The Cascadia guidebook

Five guides.
Five different clocks.

Each hazard keeps its own clock. The landscape and the households living across it remain one continuous story.

A faulted coast, braided rivers, storm clouds, snow-covered mountains, and a ridge fire meet in one connected Cascadian landscape.

Land shapes water. Weather moves through both. Fire follows fuel, terrain, and wind. Political boundaries decide who issues an instruction; they do not separate the physical system.

The chapters

Begin with the chapter closest to your place.

You do not need to read these in order. Begin wherever the land, season, or household question feels most familiar.

Each chapter begins in recognizable regional life, explains what reports, warnings, and planning information can and cannot tell you, and follows the subject into the household decisions that matter.

I
Ground, coast, and the first hours

Earthquake

Earthquake begins indoors: a table, a stairwell, a masonry wall, the shoes that can still be reached after the floor stops moving. It follows shaking outward to soft ground, bridges, ferry routes, and the coast, then into water, communication, medical needs, and reunion. Read it for the first movement and the longer hours that follow.
II
Dry land, wind, smoke, and routes

Wildfire

Wildfire begins at the dry edge of the year, long before every hillside looks dangerous. Road time is shaped by fuel, wind, smoke, animals, mobility, and how many ways a community can leave. The guide separates fire weather, observed fire edges, and evacuation instructions so a household can use the margin it has.
III
Rain, rivers, low roads, and coast

Flooding

Flooding begins upstream and often out of sight. A broad river may offer hours in which to watch a gauge; a steep drainage can change in minutes. This chapter connects forecasts and official notices to the low road, the uphill destination, and the household threshold that remains useful without pretending to predict water at the doorstep.
IV
Cold, power, access, and neighbors

Winter Storm

Winter Storm is not one kind of weather. The same Pacific system can bring rain to a shoreline, snow to a pass, ice to a valley, damaging wind to an island, and a long outage to a house on a well. Its practical clocks are warmth, water, medicine, power, roads, ferries, and the neighbors who help ordinary life continue.
V
Mountain, valley, wind, and interruption

Volcano

Volcano begins with the path between a mountain and a household. A valley can carry a lahar, wind can carry ash, and roads, water, power, aviation, and supply routes can carry disruption farther still. The chapter helps a household use official maps and instructions to decide whether its plan begins with movement, shelter, or continuity.

The guide is one part of the work.

When you need an official source rather than a chapter, Signals helps find the responsible publisher and the Regional Hazard Atlas compares selected reports, observations, forecasts, and planning layers. Local authorities remain the source for instructions.

For another way into the subject, read a fictional Field Story. When you are ready to put the household on paper, continue to Build Your Kit.

Five guides.Five different clocks.

The guide is one part of the work.

Five guides.
Five different clocks.