Of Quakes and Chemicals in Oregon : 1993 ‘Spring Break Quake’ Jolts Region Out of Its Complacency

It’s quiet now around Molalla Union High School. The building sits ghostlike and abandoned. A sign at the front of the crumbling edifice warns: “Keep Out Danger.”

Gaps in the school’s brick facade and a giant hole where the auditorium once stood are stark reminders of the day five years ago when, in the predawn darkness, the ground shook violently and sent hundreds of bricks cascading down.

“We were darn lucky kids weren’t in school that day,” said district Supt. Alice Ericksen.

Ever since that 5.6-magnitude jolt of reality that rattled hundreds of buildings and even cracked the Capitol rotunda, the state has responded with beefed-up construction codes, more earthquake safety drills and better mapping of potential earthquake zones.

At the same time, though, officials concede Oregon hasn’t made a lot of progress--except in some local instances--with the expensive task of retrofitting and strengthening existing structures.

The so-called Spring Break Quake on March 25, 1993, caused more than $30 million in damage, but no deaths or even any serious injuries--mainly because it struck at 5:30 a.m., when most people were still in bed.

But Molalla--and the rest of Oregon--might not be so lucky the next time.

Geologists say the shaker that was centered east of Scotts Mills, near Silverton and Mount Angel, was a harbinger of even bigger earthquakes that will strike the state someday.

An 8 or 9 magnitude quake-- which geologists say is in the state’s future--likely would destroy hundreds if not thousands of unreinforced brick buildings and topple hundreds of bridges throughout western Oregon.

“The risk is really very large,” said Donald Hull, Oregon’s chief state geologist. “There is no single event in Oregon’s future that will cause a larger loss of life and property value than a large regional earthquake unless we become better prepared.”

Geologists have known for years that Oregon has a long history of earthquakes, both those centered offshore as well as inland quakes like the one near Scotts Mills.

For many other people, the Scotts Mills earthquake and a 6-magnitude quake later in 1993 that struck near Klamath Falls and killed one person--a motorist hit by a falling rock--served as a frightening warning about the state’s susceptibility to seismic events.

Pamela Peterson, 49, said she still hasn’t entirely gotten over the 1993 quake that jolted her family’s house in Molalla and shifted the ground enough to snap the pipes leading from an underground water well.

“It shook us out of bed. It sounded like a jackhammer to me,” she said.

Just the other night, Peterson said, a metal railing on a stairway started clanking for no apparent reason.

“I woke up and thought, ‘Earthquake!’ It’s still a very vivid memory,” said Peterson, a mother of four who works as a secretary.

There’s no doubt that, since the Scotts Mills earthquake, many Oregon homeowners have gotten religion on the subject of earthquake insurance.

The percentage of Oregon homes covered by earthquake insurance has risen from about 2% at the time of the Spring Break Quake to about 30% now, said Marianne Macina of the Western Insurance Information Service.

Depending on the type of home construction, earthquake insurance can add anywhere from $50 to $280 a year to the cost of a homeowner’s policy, Macina said.

“People should take a look at it,” she said. “In most cases, your house payments would go on even if your house was gone. And it only takes a little bit of tilt off the foundation to declare the whole thing gone.”

In many ways, governments, too, have taken seriously the idea that the state needs to become better prepared to deal with severe earthquakes.

State laws passed since 1993 limit the construction of schools, hospitals, and police and fire stations to areas above tsunami zones, and require coastal school districts to teach children about tsunamis and to conduct regular tsunami-evacuation drills.

A statewide school earthquake drill is set for April 30 to help raise earthquake awareness around Oregon, not just at the coast.

“They’re being taught to duck, cover and hold,” said Dave Cassel of the Oregon Emergency Management office. “In other words, get under a chair or table, because light fixtures might be falling from the ceiling or books might be falling off the shelf.”

Despite the big price tag involved, many places have embarked on programs to retrofit critical facilities such as schools, hospitals and police and fire stations to make them more earthquake resistant.

The Portland School District, for example, already has completed earthquake-strengthening projects at 15 schools and plans to do 30 more in the next two years as part of a $200-million bond measure approved by voters.

“It’s a very significant effort,” said Roger McGarrigle, a structural engineer who has been advising the district on the projects. “We have taken some schools where you could just about guarantee they would collapse in an earthquake and strengthened them to today’s building code.”

The fact is, however, that many other critical facilities and structures haven’t been strengthened and are at risk of collapsing in a major quake.

That includes the Salem office building where the state’s emergency management office is located.

“In a severe earthquake, our emergency response could be stymied because the agency and the people responsible for coordinating it could be buried under rubble,” said Rep. Darlene Hooley (D-Ore.), who has been pushing Congress to approve $12 million to build a new emergency center.

The Oregon Department of Transportation has spent a total of $12 million since 1993 to do earthquake retrofits of about 60 bridges, including the Marquam Bridge in Portland.

That leaves about 1,500 bridges around western Oregon that are still in need of at least some earthquake strengthening, but the Legislature refused to allocate additional money for that purpose during its 1995 and 1997 sessions.

“If the Big One hits, my rough guess would be that maybe 50% of our bridges in western Oregon will fall down, with the highest concentration toward the coast,” said Craig Shike, bridge designer for state transportation department.

“It will be difficult to get around the state if that happens. You wouldn’t be able to get there from here, as they say,” Shike said.

The Legislature’s refusal to approve more bridge retrofitting money and its rejection of a bill last year that was aimed at providing financial incentives to owners to replace unsafe older buildings drew criticism from Bob Yeats, an emeritus professor of geology at Oregon State University.

“Cycling out unsafe buildings is really an important thing to do,” Yeats said. “If we’re going to have a major earthquake, I just hope it doesn’t happen on a Sunday morning, because a lot of churches would fall in a heap. A lot of people are likely to die in that earthquake.”

Senate President Brady Adams said lawmakers aren’t insensitive to earthquake danger, but must make budgetary decisions that balance benefits and risks.

“It’s not like there’s an unused pot of money that would allow us to go and fix every building,” the Grants Pass Republican said. “We’re going to do the best we can with the resources we have available, but it’s going to have to be in phases over a long period of time.”

The problem is, geologists and other scientists can’t say when the Big One will strike.

It could be next week or it could be 100 years from now, but a devastating earthquake is a certainty, said Curt Peterson, a geology professor at Portland State University.

“The probability of it is increasing,” Peterson said. “Within the next two to three generations, the probability tends to go scarily high. If we don’t get it, our children or grandchildren will.”