![]() Preparations for this threat have especially lagged in Washington, says state seismologist Harold Tobin, who chairs the University of Washington’s seismology and geohazards program and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network: “Oregon, California and British Columbia have all taken it more seriously.”Įven if preparations speed up, Coast Guard rescuers will face a daunting task after the Big One strikes - assuming they survive it themselves. Someday - next week, next year, maybe next century - a sudden and deadly marine shock will strike the Northwest coast: what locals call the Big One, a circa 9.0-magnitude offshore earthquake generating tsunami surges reaching 60 feet high or more. Two 29-foot and two 45-foot short-range response boats deal with local emergencies they joined the choppers on 16 rescue missions in 2021 and responded on their own in 23 others.īut those exploits are just a warm-up for the disaster to come. Ediz Hook is also home base for four seagoing cutters, 87 to 110 feet long, and one 210-foot medium-endurance cutter, which are often away patrolling for drug smuggling, human trafficking, illegal fishing, oil spills and other security and environmental threats. In 2021, they undertook 195 search-and-rescue missions. The station’s three MH-65 Dolphin helicopters are the only aircraft the Coast Guard, America’s frontline coastal defense and search-and-rescue service, bases along Washington’s deeply crenulated 3,026-mile coastline. Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles is the very first of first responders when something goes wrong, as it often does, on the state’s tangled straits and inlets and stormy outer coast and, sometimes, on the peaks and bluffs overlooking them. At its tip, between snowy mountains to the south and Vancouver Island to the north, sits what may be the nation’s most scenically sited military installation - and its most vulnerable. ISIL attacks in Afghanistan have often targeted the minority Shia communities, as well as foreigners and foreign interests.On the north shore of Washington’s wild Olympic Peninsula, a scimitar-shaped sandspit called Ediz Hook arcs for three miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The ISIL group has also claimed other recent attacks in Kabul, including a bombing near a checkpoint at the city’s military airport that killed and wounded several people and also an assault on a Kabul hotel in mid-December. The group has emerged as the biggest security threat to the Taliban, which took over Afghanistan in August 2021 after US-led foreign forces withdrew after 20 years of war.Ī blast in January killed at least five people and injured dozens at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as employees streamed out of the building at the end of their work day. Muzammil was known for his resistance to ISIL in the area. Six members of the armed group were killed, he added. The raid comes as the Taliban rulers crack down on the regional affiliate of the ISIL group – known as the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), which has carried out several deadly attacks in recent months killing dozens, including Balkh governor Mohammad Dawood Muzammil last month.Īccording to Mohammad Asif Waziri, a spokesman for the police chief in Balkh, the operation late on Monday night targeted an ISIL hideout in Nahri Shahi district. Taliban forces have killed six members of the ISIL armed group (ISIS) in Afghanistan’s northern Balkh province during an overnight raid, a Taliban spokesman said on Tuesday.
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