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This image shows Oregon State’s Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building, a multi-story building complex surrounded by a landscaped outdoor area. The building has a sleek, angular design with black and glass exterior. The grounds feature a wide concrete walkway leading up to the entrance, with grassy areas and small trees on either side. The sky in the background has an orange-yellow sunset glow, creating a warm, vibrant atmosphere.
Courtesy of Oregon State University
Research

Built for the Big OneCome earthquake or tsunami, OSU’s marine center is ready.

By Katherine Cusumano, MFA ‘24

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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.


Illustration by Matt Twombly

Key Features

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.


A Ship-Proof “Crumple Zone”

Though the likelihood that large pieces of debris  — like the ships moored in the harbor — will travel as far inland as the Marine Studies Building is low, the building’s architecture is nevertheless prepared for this worst-case scenario. On the roof, metal barricades and a rock garden mark the “crumple zone,” an area (10-feet wide at its widest point) that will sustain the impact of objects tossed ashore without harming either the people who’ve sought refuge on the roof or the I-beams holding it up.


Supplies for Days

The tsunami won’t simply wash in and recede, Moffett says. Waves created by the earthquake will slosh to and fro, oscillating as if in a bathtub, for up to two days. On the roof, a cache contains enough food, water and first-aid supplies for up to 920 people (and pets!) to survive for that period. (“Remember, I said ‘survival,’ not ‘happy,’” Moffett says of the 800 calories and gallon of water allotted to each person per day.) In the cache, a binder labeled “Open Me First” outlines protocol and includes tasks, like portioning out food rations, designed to keep survivors occupied.


A Disaster-Proof Elevator

The Marine Studies Building is the only Americans with Disabilities Act-approved vertical evacuation site in the country, and it’s all because of the elevator. It looks just like a regular elevator — so much so, in fact, that one of the architects’ challenges was how to represent its role in evacuation to people taught to avoid elevators in disasters. A reinforced elevator shaft makes it sturdy enough to operate during an earthquake, allowing people with limited mobility to access the roof.

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