along the Cascadia subduction zone?the Pacific Northwest fault line that?s the only fault line in the continental U.S. capable of producing a 9.0 magnitude quake.
?Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast,? was one of the lines from the story that seemed engineered for wide distribution on social media, as were statistics like this:
FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. Schulz?s article scared people?Curbed Seattle, in fact, asked its readers ?Did The New Yorker's Earthquake Article Scare the Crap Out of You or What"??but the response that followed the article moved quickly beyond fear and into action.
A wave of public conversations addressed the region?s preparedness and local news outlets spun the story into opportunities for education. In perhaps the most telling indicator of the story?s impact, earthquake kits flew off shelves, with a prominent online seller reporting the company sold a m...