By designing a new, raised City Hall that would also be earthquake resistant, Cannon Beach, Ore., hopes to build the nation’s first tsunami-resistant building. Located along the Cascadia Subduction Zone — a fault that stretches from Northern California to mid-Vancouver Island that seismologists say can produce a magnitude 9.0 earthquake or greater — the city’s officials and residents know they must be vigilant in their preparation for a massive quake that could cause a tsunami. Elevated about 15 feet above ground by stilts and surrounded by two low walls, the new City Hall would allow tsunami waves to pass underneath it, while also providing a vertical evacuation site for about 1,500 people.
“It would be an evacuation site plus it would be a tsunami-resistant government center because the City Hall as it is now would be in the tsunami zone,” said City Manager Richard Mays. “First of all, an earthquake is going to take this building down because it’s an old building; the tsunami would just finish it off, but if we had an earthquake and a tsunami-resistant city hall, of course that could function as a center of government after a catastrophe hits.”
Image: A rendering of what Cannon Beach, Ore.’s tsunami-resistant City Hall may look like.
The development of the building plans began when an ad hoc design committee came together that included Jay Raskin, an architect and former Cannon Beach mayor, a civil engineer from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, a tsunami researcher from Oregon State University and others. After watching communities recover from Hurricane Katrina, Raskin observed that their collapsed city government buildings hindered disaster recovery efforts. If Cannon Beach gets its tsunami-resistant building before a large disaster hits the community, “City Hall will basically be intact and we can organize relief efforts and then also start doing the business of reconstruction and recovery,” he said.
Raskin said the building plans were based on FEMA’s Guidelines for Design of Structures for Vertical Evacuation from Tsunamis and observed destruction from the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and its resulting Indian Ocean Tsunami. “They realized that buildings behind low walls actually seemed to be protected by them,” he said.
Although it’s currently a concept with no plans to begin building, Oregon State University researchers are testing a prototype of the building in the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory’s wave tank. “They’ve taken a 900-foot wide by 3,000-foot wide slice of Cannon Beach where basically the City Hall project would be located and are kind of modeling how the tsunami would come through there and they’re testing the forces along the building,” Raskin said.
Cost is the main barrier to building the new City Hall: It’s currently estimated at $4 million, Mays said. And he’s hoping the city can obtain a federal grant to cover half the cost. Raskin said he tried to obtain a FEMA grant for the project, but the agency lacks a funding stream that covers creating a new building; most building funds are for seismic retrofitting. “The federal agency that really does the most looking at tsunamis is the NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], and they don’t have things about creating capital improvements,” he said.
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