The purpose of this project was to determine a suitable location for a recovery area if there was to be a tsunami along the coast. I focused on Lincoln County for my analysis. Because Oregon is on the coast there is a high chance of tsunamis hitting and displacing a large number of people. While it does not happen often, when it does, the results are detrimental. I began my analysis by comparing the area that a tsunami would effect in relation to the city limits of Lincoln County. This gave me an idea of how far from the coast would be considered safe in the event of a tsunami. By combining data of slope, distance from the inundation zone and distance from highways, I was able to create an area that I would consider suitable for a recovery area during a natural disaster. For my classification of the inundation zones I used quantile breaks because it displayed the data most evenly. The data was heavily skewed left so this offered a nice classification for the Euclidean distance of the inundation zone. I used geometrical interval for the highways because it was also skewed left but not as dramatically as the inundation zone. For slope I used quantile again because the data was very heavily skewed to the left as it was in the inundation zone data. Once my data was classified to my liking, I joined them together. (see below)
I gave the distance to highways a weighting of 0.5 as I thought that being close to highways would be the most important factor when trying to evacuate the area. Second, I assigned slope a weighting of 0.3 because slope can have a major impact on where water flows once it is on land. Finally, I gave distance from inundation zone a weighting of 0.2 because I thought this had the least effect on determining where to set up a recovery zone as the point is to make it as close as possible.
(This website won’t let me upload my map as a PDF and it looked horrible cropped)
Above on the left you can see the effect a tsunami would have on the area of the cities. The proportion of the city flooded is given as a percentage . As you can see, the cities along the coast would be in serious trouble if there was a tsunami. On the right there is the length of highway that would be effected by a tsunami. In total, 250 miles of highway would be covered in water during a tsunami. Luckily, the recovery zone I created took this into account so that would not effect the recovery area.
From this analysis, I would say that Oregonians are certainly not prepared for a tsunami. Some of the towns on the coast would be completely underwater giving the residence no way to escape. I think every county located along the coast should have recovery areas mapped out in preparation for the Cascadia earthquake, which will lead to a huge tsunami. I think my analysis would be appreciated by the residence of Lincoln County as they would have an idea of how far outside of the county they would need to go to escape the impact of a tsunami.