If you’ve never attended a lunch meeting of the Rotary Club of Wilsonville, you’ve been missing some wonderful speakers covering a broad range of topics and issues. If you’d like to join us for a future meeting, the Club meets every Thursday from noon – 1:00 pm at the Al Kadar Center in Wilsonville. Lunch is on us!

As an example, one of our recent speakers included Dr. Scott Burns, who has been a professor of Geology and faculty leader at Portland State University since 1990 had Rotary members on the edge of their seats describing all the impacts on life, infrastructure and our environment that the “Big One” will have on the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Burns is a frequent expert on earthquakes, landslides and other of mother nature’s most powerful events, often seen on the television news in Portland. He also applies his local knowledge of landscapes and oenology when he leads geological wine tours in the Yamhill Valley area.

Dr. Burns described earthquake liquefaction, which occurs during large Richter scale events. He noted that the evidence of previous tsunamis is along the Oregon coast, including petrified “ghost forests” that resurface along the shore line, particularly during the stormy winter months. He also noted that there is evidence of a “widow” tsunami in Japan in the early 1700s, which means there was no earthquake that accompanied it; and that the earthquake came from somewhere else, and in this case from the the western U.S.