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up and down the West Coast - the article to friends Chapter 7 Practice, practice, practice In July 2015, The New Yorker published an article that got attention up and down the West Coast of the United States.1 I live just outside of Seattle, and I remember emailing the article to friends just as it was arriving in my inbox from other friends. It became a regular source of dinner-table conversation that summer. The headline on the article was, "The Really Big One: An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when." The author, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist named Kathryn Schulz, explained that a huge stretch of coastline, from Canada into Washington state, Oregon, and northern California, sits near what's known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Cascadia is a fault hundreds of miles long beneath the Pacific, where two tectonic plates meet and one is sliding underneath the other. Subduction zones are inherently unstable and tend to cause earthquakes. Seismologists figure that massive earthquakes occur along the Cascadia zone an average of every 243 years, and that the last one occurred around 1700. The 243-year average is debated, and Cascadia may go much longer than that between two quakes, but reading the article, none of us locals could dismiss the fact that the last Cascadia quake happened more than 315 years ago. The article cited horrific projections: A Cascadia quake, and the tsunami that would result from it, could kill nearly 13,000 people, injure 27,000 more, and displace a million people from