Living in the pacific northwest gives us some familiarity with earthquakes. You've probably felt one or two right? But what about those large and disastrous quakes, like the one that hit Japan a couple years ago, or the one that created the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004? We're lucky that most quakes in Oregon are fairly small-scale. California bears the brunt of earthquake-related damage on the west coast and even the Seattle region gets hit more often than Portland.