Could It Happen in the US?

It Already Has:

Not only could a disaster like the one that hit Japan Friday happen in the United States - one already has, and could again, experts said on "The Early Show on Saturday Morning."

The magnitude-8.9 shaker spawned a tsunami that swamped large swaths of northeastern Japan, leaving devastating damage and killing hundreds.

And Dr. Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, told c-anchor Rebecca Jarvis, "Every time an event like this happens, it's a wake-up call for us here in America that we need to be prepared."

McNutt said the exact scenario that we saw happen in Japan has already occurred, in the Pacific Northwest.

"Brian Atwater, who's a specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey, has looked back into the geologic record and seen evidence that, on the 26th of January, at 9 p.m., in the year 1700, there was an earthquake that generated a tsunami ... offshore Oregon ... that was actually historically recorded in Japan," McNutt said. "It was the same magnitude as this event. It happened then. It could happen again."

 But it's a real rare event on the left coast, isn't it?

"In the Pacific Northwest, it's certainly a longer time window for the repeating of these kinds of events than it is in Japan (where events like Friday's are thought to happen once a century). It's probably more in the order of 300-to-500 years."

Let's see, 1700 + 300 equals, well, any time now.

McNutt observed that, in the U.S., "Like Japan, for decades, we have been using building codes that are up to date. And so, like Japan, I think happily we can say that modern building codes should withstand strong shaking, and strong earthquakes. But, sadly, I think what this event in Japan has shown us is that something like a wall of water that is six feet high, running six miles inland, or even higher, is something that we are equally unprepared for. And that many of the same kinds of preparedness that we're talking about in terms of hardening our communities to floods, and to sea level rise, might be the very same things we should think about accelerating in terms of preparing ourselves for tsunamis."

Actually, getting communities prepared for tsunamis is much more important than preparing for the continuation of 3 mm/year sea level rise.