What damage could an earthquake do here?
On Feb. 28, 2001, the Nisqually earthquake shook the Puget Sound area for nearly 25 seconds. That quake, which registered a magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter scale, damaged several buildings in Renton and led to Cedar River flooding and mudslides, but no one in Renton was seriously injured. Scientists at the time said the region was fortunate because the Nisqually earthquake was centered deep under ground, so the shaking wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But a shallow earthquake along the Seattle fault could cause much more damage in Renton and much of south King County than in other parts of the state because a lot of the soil is soft and sandy. A strong earthquake that lingers would turn that soft soil into something resembling jelly, a process known as liquefaction, making it more likely that buildings would collapse, said Bill Steele, coordinator of the University of Washington’s seismograph lab for the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network. The liquefaction process actually began
