Remember that scary piece in The New Yorker, “The Really Big One,” by Kathryn Schulz, that went viral last summer (http://tinyurl.com/schulzbig)? It was about how the Cascadia Subduction Zone is imminently going demolish the Pacific Northwest, and focused on the damages and havoc that would ensue.

The story made a splash nationwide, and instilled terror in her readers’ hearts. It also made Schulz a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner “for an elegant scientific narrative of the rupturing of the Cascadia fault line, a masterwork of environmental reporting and writing” (www.pulitzer.org/winners/kathryn-schulz). The writer and the Pulitzer Prize are shown, courtesy of Pulitzer.org

She followed up the original piece with the very low key “How to Stay Safe When the Big One Comes” (http://tinyurl.com/schulzbig2), which notes that while the Cascadia could rupture at any time, the actual odds are that “there is a 30 percent chance of the M8.0–8.6 Cascadia earthquake and a 10 percent chance of the M8.7–9.2 earthquake in the next 50 years.”

The second story did not cause wide-spread panic. It didn’t win a Pulitzer, either.

— Elleda Wilson