22 OregonStater.org R E S E AR C h ILLUSTRATION BY MATT TWOMBLY BUILT FOR THE BIG ONE COME EARTHQUAKE OR TSUNAMI, OSU'S MARINE CENTER IS READY. By Katherine Cusumano, MFA ’24 The signs are everywhere.You start to notice them — blue and white and printed with the words “Tsunami Evacuation Route,” alongside an illustration of a cresting wave — after crossing Newport’s Yaquina Bay Bridge. Follow them, and you might reach Oregon State’s Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building, which is not only a space for learning and research, but also a vertical evacuation structure. The vertical evacuation structure — the 47-foot-high roof of the building — is a necessary adaptation to new research on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Scientists say that this fault line, just off the coast of Newport, is overdue for an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater (aka “The Big One”), which could summon a mighty tsunami. To make matters more precarious, the spit of land where the building is located lies close to sea level and is composed primarily of soft, unstable dredge spoils. As a result, architects engineered the building, which was funded by a lead grant from the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation and opened in the fall of 2021, for the worst-case Cascadia rupture.They drew inspiration from disaster-proof structures around the world, including foreign embassies designed to withstand bomb strikes and other earthquake- and tsunami-resilient structures. As someone who works on the coast, Cinamon Moffett, the Hatfield Marine Science Center’s associate director for research and marine support, says that the risk of natural disaster is always on her mind. “OSU does an amazing job about putting this forward and saying, ‘OK, this is real; there’s a problem, this is going to happen,’” she says. “For those of us that already chose to work here, I was like, ‘Thank you.’” These key features make this state-of-the-art building ready for what’s to come. An Extra-Deep Foundation Dredged land beneath the building will liquefy after a major earthquake. For stability, the Marine Studies building sits atop a nearly 100-foot-deep, honeycomb-shaped foundation made of soil mixed with concrete and then secured to the foundation by 50-foot bolts. This means the foundation is roughly two times as deep as the building is tall. “We’re kind of an iceberg,” Moffett says. Breakaway Walls The building may be tsunami-proof, but that doesn’t mean that the building itself will survive. It won’t. “The only safe place in this building when the water comes is the roof,” Moffett says. In the event of a tsunami, the building’s exterior walls have been designed to collapse so water can rush through, leaving the roof — held up by sturdy structural steel I-beams and concrete shear walls — safe and stable. (In fact, a few of those I-beams can even be compromised without affecting the structural integrity of the roof.) A Really Big Ramp To accommodate the largest possible number of evacuees, there are three ways to access the roof: the elevator, the stairs and the massive ramp wrapping around the structure’s exterior. As you ascend the ramp — which is steep, its incline too sharp for wheelchair users to navigate on their own — you pass markers estimating how high the water will rise in case of “medium,” “large” and “xl” events.
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