Geological Inevitability: Yumei Wang on the Discovery Channel

Recently, California was again rocked by a serious earthquake (with a magnitude 6.4) that left tens of thousands without power. While luckily few were injured in this latest quake, the increasing ubiquity of these events highlights the growing necessity of adapting to the existential threat of natural disasters was recently in the spotlight again when Discovery channel featured one of PSU’s incredible faculty members, Yumei Wang. Wang is an Affiliate Faculty and Senior Advisor on Infrastructure Resilience and Risk in the Department of the Maseeh College‘s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and she was asked to lend her expertise to the channel's recent three-part documentary “Brink of Disaster” (available to stream on Discovery+). Melodramatictitle aside, the “West Coast Superquakes” episode offered an opportunity for Wang to highlight her expertise and to showcase the new tsunami shelter in Newport, her all-time favorite building.

Newport’s Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building (GVMSB) is Oregon State University’s building for Marine Studies and is Oregon’s first tsunami vertical evacuation structure, though there are two others in the Cascadia subduction zone: the Ocosta School District’s Elementary school near Westport, Washington and an evacuation tower capable of holding 600 people twenty miles south on the Shoalwater Bay Indian Reservation. Given that the occurrence of another major earthquake is a question Wang authoritatively states “not if but when,” carefully engineered projects like this need to become more common. Historically, an 8 or 9 magnitude earthquake hits the Cascadia Subduction Zone every 200 to 500 years. We’re a bit overdue, given the last one in the Pacific Northwest happened in 1700.  According to an article by OPB, the fault near Portland is more active than previously thought.

Wang points out that the Newport tsunami shelter stands out from the other two vertical evacuation structures both for its intuitive design, openness to the surrounding South Beach community, and inclusive mindfulness regarding vulnerable members with mobility issues. A wide, highly visible ramp guides people to safety while tsunami levels are marked in stairwells as they ascend to safety on the structure’s rooftop, which houses a supply cache that can support almost 1000 people for two days following a disaster. 

Robust enough to withstand an enormous Cascadia earthquake with minutes of violent shaking, the building’s perimeter is designed to keep people on the rooftop protected while it absorbs catastrophic impacts from tsunami debris crashing into it without being subjected to progressive collapse, much like the bumper of a car.  Tsunami waves and debris would blow out the windows and walls of the lower levels, but the building would remain standing and safe.  Perhaps equally compelling, GVSMB is designed to be repairable after a destructive tsunami. Engineers can design similar buildings to withstand the tsunami forces exerted by the world’s largest earthquake to be recorded (the magnitude 9.5 in Chile in 1960), as well as the 2011 Japan disaster that wiped out entire coastal communities. 

Although Wang remains modest about her substantial body of achievements including her leadership role in tsunami safety, she is proud as she points to the Newport tsunami shelter as an innovative engineering masterpiece.  She is also highly and widely regarded for helping to create the seismic safety grant programs for schools and emergency response facilities and the Oregon Resilience Planas well as initiating safety regulations for water, electric, natural gas, and petroleum facilities.  In fact, Wang recently received the 2022 GSA Public Service Award, and her response to the award includes a sobering to-do list of what needs to be accomplished in the future to keep ourselves safe from the increasing threat of extreme weather events and geological disasters. Thanks to the hard work and expertise of engineers like Wang and innovative projects like the Newport tsunami shelter, everyone in the area is more prepared for the next Cascadia earthquake or tsunami.