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In Neskowin, Kathleen Clark got a terrifyingly complete view of the entire tsunami cycle from the front window of a vacation rental she was staying in with her brother and boyfriend. Recounting the story to The Oregonian’s Lori Tobias, Clark said they had the window open and were enjoying the sounds of the surf when suddenly those sounds went away. The three young people looked at each other, baffled, then got up and looked out toward the sea. The moonlight was shining on a vast expanse of wet sand. The ocean had retreated, literally beyond the reach of their sight in the moonlight. “And then as we were watching, there was this wall of water coming at us,” Clark told Tobias. “Just a straight wall. Like the ocean had become vertical. It was a tremendous roar coming in. The water came into the little yard out front. We were just flabbergasted, just frozen in place. If the wave had been a foot higher, I bet it would have taken out the plate glass window.”
ALL TOLD, THE earthquake and tsunami dealt out $2.8 billion (in 2022 dollars) in damage, and killed 136 people. But scientists quickly figured out it could have been worse. A lot worse. The majority of the tsunami deaths in 1964 were from communities near the epicenter, in Alaska. There, waves hundreds of feet high slammed into the beaches within a few minutes of the earthquake that launched them. Most Oregon beaches got a far smaller, more attenuated version of the wave, arriving hours later. That wasn’t the case in the year 1700, though. In that year, the epicenter of the quake was right off the Oregon coast, in what we today call the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Waves hundreds of feet high came ashore within 15 minutes of the quake, and washed entire villages out to sea. Sections of land dropped dozens of feet in an instant; off Neskowin there is an entire “ghost forest” of stumps from trees that, snapped off in the 1700 tsunami and plunged below the sea level by the slumping land beneath, were drowned and preserved in the surf. Visitors can wander among them at low tide today. Scientists say similar earthquakes happen relatively regularly off the coast … on the average, every several hundred years. Scientists are currently estimating there’s a 37 percent chance one will strike sometime in the next 50 years. With that in mind, today Oregon has two tsunami warning systems: One for faraway events that send waves around the world, and one for the bigger, deadlier local kind. But the best advice is the most intuitive: If the ground shakes, and you’re on the beach, get off it as quickly as you can and get to high ground!
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