So the tsunami evacuation shelters can be a costly, but shared, solution to a community problem.
Japan, which has experienced many tsunamis, is dotted with such shelters. But the US has only a handful.
Read the story to find out why! GIFT LINK:
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/r...
And building a single residential home to be tsunami-proof is essentially impossible, let alone financially feasible, a tsunami tower engineer said.
Tsunami-safe structures have foundations that plunge 50 to 100 feet into the ground. Most PNW homes are wooden structures and would be swept away.
Almost all extant buildings in the US were not built to survive a tsunami, and there's no clear guidance for assessing whether buildings like hotels or parking garages would withstand the waves, either.
Building codes for tsunamis were only created in 2016, and they're still rarely implemented.
Some tribes in tsunami-prone places are relocating uphill. But that too takes time and money.
And again, if there's no high ground to move to, tribes may not want to leave their ancestral homes. Towers can help them stay in place.
For communities in low-lying places without high ground to flee to, such as the Shoalwater Bay Tribe in Washington state, an evacuation tower might not save buildings. But it would save lives.
Theirs, completed in 2022, was the first of its kind in the country.
mil.wa.gov/news/celebra...
The threat of "the big one" looms large in the PNW, and with it, fears of a massive tsunami towering 100 feet above the shore.
But it's important to remember that even a tsunami that's just a few feet deep can be damaging and deadly, as 2011 Tōhoku showed the world.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8qF...
For the @nytimes.com, I wrote about the threat of tsunamis on the West Coast and the lack of evacuation structures.
These expensive but life-saving buildings could help tribes and other coastal communities stay in place. But the US has only a handful.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/r...
"The issue with the Pacific Northwest is that it's so quiet," said Stephen Angster, a USGS geologist who led one of the papers. "We're not reminded that we live in a seismically active area as often as in California. Papers like this renew that awareness the region."
Given the finding that smaller faults are more common than thought, people "should increase their level of urgency" for general earthquake preparedness, said @haroldtobin.bsky.social, who heads the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
The models for seismic risks from the USGS don't include these smaller faults. But as scientists learn more about how the history of this complex fault zone and how it works, some make the argument that including smaller faults is necessary for an accurate risk assessment.
The Seattle fault zone runs right under its namesake city. In 923, it ruptured catastrophically.
The threat of a repeat event on the main fault is still there. But two new studies show that smaller—but still damaging—quakes from shorter faults in the system are more likely.
eos.org/articles/on-...
Also: DM me if your community's tsunami or earthquake mitigation projects have been interrupted by FEMA funding uncertainty.
I talked with so many more people for this story beyond those who ended up making it into the piece: community leaders, engineers, tsunami experts, hazard and outreach officials... a big thanks to everyone who shared their time and knowledge with me!
With BRIC restored and a federal judge's orders to get funds flowing, progress on tsunami mitigation projects may resume.
Even so, they are only a handful of the dozens the coastline needs.
“We have a long way to go, there’s no question there," said Jon Allan of Oregon's state geologic agency.
“The only structures we have confidence in are the ones that are specifically engineered and designed to withstand the tsunami hazard that our coastal areas face,” said Maximilian Dixon of Washington's emergency management team.
Only Washington state has estimated how many evacuation shelters would be needed to protect all the coastal communities.
Need: about 85
Have: 2
There's a chance some existing buildings could serve as evacuation sites, but there's no guidance for assessing that, and no guarantee they'd survive.
There are at least six tsunami-safe structures in the U.S. There may be more; there's no official count. (In reporting, even some officials weren't aware of all the shelter projects in their state.)
And for some communities with a lot of older, longtime residents, there's a surprising sangfroid about the risk — "if it happens, it happens," one city administrator described it.
The other big hurdle can be motivation.
Tsunamis are high-risk but low-probability disasters. For some communities, there are more pressing needs, whether it's permafrost melting out from under an Alaskan village or an Oregon town that simply needs a new sewer system.
That sowed chaos for ongoing and would-be projects.
"A comedy of errors," one community official called it.
Last month, FEMA announced that the program would be reinstated. But uncertainty around when funds will arrive still reigns.
FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program funds disaster mitigation projects, including tsunami structures. The Trump administration abruptly canceled the program last year, calling it "wasteful and ineffective."
web.archive.org/web/20250405...
The last big tsunami struck the West Coast in 1964, but with the Cascadia subduction zone lurking offshore, "the big one" (a magnitude 9+ quake and massive, local tsunami) poses a perpetual threat.
Some communities are trying to be ready for that, despite significant funding challenges.
Their rarity comes down to two things: cost and motivation.
Cost is a big one. Tsunami shelters cost millions to tens of millions of dollars, depending on their design and capacity. But in the Pacific Northwest, where some of the highest-risk spots are, most communities don't have the cash.
Much of the West Coast and Hawaii faces some degree of tsunami risk. But if communities lack high ground to flee to before the waves hit, they really have one option: build up.
Tsunami shelters are ubiquitous in tsunami-prone Japan, but the US has only a handful.
🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/r...
As betting apps sweep the nation, it's interesting to uncover more of the rich history of dice games and the social good they did for the original inhabitants of the continent.
So searching for the oldest dice in the east would be key.
There's also evidence that dice games were played largely by women, at least in some regions. Future work could explore that trend though space and time.
Together, that points to more social complexity than some previous researchers assumed about early hunter-gatherer cultures.
There's much more work to be done, the author said. His search revealed ancient dice only in the western US, but eastern US cultures definitely had dice, too.
The persistent presence of dice in different places, but also in the same places consistently over time, suggests that large groups of people gathered together for communal events, some scholars think.
It's not just a search for a superlative. Dice games played, and continue to play, an important role in bringing different social groups together.
As early groups of people grew and they mingled more, perhaps not speaking the same language, dice games could have been a way to break the ice.
Dice had been found in archaeological sites from many Native American cultures around the continent. But those generally represented the last 2,000 years or so.
Oral traditions suggested dice had been used for many generations, but there hadn't been a systematic search for The Oldest Dice.