At fault

In 923 C.E., a massive earthquake -- estimated at magnitude 7.5 -- struck the Pacific Northwest.

Marine terraces -- stairstep-like formations often found on oceanic shorelines -- show evidence of a sudden uplift.  Tree-ring data, from stumps and logs entombed in mud, appear to be the remnants of a forest swamped by a massive tsunami, and dendrochronological techniques date their burial to that specific year.

When I first heard about this, from a paper last week in the journal Geology, I immediately assumed the culprit had been the massive (and scary) Cascadia Subduction Zone, about which I wrote here at Skeptophilia a couple of years ago.  This fault line, considered one of the most potentially dangerous seismic zones in the world, is capable of producing megathrust earthquakes, where a piece of a plate is driven underneath another.  When they slip it's often catastrophic, pushing the overriding plate upward by as much as several meters.  When this happens underwater, it's even worse; the volume of water that displaces causes enormous tsunamis, that can travel all the way across oceans while losing very little of their energy -- with horrifying results.

So the 923 temblor seemed to fit the bill.  A dreadful tsunami, and shoreline uplift by over eight meters.  But I was wrong about its cause.

This quake occurred because of a pair of faults that bisects the Seattle/Tacoma metropolitan area itself.

[Image Credit: Washington Geological Survey (Washington Department of Natural Resources)]

If you live in the Seattle area and are thinking, "Oh, great, one more natural disaster in the making to worry about," the good news is that this fault -- or, more accurately fault zone -- doesn't appear to slip very often.  In the eleven-thousand-odd year geological record, the 923 quake was the only apparent major failure.  But it always bears keeping in mind that unlike many other natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and tornadoes, we still don't have a reliable way of forecasting earthquakes.  Seismologists can say, "This fault has a fifty percent chance of failing in the next twenty years," but anything more precise -- when exactly it'll slip, the magnitude of the earthquake that will result, how much damage it will cause -- is beyond our current science.

"We just don’t know what the recurrence interval for these big quakes is," said Elizabeth Davis, geologist at the University of Washington, who led the study.  "For a fault that has had so much attention, there's so much we still don't know."

It's the problem with fault zones that have long recurrence intervals; people tend to minimize the threat, if they even know about it.  It's different if you're in a place where the risk is high and well-known.  When we were in Naples, Italy last year, everyone there knows they're in a place where earthquakes kind of happen on a weekly basis, and there's a big freakin' volcano hovering right over you every day.  (Our tour guide in Sicily said, "Okay, we get earthquakes here... but those people up in Naples, they're crazy.")  And for the five hundred inhabitants of the island of Stromboli -- well, the volcano in the middle of the island erupts so continuously it's been nicknamed "the Lighthouse of the Mediterranean."

Honestly, though, I guess either way encourages complacence.  If the disasters hardly ever happen, it's easy to conclude they won't ever happen; and if they rattle you around pretty much continuously, it's equally easy to think, "Eh, I can live with this," and lull yourself into a false sense of security that there's no potential there for something more dangerous.

Maybe humans just don't understand risk very much in general.

As far as the Pacific Northwest goes, I'd happily visit there, but I don't think I'd ever be brave enough to live there again.  Same goes for Italy.  I'm currently trying to learn Italian so I can fit in better when (not if) I go back, and the beautiful scenery and amazing climate make it a tempting place to do the expat thing.

But there's a downside.  So many places I've visited that have striking terrain are beautiful precisely because they're tectonically active; the earthquakes and volcanoes are what create the gorgeous landscape.  California, Ecuador, Malaysia, Greece, Croatia... and Italy and the Pacific Northwest.

Hardly fair, that.

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Prayer for pay

One of the inevitable downsides of a blog such as this one is that I tend to focus on negative stuff.  People who believe (and peddle) nonsense, charlatans, hoaxers, dupers, swindlers, and thieves.  And the world being what it is, a sizable percentage of the aforementioned no-goods never get caught, never get stopped, never have to recompense their victims what they've stolen.

Today I'm going to look at a case where the good guys won.  The story, which was sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, starts out like so many of the others -- but then ends on a happy note.

The scam was the brainchild of one Benjamin Rogovy of Seattle.  It was a website called "Christian Prayer Center," where you could sign up to have prayers said for you (or for a friend or loved one) -- as long as you donated.

All major credit cards accepted, of course.

More insidious still was that if you signed up and gave Rogovy your credit card information, you were put on a list for "continued prayers," and billed monthly -- unless you specifically clicked "No, Thank You."  And as you may have experienced with other such auto-bill sites, once you were on the monthly billing list, getting off of it wasn't easy.

Complaints began to roll in, some coming from as far away as Singapore.  Unfortunately, there was little the authorities could do.  Because the Christian Prayer Center was a licensed business, and it's hard to see how you could claim that you hadn't gotten what you'd paid for (no one said your prayers were going to be answered, after all), Rogovy was making money hand over fist from people who were either desperate or gullible or both.

Finally, however, Rogovy stepped over the line by including fake testimonials and made-up religious leaders as a way of increasing his take.  And it worked, for a while; records show that he raked in $7.75 million from over 165,000 people over a period of three years.  Hard as that is to believe.  But once the false information started showing up, that gave Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson leverage to go after the sly bastard.

And he succeeded.  Last week, as part of a settlement, Rogovy agreed to return millions of dollars to the people he'd bilked.  "What I will not tolerate," Ferguson said in a statement, "is unlawful businesses that prey upon people —taking advantage of their faith or their need for help— in order to make a quick buck."  A Facebook page appeared called "Christian Prayer Center SCAM" warning people away from the site.

People seeking a refund for money they've sent to the Christian Prayer Center and its sister site, Orcion Cristiana, have until June 12, 2016 to file a claim with the Attorney General's office.

The one cloud behind all of this golden lining is that people like Rogovy rarely ever go away.  As we saw this week with Peter Popoff, the lure of relieving the faithful of their filthy lucre is simply too tempting.  Until the Attorney General's office mandated that it be shut down, the Christian Prayer Center's website had a sanctimonious message stating, "We thank you for all the prayers, and we cherish the opportunity to have created a place where Christians could meet to support each other."  As of the writing of this post, the Center's Facebook page was still up, with a pinned post at the top of the feed saying, "If the Christian Prayer Center adds value to your lives and you think online prayer is important, please type "Yes" or "Amen" to our wall!  We love to hear praise reports and testimonials," and the following image:

Because apparently the answer to "What Would Jesus Do?" is "use false claims to take money from people and claim he's praying for them, but actually doing nothing."

So it's to be hoped that the judgment against Rogovy will put a stop to the money pouring into the Christian Prayer Center.  The problem is, of course, that even if this puts Rogovy out of business, there's always another swindler waiting in line.

If there's a sucker born every minute, as P. T. Barnum observed, there are probably two thieves born in the same amount of time.