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Perhaps you read the terrifying 2010 story in WW predicting an earthquake that would hit Portland with “a strength, duration and destruction never before experienced in the developed Western world.” Or maybe you caught the equally scary piece in The New Yorker titled “The Really Big One,” that quoted a Federal Emergency Management Agency guy saying that “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
Both stories said the quake could come as soon as RIGHT NOW.
If you feel hopeless, there’s something you can do: Play a video game. Not any video game. One called Cascadia 9.0, which simulates what’s going to happen when the North American tectonic plate snaps westward along an approximately 700-mile fault line following years of built-up pressure caused by the Juan de Fuca plate slowly wedging its way under it.
A team at Lewis & Clark College developed the game to clue in young adults to the inevitable catastrophe that somehow still seems so abstract as to be meaningless. Players find themselves in a destroyed city looking for their dog, Tsu (short for Tsunami). Think of it as The Last of Us, but without zombies. Water is tainted, gas lines are leaking, aftershocks roil the wreckage.
Good times, for sure. But a massive earthquake is far more likely than a zombie apocalypse, so why not learn something useful while you’re gaming? When the big one hits, you have to find something to hide under (hold down the “C” key on your laptop to crouch). After that, it’s a quest for water, warmth and a place to poop (hint: You have to construct a two-bucket toilet system).
If our performance in Cascadia 9.0 is any indication, we’re toast when the Cascadia subduction zone does its full rip. We played the game three times before getting past level one, where the player’s job is to get underneath something when the house starts to shake, then turn off the gas. After three gas explosions, we figured it out. Our teenage kids would do better (we hope).
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2023 here!