I am looking out my window and I can see I-5 as I write this and am on the west side of it.
We are at 1400' elevation -- would need to be the biggest tsunami in the history of the world to reach us...
Chicxulub shoved debris about 250 miles up the Brasos river in Texas.
The West of I-5 is not all about the tsunami. We will have no roads, no bridges, no electricity, no water and collapsed buildings just from the shakes. There will be many, many landslides. The gas you have in your tank is it, even if you are East of I-5 in the valley. Food is what you have in storage.
I too live within a couple miles of I-5 on the west side just north of Seattle. My current elevation is about 460 feet above mean sea level. The problem with an earthquake that size is that certain areas of the Puget Sound will change in elevation. The entire reason that the earthquake in 1700 was discovered was because of a sandbar in the San Jaun’s that had a couple of hundred dead trees below the water line that were obviously a few hundred years old and not a salt-water variety. They came from the tree-line that was a couple of hundred feet above the channel. They were moved from up in the air to below the water line in a matter of seconds as the ground buckled under and shifted west. So your altitude may not matter.
Dear CurlyDave,
Not really. Less than 60 years ago (1958) there was a tsunami greater than 1400’ in Alaska.
See below from wikipedia:
“The 1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami occurred on July 9 at 10:15:58 p.m., following an earthquake with a moment magnitude of 7.8 and a maximum Mercalli Intensity of XI (Extreme). The earthquake took place on the Fairweather Fault and triggered a rockslide of 30 million cubic metres (40 million cubic yards, and about 90 million tons) to fall from several hundred metres into the narrow inlet of Lituya Bay, Alaska. The impact was heard 50 miles (80 km) away,[6] and the sudden displacement of water resulted in a megatsunami that destroyed vegetation up to 1,722 feet (525 m) above the height of the bay and a wave that traveled across the bay with a crest reported by witnesses to be on the order of 98 feet (30 m) in height.[citation needed] This is the most significant megatsunami and the largest known in modern times. The event forced a re-evaluation of large wave events, and recognition of impact, rockfall and landslide events as a previously unknown cause of very large waves.”
Cheers! I admit, however, that it was probably the geography involved that resulted in this megatsunami and that would be unlikely in your area.
The largest Tsunami ever recorded happen in Alaska and reached 1720 feet high.
What’s special about Eugene/Springfield Oregon? Is that area built on a solid slab of strong rock? Several damage maps show an island of low impact relative to the surrounding area.
An area within the Columbia River outlet east of Astoria appears to focus the tsunami energy, as depicted by the color-scale of damage (maxed out).
https://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/01_ORP_Cascadia.pdf