Venerable New York publications want everyone in the Pacific Northwest to be afraid -- very afraid.

First it was The New Yorker, which in 2015 told us that the “Really Big One” could hit at any time, and that when the Cascadia subduction-zone earthquake does inevitably launch, “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

The magazine followed up that popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning piece with a podcast about a Cascadia earthquake and then a sequel article, about Oregon’s tsunami risk.

Now The New York Times wants to make sure we know there’s more to worry about than earthquakes. In short: Mount Hood could blow at any time, and when it does -- well, you get the picture.

When Mount Hood erupted in the 1780s, the new Times article offers, “high-speed avalanches of hot rock, gas and ash [raced] down its slopes. Those flows quickly melted the snow and ice and mixed with the meltwater to create violent slurries as thick as concrete that traveled huge distances. They destroyed everything in their path.”

Reporter Shannon Hall then adds, ominously: “Today, the volcano, a prominent backdrop against Portland, Ore., is eerily silent. But it won’t stay that way.”

Hall’s point: We’re not doing nearly enough to monitor Mount Hood and other active volcanoes in the U.S. so that we get a decent amount of warning before they go off. She points out that other countries have their volcanoes wired like Christmas trees to keep track of their every burp.

All of this surely would have made the late Ron Abell happy. The founder of the 1970s anti-growth James G. Blaine Society, whose letterhead embraced the motto “Vague But Sinister,” sought to keep people out of Oregon, in part through humorous scare tactics about what the Beaver State’s natural world had in store for them.

James G. Blaine Society (The Oregonian)

Abell warned New Yorkers -- and others outside the Northwest -- that Oregon’s “electric trees” would zap them and that they’d be attacked by sawtoothed rain worms.

Sounds worse than an earthquake or a volcano.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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