Published: Wednesday, February 23, 2011, 9:02 PM Updated:
Friday, March 09, 2012, 6:25 PM Joe Rojas-Burke, The Oregonian
By Joe Rojas-Burke, The Oregonian The earthquake in
Christchurch, New Zealand rated only a magnitude 6.3 and yet
killed at least 92 people and collapsed modern, seismically
reinforced buildings because it erupted at shallow depth near
the center of a city. Portland sits on shallow faults capable of
similar destruction. “The same characteristics that caused such
destruction and so many deaths in Christchurch are similar to
those facing Portland, Seattle, parts of the Bay Area and many
other West Coast cities and towns,” says Robert Yeats, a
professor emeritus of geology at Oregon State University. He
asserts that the region needs to pay more attention to the many
shallow faults hiding beneath population centers. Disaster
preparedness in Oregon has largely focused on a different kind
of earthquakes: those from the collision of massive sections of
the earth’s crust, called tectonic plates. Fro