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Data Sources: Participants in operating the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network include: Please email suggestions and comments to webmaster@ess.washington.edu March 3, 2008  BROOKINGS (AP) — Oregon Civil Air Patrol planes equipped with loudspeakers will help warn coastal residents if a tsunami heads their way. On a recent test run, pilot Scott Bakker used a tiny MP3 player hooked to a powerful speaker aboard a Cessna 337 Skymaster to see how far a warning message could be heard. It wasn't long before Bakker got a response. "I could hear everything you said," Curry County sheriff's Capt. Dennis Dinsmore said over the radio from his office. The loudspeaker can be heard from up to 3 miles away at 1,000 or more feet above ground. Within 20 minutes, Bakker says, he or one of the other handful of pilots trained to fly the Skymaster or its speaker-equipped counterpart, a Cessna 182 Skylane, can be airborne en route to a half-dozen population centers from Coos Bay to Eureka, Calif. The warning goes like this: "Attention, attention. This is an official warning. A tsunami is imminent. Go to high ground." Bakker and the other pilots with the U.S. Air Force auxiliary unit, the Civil Air Patrol, are supplied with pagers from the Curry County sheriff's office, linked to the county's tsunami warning system. When the pagers go off, the pilots head to the airport. In rural areas such as the south coast, where Curry County's 15 operational stationary sirens are sporadic and people might not be listening to their radios or watching television, Bakker's planes may be the first to warn thousands of people. "It's going to help us immensely," said Mike Brace, emergency coordinator for the Curry County Emergency Services Department. "As far as we know, it's one of a kind on the coast. Its a great leg in the stool, with the airplane, tsunami sirens and radio stations, to get as many venues as we can to get the alert out to people," Brace said. The idea came about after a phone call in December 2006 from Spencer Kim, who was desperately looking for his son James, stranded in the Rogue River wilderness in December 2006 with his wife and their two daughters. James Kim died of hypothermia after hiking away from his family to look for help. By the time Spencer Kim hired a private helicopter and another volunteer searcher spotted the rest of his family, his son was dead, if only for a few hours. The elder Kim had wanted Bakker's help, as commander of the local Civil Air Patrol. But there was nothing Bakker could do. "The Air Force told us to stand down," Bakker said. Bakker wonders whether things might have been different if he'd been free to use the Civil Air Patrol's planes without a request from authorities. So he formed a nonprofit group, the Guardians from Above, that operates with its own budget and can act independently of an official order. The last time anyone died in Oregon and Northern California from a tsunami was in 1964, when the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska created a tsunami that killed 12 people in Crescent City, Calif., and four on the Oregon Coast. - Now contrast that with OFFICIAL ANNOUCEMENTS - Earthquake off Coos Bay just a blip in the ocean Earthquakes rattled the Pacific Ocean's Ring of Fire this weekend. One quake was off the coast of Oregon, due west of Coos Bay. The 5.6 magnitude quake occurred at 5:05 a.m. Saturday about 160 miles offshore, according to an alert from the National Earthquake Information Center. The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center issued a notice that a tsunami was not expected. At 5:42 a.m. Sunday, the center said, a 5.2 magnitude quake struck 220 miles northwest of Nome, Alaska. No tsunami was generated by that quake, either. OSU professor shows link between San Andreas, Cascadia faults Chris Goldfinger finds Oregon and northern California are overdue for major earthquake Although living on the West Coast means individuals don't have to deal with hurricanes, blizzards or tornadoes, there is one natural disaster that people have to be ready for at a moment's notice: earthquakes. To many, earthquakes have been deemed the most unpredictable natural disaster of all. However, new research done by Chris Goldfinger, an associate professor of marine geology at OSU, might allow scientists to better understand earthquakes and even predict when and where earthquakes will occur. Goldfinger's research is being published in the April issue of the Bulletin of Seismological Society of America. The research was conducted with a team of geologists from the University of California, Berkeley and other universities across the country, and it focuses on studying the past to predict the future. "Since we can't predict [earthquakes], one of the tools we have to understand how faults work over time is to look at past earthquakes," Goldfinger said. Goldfinger's work has focused specifically on two major fault lines on the west coast: the San Andreas Fault, which runs from the Gulf of California to Cape Mendicino, and the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs north from Cape Mendicino to British Columbia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Goldfinger's team studied the fault lines by observing underwater geological deposits from past earthquakes. Because the southern part of the San Andreas Fault is on land, the team conducted its research specifically on the northern San Andreas and southern Cascadia fault lines. "Every time the Cascadia or San Andreas has a large earthquake, it triggers a submarine landslide along its whole length," Goldfinger said. "So it's fairly easy to go out with a ship to take core samples, find deposits and date the samples using radioactive carbon dating. "This process gives us a time and place of past earthquakes for the last 10,000 years. If we do this in one spot, we can get a 10,000-year record from that spot, but if we do it along a whole fault line, we can tell how big the earthquake was and whether it ruptured along the whole length of the fault or just part of it." The team unearthed more than just random earthquake history though. Their data showed some striking similarities between the two fault lines.
Virginia Simson is a spiritual journalista/activist who runs a visionary planetary tutorial blogspot, www.ladybroadoak.blogspot.com as well as a blog on the uranium industry and depleted uranium at www.lowlevelradiation.blogspot.com. She feels that we must educate the young as to the real issues of the day - economics, clean energy, a drug free lifestyle, friendship and concern for the environment. We must plan for seven generations in the future. She unconditionally supports impeachment and a war crimes tribunal of the current DC administration - including CONgress.
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