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than a year earlier, while working at Cornell University in New York State, he had published the first in a series of papers with new data showing that the coastal mountains of Washington and Oregon were in fact being bent and tilted landward, probably by the force of plate tectonics.
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    A magnitude 8 or higher, here on my West Coast—really? I’d been living in Vancouver nearly ten years at that point and had never heard anything about a monster shockwave. Not a word of it. How could I, a working journalist covering British Columbia for most of a decade, have missed a blockbuster story like that? Well, it turns out the banner headline was being written in the present tense at that very moment. This news had not escaped the confines of laboratory walls until now.

    With a quickening pulse, I turned back to Dieter Weichert and asked for context. He recited what sounded like a well-rehearsed list of the most recent moderate-size temblors in the Pacific Northwest: “For ten years, we’ve always warned people that there are earthquakes—in Seattle-Tacoma [in 1965], under Pender Island in 1976, central Vancouver Island in 1946.” It was true, he conceded, “We have never talked about this big subduction earthquake. We knew about the possibility, but certainly with a fifty–fifty chance, you’re not going to say there is a big earthquake waiting for us.”
    First, I asked myself, who else knew there was even a fifty–fifty chance of a magnitude 8 rupture? Probably nobody except the scientists. Then it occurred to me—okay, so the senior seismologist at the Canadian government’s West Coast geoscience laboratory is a cautious man who doesn’t want to alarm the public without reasonable and probable cause. I understood that. Yet now, in the aftermath of Mexico City, he was apparently ready to raise the biggest, reddest warning flag I’d ever seen.
    â€œNow you’re saying it?” I prompted.
    Weichert took the plunge: “We’re saying yes, we have to come to grips with this problem. The chance has increased, in our minds, from a fifty–fifty chance to something like a seventy–thirty chance for the earthquake to happen within, say, the next two hundred years.”
    As a scientist, he really couldn’t say for sure when the megathrust might happen—two hundred years from now, or tonight —so Weichert had erred on the side of caution. That’s what responsible government scientists do. Kaufman and I, however, figured Weichert, Rogers, and Adams had given us a clear signal that the risk level was sufficiently high to justify front-page treatment of the issue.
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    On Sunday, November 3, 1985, I flew from Vancouver to San Francisco en route to the U.S. Geological Survey laboratory at Menlo Park, California. First thing Monday morning we shot an interview with
USGS seismologist William Bakun, who not only reinforced what the Canadian team had told us the previous week but made an even more ominous prediction. He said the Juan de Fuca plate could generate a disaster even larger than the one in Mexico.
    â€œWe have to take seriously the possibility that a great earthquake—a very great earthquake, such as the 1960 Chilean earthquake—might occur along the Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia coast,” said Bakun. “We’re talking about as big an earthquake as has occurred in historic time—in the world.”
    Knowing almost nothing about what happened in Chile, twenty-five years earlier, I again asked for clarification. “Where would that be on the Richter scale?”
    â€œOff it,” he laughed weakly, and then quickly followed with an explanation. A moderate earthquake is defined as magnitude 5.0 to 5.9; strong is 6.0 to 6.9; major is 7.0 to 7.9; and a great earthquake registers 8.0 or higher on the Richter scale.
    Because the scale is logarithmic, there is a tenfold increase in the amplitude of the