From Heartless Libertarian:

While all of the disaster talk over the last week or so has concentrated on the coming of hurricane season, earlier this week I was a (very minor) participant in PACIFIC PERIL, a disaster exercise centered on a potential earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest-northern California, Oregon, Washington, and parts of British Columbia, mainly Vancouver Island.

I must say that in a lot of ways the whole thing was a bit disappointing-the primary focus was on the tsunami and what it would do to the coast, not so much the effects of the quake on the major urban areas further inland. The other disappointing part was how little of the exercise I was able to actually see. I was part of the Defense Coordinating Element (DCE), responsible for coordinating responses to state requests for assistance from the DoD. Which means we had very little visibility on the big picture, especially infrastructure damage.

That being said, I did learn some interesting stuff. The effects of a major Cascadia Subduction Zone quake-the exercise was modeled on a 9.0 (smaller than the 9.4 quake in Chile in 1960, the 9.2 1964 Alaska quake, and the 9.3 Sumatra quake in 2004)-could be devastating, and depending on the timing of such a quake/tsunami combo, the death toll could outstrip Katrina by far. Looking at the tsunami evacuation area maps, some coastal communities, such as Ocean Shores, WA, and Seaside, OR, would pretty much be wiped off the map, and in many others only a few structures might be left standing. Warning time between the earthquake and the first tsunami wave would vary from as little as 10 minutes on some parts of the Oregon coast to a max of 30-35 minutes. The worst case scenario would be for the quake and tsunami to hit in the winter, in bad weather (temp low-mid 30s, wind and rain, quite common in the area), not too long after nightfall. Thousands of people forced from their homes to escape the tsunami, now cold, wet, and with little or no shelter from the elements. Large numbers would die from hypothermia. And that doesn't count those killed by the tsunami itself.