Hey Chuck - Head to HIGH GROUND...
JimH wrote:
I think the highest *tsunami* wave was 1.5 feet high. ;-)
I live about 3/4 of the way up Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, so I'm a few
hundred feet or more above sea level. If I'm home when a tsunami hits
and it *still* gets me, most of civilization as we know it will be
wiped out by the same wave.
My boat is now "inside" the locks, under covered moorage, so to get my
boat the tsunami would need to come roaring down the Strait of Juan de
Fuca, avoid smacking into the western edge of Whidbey Island and
instead make a miraculous turn of about 45 degrees turn to the SE down
Admiralty Inlet, avoid slamming into Edmonds and turn south toward
Shilshole Bay. The tsunami then needs to roar down a 300-400 yard wide
entrance channel to the Chittenden Locks and still retain enough energy
to breach the dam or the lock walls themselves. Then I'm in trouble,
I'm moored very near the locks. :-)
No, I'm not that worried about a Tsunami.
Out in the open ocean, a lot of tsunami waves are barely identifiable.
The pulse is spread across enough space and depth that some of the
tsunami waves in mid ocean can be measured in inches. Of course when
all that energy, maybe enough to run a pulse through hundreds of feet
of water, reaches the shallows a lof ot that water piles up into
disastrous waves, and that's why all the damage occurs.
Very few inland waterways, such as Puget Sound, would be at the same
type of risk for tsunami damage as a coastal community or an island.
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