When the only thing between you and death is you

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Say you are residents of Oregon, a state in the US Pacific Northwest facing a magnitude 9.0 earthquake just off its coast. Aftershocks will likely be around magnitude 8.0 with a 60′ tsunami hitting the shore first thing.

Nothing has ever happened like that to Oregon. Some began thinking seriously about this earthquake and its aftermath only a decade or so ago. Thinking about the infrastructure interconnectivities within a regional focus is even more recent. People talk about the more recent spate of snowstorms, fires, flooding and heat dome effects as “eye-openers and wake-up calls” than as sources from which lessons are to be learned. According to the experts, emergency management is itself a relatively new profession and organizational priority there.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that key resources, like electricity generation and regional transmission, are on the eastern side of the state. But that too is at jeopardy if instead of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake off the coast, we are talking about, say, a massive geomagnetic storm like the Carrington Event of 1859. That too can happen and take out a much wider swathe of electric and telecom assets.

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What to do in response to these prospects of “earth-shattering” events?

One thing is: “get out of Dodge.” But then do you know what’s in store when you arrive somewhere you’ve never have been? That even the state’s infrastructure operators aren’t fleeing like mad indicates people’s preferences for known unknowns over unknown unknowns.

Known unknowns, after all, can be cast in the form of scenarios, and scenarios can be more or less detailed. Restoring water, electricity, telecoms and roads after the earthquake will be an immediate priority once saving lives is underway. We imagine the known unknown called the unimaginable all the time.

And the second we try to anticipate the unimaginable–that is, prepare for it–the preparedness scenarios beg to become granularized for now, not some other time. Operating in the blind during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which had a major impact on European history, is quite different than operating blind in the Cascadia one and its aftermaths.

Your scenarios are what separate you from unstudied/unstudiable conditions. “Humans can only really know that which they create,” as the older insight has it.