The Real Stakes of Living on the West Coast in 2017

I don't care if you believe my story but you need to hear this. Everybody needs to hear this, especially if you live on the west coast of the United States, in particular Oregon and southern California.

I'm a reporter for a mid-sized paper in Santa Barbara, I mostly write about local politics and social events. A few weeks ago I was approached by an agitated young man claiming to be on leave from the naval station in Long Beach. He said he made sure he wasn't followed and that he only had an hour to talk but that everybody needed to be warned and he didn't care what happened after that.

I got a friend of mine and our new editor together, I have a contextual code I give them when I think we might have an interesting experience with a person that has mental issues. It's generally better to at least hear someone out rather than dismiss them completely if they go to the trouble to find you in person.

So the three of us were in the conference room with this guy and he tells his story, I just listened to it again on my recorder. He is a trained sonar operator and works in a command center where they monitor a huge array of sonar stations off the coast of California. It gives the Navy notification of almost any enemy submarine activity. He is usually watching over a dozen foreign submarines near Los Angeles and San Francisco conducting operations legally in international waters. But they're all tracked and our forces are always positioned in a manner to have general dominance so on most days everything is good.

The last few months though he said, it's been "an entirely different story." There are three times as many hostile submarines as usual and they are conducting their own offensive operations, and all he would say is that "things have happened. A lot of sailors won't be going home, you just haven't heard about it yet. Or you may never hear about it."
The second and bigger issue, he said, is the North Korean operations. Their subs have gone completely dark and several of their vehicles were last spotted north of San Francisco and off the Oregon coast.

In other words, if there is a war they are going to strike the fault lines along the west coast of California, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. We have the most sophisticated array of ships and underwater resolution technologies in the world, and have spared no expense, but these North Korean submarines are so small and quiet that they can literally cross the bottom of the pacific ocean at 10 knots and we have no chance of seeing them, they're smaller than whales and way quieter.

We know they are out there, we have caught glimpses of them but short of carpet imploding the bottom of the entire ocean, they can sit on the San Andreas fault for years at a time with either nukes or enough TNT to cause a major seismic event.

This is an every day operational concern for the U.S. Navy, and it is something that they do not want people to worry about, but they should know. The operational plans have no effective response for a North Korean first, or if their dead man switch triggers retaliation in response to something they don't like.

Even if the entire North Korean military command was 'decapitated' and their entire force in North Korea neutralized exactly according to plan, we would still be looking at around 500 North Koreans commandos in squads of 6 walking out of the ocean in the middle of the night and destroying every major bridge, subway and electrical transformer station in every major city on the west coast. And while that is happening, the biggest explosions they can possibly make will go off on top of both major unstable fault lines.

You know what will happen if the San Andreas goes, think 9+ on the Richter scale and several hundred square miles of populated city dropping underwater. But if they hit the Oregon shelf hard enough, the tidal wave would destroy 30 miles of Oregon coast and possibly set off mount Hood, destroying Portland within a week, with lava and ash.
The high command knows there is no defense for this, they are too small and determined. It's too much area to possibly defend.

Where would you park a sub with a few tons of TNT or worse?

From Discovery.com

The North Korean subs are stationed on this trench with massive explosives.

We asked him a few more questions about his deployment and personal history, got a look at his ID and just about that time there was a knock at the door. This is where it got strange. His assistant was there and she apologized for interrupting but asked if they could speak alone for a minute. Our office was windowed and I could see men in suits. I was like, you're kidding me. It feels like a prank, like a cheap prank show. The kid saw them and his face went pale.
He said, 'I guess they know everything now. Oh well. I tried.' He tried to look calm but I could tell he was upset, like about to cry and hiding it, compensating, a crack in his voice.

Then he just got up and walked out, they grabbed his arm and walked him out without looking back.

My editor never mentioned it again. My friend asked me to never mention to it to her again. I know I can't publish it. But the kid is right, people need to know this. If there is war with North Korea it could destroy the entire West Coast of the United States. There is not a way to attack them without this happening.

And if you think about it, the President is gambling with parts of the country that happen to be entirely part of his permanent opposition. He doesn't need these votes to maintain power, actually the opposite.

Americans have this feeling like they are isolated and removed from the actual conflicts their government has started while the rest of the world is in a posture where they could actually attack us easily and with devastating effect, and on a scale beyond anything ever seen in history.

As for myself, I have decided to leave Southern California for a while. I have a job offer from a friend in a nice seismically stable part of the country, I'm going to take him up on it.

I don't like the idea of being a chip on the current president's Roulette table, but everybody takes their own chances.
And the kid, I tried to find any evidence of him existing. I even asked our Private Investigator to look into. He was able to confirm the sailor existed, but that now he can't be found and he was told in as many words it would not be good for his health to keep asking questions.

I have never been interested in hard news reporting, I don't even see myself as a reporter, really. They pay me more for what I don't know, the questions I won't ask.

This experience makes me wonder though, have I been hurting everyone more than I ever thought? Now there is something really dangerous on a scale I never would have imagined and everyone I lived my life around for years is carrying on right underneath, oblivious. It's as though the parts of the world I was ignoring, and helping other people ignore, kept getting bigger. Now it's so big no one will believe you even if you are pointing straight at it.

Listen of don't listen, believe or don't believe, but I feel better this is out there. If it ends up badly, I will at least not have aided our enemies, and our military overlords, by helping them keep the secret of how they use civilian lives, our lives, as pieces to gamble away in their insane games.