Waiting for the Big One: What Duwamish Taught Us About Earthquakes

“In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.” So Pioneer Henry Smith recalled the words of Chief Seattle, translated on Seattle’s waterfront during the cold, clear Thursday morning of January 12, 1854. Seattle was saying that so many of his Duwamish people had lived here for so long that they were literally part of the living landscape. The white man would never be alone.

The longer we live here and the more we learn about this place, the more those words become freighted with meaning. And the more we hear ancient Duwamish voices.

In December, 1992, five articles published by geologists Brian Atwater and Allan Moore in Science magazine, announced the discovery of the Seattle Fault, a narrow zone of faults reaching from the Olympics across Seattle and Lake Washington to Lake Sammamish and the Cascades. In a terrible few minutes sometime between the month of October, 923 AD and March, 924, land south of the fault parallelling today’s Interstate-90 rose as much as 20 feet. Land to the north dropped three feet.

The discovery was a shock and a wake-up call. If that quake happened today, the damage and death toll would be cataclysmic. A 2019 Post-Intelligencer article marveled that the quake had gone undiscovered for a millennium. But the Duwamish knew about it only too well and had shared their knowledge. A rock in the fault zone on the beach at Fauntleroy Cove was said to be so dangerous that even looking in its direction risked having one’s head twisted on one’s neck. All along the zone, from Hood Canal to Lake Sammamish, large boulders and place names warned of danger.

https://www.postalley.org/2024/03/26/waiting-for-the-big-one-what-duwamish-taught-us-about-earthquakes/