Results tagged “earthquakes”

The SR 520 reopened to traffic this morning, after a weekend closure for transportation crews and the floating bridge's annual inspection. Visitors saw firsthand the impact of 120,000 daily vehicles after peering into the big, hollow concrete pontoons that are holding up the aging bridge. While crews patched 520's cracks, the question continues to loom over the bridge's longevity, especially in the event of an earthquake. If anything, this inspection solidified the need for the new bridge, which is expected to open in 2014--although it will come at the cost of pricy tolls on the 520, expected to begin next fall.

Sounders FC tries to break a two-game winless streak when "San Jose" comes to town Saturday night. Here's a little primer about our opponent whatever happens to pop into our heads.

Speculation abounded when Charles posted about a recent study showing what would happen to Seattle if a 9.0 quake hit us. The Space Needle was called out as an icon that wouldn't go down. Seattlest's dad is the resident earthquake-and-volcanoes disaster geologist in the family, so we asked for the truth. We were told to consult the disaster flick 10.5, a made for TV turd movie starring Kim Delany (you know, from CSI: Miami, or Law and Order, or, gasp, the OC!). It opens with an Extreme! urban mountain biker evading the quake (because you know, earthquakes chase people--but he was wearing a helmet, safety first!), and ultimately the Needle. Dad uses this clip as a joking intro to a University of Utah disaster course, where the students model disasters like a 9.0 quake hitting Seattle, or a sudden lahar wiping out Orting (where our in-laws live, har). Check it out for yourself:

Seattlest has been through our fair share of earthquakes, and while Jonathan Raban's book Surveillance gave us a quivering reminder of the Nisqually quake, we understood the optimism inherent in his ending. Seattle is still there; shaken, likely forever changed, but still there. We know quakes can be insanely devastating, but they don't scare us nearly as much as what we discovered in grad school in central Illinois: tornadoes and wind storms. The first time we set foot in the plains outside Champaign-Urbana, we were gripped with a paralyzing terror that we would simply float up off the planet, untethered by mountains, water...hell, even a small hill would have helped. Our brain would conjure far-off mountain ranges from cloud formations, and we would engage in the explicit delusion that they were indeed there, comforting us with their solidity, mass, and means of escaping the never ending flatness. We lasted a mere three and a half years there, and ran screaming back to the West Coast.

It's got AM and FM radio, a flashlight, a siren, multiple phone chargers, hand-crank recharging and a motherfucking earthquake detector! It's from Japan so maybe it detects Japanese earthquakes, but it could still be useful here as a tsunami detector. Either way it's cool.

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Londonist prepares a Happy Birthday bath for Buddah this week and then things get all cliched. A madman goes on a rampage while axe-wiedling and London's mayor warns an American diplomat to avoid the kitchen if the heat bothers him so much.

DCist helps us make more sense of the world this week. Posts like this concert review are the reason for Scott Stapp. DCist also enumerates the reasons for playing ultimate frisbee, Condi’s tight buns, their love of a local convenience store, and their jealousy of a person in Seattle calling the city.

It's the time of year when Europe's soccer teams come across the Atlantic to warm up for the coming season by knocking a few of our teams around. Hey, as long as they're in town, might as well hold it at the stadium and sell a few thousand tickets to starved fans and have the annual go at the impenetrable nut that is the American soccer audience.

Seattlest may not be convinced that there's any good reason to leave our fair city -- but at least we can rest assured that we've got a modern and easy-to-use airport to assist us in our travels when necessary.

Events this past Saturday night had astronomists, seismologists, public utility watchers, and conspiracy theorists well occupied. Seattlest feels bad for those individuals that belong to two or more of those...

Three small earthquakes off of Vancouver Island Monday morning were fortuitously timed to coincide with the Seattle Fault Earthquake Scenario Conference in Bellevue. Of course the Vancouver Island quakes were nowhere near the magnitude the conference was discussing.