Now Is a Really Bad Time for the Really Big One

There is never a good time for an earthquake. But as President Donald Trump and his government efficiency guru, Elon Musk, take a buzzsaw to the federal bureaucracy, they risk discovering whether there is such a thing as an especially bad time.

The 700-mile Cascadia Subduction Zone runs off the Pacific coast from southern British Columbia to northern California, and has been stuck for approximately the past three centuries. When the oceanic Juan de Fuca plate finally slips free to slide beneath the North American plate, it will cause what is ominously referred to as the Big One: a megathrust earthquake expected to be “one of the worst natural disasters” in the continent’s history. Scientists put the odds of it happening in the next 50 years at around 37%, with an upper threshold of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake or possibly even higher. As the Pacific Northwest’s former FEMA director once famously (albeit somewhat hyperbolically) told The New Yorker, when the Big One hits, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

Of particular concern for the low-lying Washington and Oregon coasts is that the earthquake could cause a tsunami, which in places could reach more than 100 feet high. While the United States Geological Survey monitors earthquake activity in the U.S., tsunamis are the domain of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is undergoing heavy staffing cuts courtesy of the Trump administration. The U.S. tsunami program — which includes staff at the National Weather Service and the two U.S. Tsunami Warning Centers in Alaska and Hawaii — comprises only about 50 people. So far, at least three scientists from the Warning Centers have been terminated, along with the director of the tsunami program, with more layoffs expected in the coming days.

“Tsunami is about the worst thing that can happen to a coastline,” Carrie Garrison-Laney, a tsunami hazards specialist at the University of Washington’s Sea Grant program who liaises with NOAA partners, told me. She added, “I’m concerned about the impact on public safety.”

Indeed, the layoffs add another layer of strain on a system that is already in transition. The National Tsunami Warning Center, in Palmer, Alaska, is set up to issue warnings to the entire West Coast, while the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, covers the Hawaiian Islands, the Pacific territories of Guam and American Samoa, and the Caribbean. Though the warning centers are intended to serve as backups for each other in the case of a technical glitch or disaster that knocks one of them out, they use two different, incompatible software models from the 1990s. “The current systems in place are not good,” one Washington State-based emergency manager told me.

About a year and a half ago, the Tsunami Warning Center began a $2 million unification project to update the technologies and merge the platforms onto a shared system. That project is not expected to be completed until later this year, and many in the tsunami and emergency management worlds are concerned that it could get mothballed as the Trump administration continues to deplete NOAA staff and funding. “The loss of technical personnel may delay that work,” a representative from Oregon’s Department of Emergency Management confirmed to me in a statement.

That might not be an issue for coordinating an emergency response in the short term, but the longer it’s put off the greater the risk to people living in tsunami zones. “If we’re not on the cutting edge of understanding and being able to warn people about a tsunami as it’s happening, then the greater likelihood we have of something going wrong,” Daniel Eungard, a tsunami hazards geologist at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, told me. “Then you’re looking at more casualties or more damage.”

Even worse, NOAA’s Tsunami programs were already severely understaffed before the layoffs began. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, in particular, has struggled to attract people who are willing to live on a government salary in one of the most expensive parts of the country.

Earthquakes are no-notice events, meaning they can hit with no more than a few seconds of warning. Tsunamis, as a result, don’t follow a nine-to-five schedule; the centers need to be staffed around the clock every day of the year. The Tsunami Warning Center teams were already working overtime before the added strain of Trump’s staffing cuts. Add more layoffs on top of that, and an already-small staff in charge of sending life-saving alerts faces a real risk of burnout. Oregon’s OEM also stressed that in no-notice events, quick and accurate information is imperative. Whether the NOAA layoffs will impact the quality of the warning centers’ service isn’t yet clear. (In a statement provided to Oregon’s OEM and Heatmap, the National Weather Service said that it doesn’t discuss internal personnel and management matters, but that “NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public.”)

Though planning, alerts, emergency responses, and public messaging — including evacuation maps, sirens, and signage — for tsunami disasters are primarily done at the level of states and territories, they’re almost entirely funded through the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program. Even before Trump took office, states had unsuccessfully fought back against cuts to the program — ironically, to pay for the software integration project — which reduced grants for some states and territories by up to 50%.

The tsunami experts I spoke with were uniformly alarmed by the short-sightedness of the funding cuts, a situation they don’t expect to improve under the Trump administration. “We’ve been very fortunate that we’ve had very few events of significant size and damage here, and hopefully that will stay that way,” Eungard, the tsunami hazards geologist, said. “But the likelihood is that as time continues, one such event will happen.”

NOAA, of course, isn’t the only agency in turbulence right now. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which would be tapped to respond to a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami on the West Coast, is in similar disarray. “Nobody should feel particularly assured that FEMA is coming to their assistance in your time of need," Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently told NPR. One emergency management official agreed to speak with me only off the record; when I asked whether they felt like FEMA could be counted on in the case of a near-future disaster, they scoffed. (For the time being, the USGS seems to have survived some of the probationary cuts, though its funding is also on the chopping block.)

The situation at NOAA should be a major concern for everyone who lives in a coastal region, whether it’s American Samoa, Alaska, or the Oregon Coast. An earthquake is a no-notice event for a reason; it doesn’t wait on politics, personnel, or outdated technologies to be updated, and it can strike at any time.

But for as long as the Big One holds off, Garrison-Laney, the specialist at Sea Grant, said her NOAA colleagues are in her thoughts. “It’s a group of people who work really hard and do really great work,” she told me. “There’s nothing wasteful about the work that they’re doing.”