ShakeTrailer at Redwood Acres Fair teaches earthquake preparedness

At Redwood Acres Fairgrounds in Eureka, the ShakeTrailer is turning a summer fair into a blunt reminder that Humboldt County lives with earthquake and tsunami risk every day. The mobile simulator, brought to town by the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, lets fairgoers feel strong shaking in a safe, controlled setting while organizers push a more serious message: preparedness has to start at home.

A fair booth with a public-safety mission

The Redwood Acres Fair runs from June 18 through June 21, and the ShakeTrailer is set up to reach families over several days instead of in a single demonstration. That matters in a county where emergency education can be easy to postpone and dangerous to ignore. The booth is also designed to draw people in with games and prizes, but the real goal is to get residents thinking about what would happen in the first seconds of a major quake, and what their homes would look like once the shaking stops.

Amanda Admire, co-chair of the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group, said the simulator is a way to help people visualize real shaking and understand the dangers of unprepared living spaces. That framing fits the exhibit’s larger purpose. It is not trying to entertain people into readiness. It is trying to show them how quickly ordinary furniture, loose items and blocked exits can become hazards.

Why Humboldt cannot treat this like a routine fair attraction

Humboldt County sits in one of the most exposed parts of the West Coast. Earthquake Country Alliance says the Northern California coast is the most tsunami-prone area of the continental United States, and that 34 tsunamis have been recorded on the North Coast in the past 70 years, with five causing damage. Those are not abstract numbers for a region with low-lying neighborhoods, beach access points and communities that depend on knowing when to move inland.

County tsunami maps make the risk even more concrete. Green areas are marked as high enough or far enough inland to be safe even in extreme events, while yellow areas sit closer to danger, especially near the beach or in low-lying places. For people who live, work or recreate around Eureka and the rest of Humboldt County, understanding those colors is part of the job of staying alive after the shaking starts. The fair exhibit gives organizers a chance to repeat that message face to face.

The hazard source is equally clear. Cal OES says the Cascadia Subduction Zone is an 800-mile-long offshore fault stretching from Northern California to Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and that a magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake would be immediately devastating. That scale of event is why local officials keep stressing both strong shaking and tsunami evacuation knowledge. A big quake is not just a seismic problem. It is a housing problem, a transportation problem and a communications problem all at once.

What the region has already lived through

History gives the warning signs a face. The March 27, 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake, measured at magnitude 9.2, triggered a tsunami that caused casualties and damage from Alaska to northern California. California seismic safety materials say that tsunami killed 12 people in Northern California and caused more than $15 million in damages. In Crescent City, surges reached 21 feet and inundated 29 city blocks.

That history is part of why North Coast preparedness conversations never stay theoretical for long. In March 2024, Cal Poly Humboldt hosted a public forum with the National Weather Service Eureka, the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group and the California Geological Survey to revisit earthquake and tsunami hazards and talk about what the community learned from the previous year’s local quake sequence. The point of those conversations was not simply to review damage after the fact. It was to ask what should be done differently before the next event.

The ShakeTrailer fits into that same continuum of learning. It gives people a physical reminder that shaking is not something to watch from a distance. It is something that can throw you off balance, rattle your home and force split-second decisions while the ground is still moving.

What to have ready now

The message at the fair is built around the Seven Steps to Earthquake Safety, the framework used by Earthquake Country Alliance and the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group. The most practical pieces are straightforward, and they begin long before any warning siren or shaking starts.

• Anchor furniture and other heavy items that could tip or fall.

• Walk through your home and identify hazards that could block exits or injure people during a quake.

• Know whether your home, workplace and regular routes sit in a green or yellow tsunami zone.

• Keep the regional guide, Living on Shaky Ground: How to Survive Earthquakes and Tsunamis in Northern California, within reach for family planning.

• Practice what happens before, during and after a major quake so that the response is familiar, not improvised.

Those steps sound simple because they are simple. The hard part is doing them before anyone feels the floor move. In a region where the next major earthquake could also trigger a tsunami, the difference between readiness and delay can be measured in minutes, and sometimes in lives.

The real test of the ShakeTrailer

The ShakeTrailer may be the most visible part of the Redwood Acres Fair, but it is also a test of whether local emergency messaging is changing behavior. A display that makes people laugh, grab a prize and step back into the fair can still matter if it sends them home to anchor a shelf, mark a safe route or check a tsunami map with fresh urgency.

Humboldt County does not lack warnings. It has hazard maps, state guidance, regional alliances and hard history, from the 1964 tsunami to the ongoing attention from Cal Poly Humboldt, county officials and North Coast emergency partners. What it still needs is follow-through in households, where readiness either becomes routine or never happens. The ShakeTrailer is there to push that choice into the open.