One, the offshore Juan de Fuca Plate, is what’s left of a continent-sized plate that has for the past 200 million years been intermittently sliding under the larger North American Plate, an actual continent, in a process called subduction. Kyle Cuttie, who was the station’s communications officer when I first visited it nearly eight years ago, told me, “It’s hard to say whether we’ll be first responders or victims.”Ībout 130 miles west of Ediz Hook, 70 miles past the outer coast, two slabs of planetary crust are locked in a titanic struggle. Just how ready these coastal defenders are for the big wave to come is a question with life-and-death implications, for them and for those they defend.Īs Lt. But this certain disaster of uncertain date will wash away all the Guard’s preparations, along with just about everything else on Ediz Hook and the other sandspits and alluvial flatlands along Washington’s coast. Semper paratus - “Always ready” - goes the Coast Guard motto. Preparations for this threat have especially lagged in Washington, says state seismologist Harold Tobin, who chairs the University of Washington’s seismology and geohazards program and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network: “Oregon, California and British Columbia have all taken it more seriously.”Įven if preparations speed up, Coast Guard rescuers will face a daunting task after the Big One strikes - assuming they survive it themselves. Someday - next week, next year, maybe next century - a sudden and deadly marine shock will strike the Northwest coast: what locals call the Big One, a circa 9.0-magnitude offshore earthquake generating tsunami surges reaching 60 feet high or more. Two 29-foot and two 45-foot short-range response boats deal with local emergencies they joined the choppers on 16 rescue missions in 2021 and responded on their own in 23 others.īut those exploits are just a warm-up for the disaster to come. Ediz Hook is also home base for four seagoing cutters, 87 to 110 feet long, and one 210-foot medium-endurance cutter, which are often away patrolling for drug smuggling, human trafficking, illegal fishing, oil spills and other security and environmental threats. In 2021, they undertook 195 search-and-rescue missions. The station’s three MH-65 Dolphin helicopters are the only aircraft the Coast Guard, America’s frontline coastal defense and search-and-rescue service, bases along Washington’s deeply crenulated 3,026-mile coastline. Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles is the very first of first responders when something goes wrong, as it often does, on the state’s tangled straits and inlets and stormy outer coast and, sometimes, on the peaks and bluffs overlooking them. At its tip, between snowy mountains to the south and Vancouver Island to the north, sits what may be the nation’s most scenically sited military installation - and its most vulnerable. On the north shore of Washington’s wild Olympic Peninsula, a scimitar-shaped sandspit called Ediz Hook arcs for three miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Tide graph oregoncoast