Model of tsunami-resistant building tested

CORVALLIS (AP) — Inside the cold and quiet and sterility of the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, it’s hard to appreciate the implications of the faux tsunami bearing down on a collection of model houses and a city hall built on little red stilts, even if the town is a representation of Cannon Beach.

There are no drowning residents flailing in the surf; no tractor trailers knocking into building pillars; no bridges tumbling into the estuary.

But the abstract feel of a demonstration of the facility on Monday didn’t diminish the aim: to replace Cannon Beach’s City Hall with a structure that could withstand a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami, a building that could offer shelter for as many as 1,500 evacuees.

Scientists say there’s a 37 percent chance that an earthquake will erupt along the West Coast-wide Cascadia Subduction Zone within the next 50 years, an event that could easily produce a temblor of that size and a devastating tsunami.

The questions now are whether a city hall can be designed to survive such an event, and whether residents in Cannon Beach and other cities along the Oregon coast are willing to pay twice the current market cost for a tsunami-proof city hall, events center or fire station.

The scale model of the proposed 9,800-square-foot structure has held up well in tsunami tests, said Dan Cox, a professor of coastal and ocean engineering at OSU, and there’s enough known about how to engineer the facility to withstand a quake that scientists can focus on the wave.

The tests will examine how such a facility might respond if the row of buildings that now buffer it are wiped out by a quake and tsunami, or if a crush of debris gets stacked up against the columns that act as stilts.