Kathryn Schulz, the New Yorker writer who detailed the earthquake risk facing the Pacific Northwest last year in terrifying detail, published a new piece Friday and this time, instead of looking at the region as a whole, she focused on the schools in the town of Seaside, many of which face obliteration if a large quake hits.

Her Pulitzer-winning first piece, "The Really Big One," laid out a shocking, but not unlikely, scenario in which the Cascadia Subduction Zone ruptures causing an earthquake in the neighborhood of magnitude-9.0. The ensuing damage could take as many as 30,000 lives between landslides, explosions, collapsing buildings and a massive tsunami that would inundate the coast.

It is that tsunami, and the most vulnerable victims who live in its path, which Schulz zeroes in on with her latest dispatch, titled "The Really Small Ones."

The monster wave could travel more than a mile inland, Schulz writes, and some coastal communities could end up under as much as 100 feet of water, depending on their location. Depths won't be quite that deep in Seaside, but the town would still likely face as much as 50 feet of water.

Three out of the four school buildings in Seaside sit between five and 15 feet above sea level, well below the elevation needed to survive a tsunami. Beyond that, Schulz writes, none of the buildings have been seismically retrofitted so any evacuation, which would need to start immediately after the shaking stops, would be made more difficult by unstable buildings and widespread debris.

Students at the three schools in question -- Gearhart Elementary, Broadway Middle School and Seaside High -- all face perilous evacuation routes as well. Many children will need to travel nearly a mile in the estimated 15 minutes between when the quake hits and the tsunami lands, often uphill and over bridges that may or may not still be standing after a large earthquake.

Officials are aware of the situation, but doing something about it has proven vexxing, Schulz writes. Doug Dougherty, who has served as the superintendent of the school district for nearly 20 years, has been searching for the $128 million needed to move the district's vulnerable students to facilities outside of the inundation zone.

He had his hopes set on a property tax increase of $2.16 per $1,000 of home value, which was on the ballot in 2014, to fund the move, but it failed by a wide margin.

In the meantime, 80 acres of land situated outside of the tsunami zone was donated to the district by timber company Weyerhaeuser, which came as a relief to Dougherty.

"There are only four public K-12 schools in Oregon that are currently within the tsunami inundation zone. Weyerhaeuser understands that Seaside School District has three of these four schools and that there is no other suitable land available," he said in a statement after the donation. "A Cascadia earthquake off of our coast will cause large portions of these three antiquated schools to collapse and then be submerged by the Pacific Ocean. The average age of these schools is over 63 years and they have outlived their useful lives."

But the land alone is not enough and the district still needs to find funding to build there. To do so, another bond is on the ballot this year, but this time property taxes would only go up by $1.35 per $1,000 of home value, which Dougherty hopes is enough to swing the vote in the schools' direction.

"Either the city will choose to knock down its schools and rebuild them somewhere safer--or, sooner or later, other forces will knock them over instead," Schulz writes. "For those who live there, for those with loved ones there, for anyone with a school-aged child and an imagination, the issue is as stark as the one at the top of the ballot: a vote for reason or for madness, for relative safety or looming catastrophe."

-- Kale Williams

kwilliams@oregonian.com

503-294-4048