The San Andreas Fault gets all the attention, media coverage and movies, but it’s not the fault line the tech sector needs to worry about. A much bigger problem lies to the north, and some of the most important tech firms are directly in its crosshairs.
The Cascadia subduction zone runs north-south from Canada to northern California and sits roughly 80 miles offshore. That’s the good news, since it’s 80 miles out to sea, as opposed to the San Andreas and Hayward faults, which run right through the Silicon Valley and East Bay, respectively.
The bad news is it is capable of a much more severe quake. The Cascadia fault is believed to be capable of a 9.4 magnitude quake. Residents of the Pacific Northwest got quite a fright last year when The New Yorker published an article called “The Really Big One,” which detailed the potential of a 9.4 magnitude earthquake hitting the area. The article outlined projections for 13,000 immediate deaths, one million left homeless, and the whole region left without power and water for months.
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