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Nearly half the population is vulnerable to shaking and damage due to earthquakes, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

New earthquake building codes have been issued through executive order at the federal level, and an early warning system is in advanced testing in California, Oregon, and Washington. But the Pacific Northwest is not the only area at risk. The U.S. Geological Survey issued a report last year saying upwards of 143 million people in the 48 contiguous states could be exposed to damage caused by an earthquake, with the top 10 susceptible states being California, Wash- ington, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Missouri, and Illinois. “This is finally putting the engineering quality in the forefront. Engineers have felt that LEED has always lacked a vital component – resiliency. It’s not enough to be environmentally friendly. It has to last.” National awareness of resiliency, or lack thereof, was trig- gered by storms, not earthquakes. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 killed more than 1,200 people, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused around $75 billion in damage. Regionally, Oklahoma is dealing with resiliency as the state has been See SALUS RESILIENCE, page 8

Also playing into the emergence of the resiliency market is the state of U.S. infrastructure, Pyrch says. Much of it needs to be rebuilt, and when it is, new seismic and envi- ronmental standards like those advocated by USRC and US- GBC will likely come to the forefront, Pyrch says. According to the 2013 infrastructure report compiled by the Ameri- can Society of Civil Engineers, the nation’s overall grade is a D-plus across 16 infrastructure segments, and to improve that grade, the ASCE estimates that upwards of $3.6 trillion needs to be invested by 2020. A 2015 article that appeared in The New Yorker spread fear throughout the Pacific Northwest. Titled “The Really Big One,” the article detailed the potential of the Cascadia Sub- duction Zone, which runs for 700 miles from mid-Vancou- ver Island to Northern California, to bring devastation to the region. Overdue for a quake, the Cascadia is large enough to un- leash a tsunami, much like the one that crashed against Ja- pan in 2011, killing about 16,000 people, and touching off the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant. “We’ve been saying that for years, but once it’s in The New Yorker , everyone believes it,” Pyrch says, referencing the heightened interest in earthquake assessment along the West Coast.

rch 14, 2016, ISSUE 1143

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