Preliminary Geotechnical Engineering Report GeoPacific <br />Project No. 18-4986, 177 Day Island Road, Eugene, Oregon 11 1 11 1 <br />REGIONAL GEOLOGIC SETTING <br />The subject site lies within the Willamette Valley/Puget Sound lowland, a broad structural <br />depression situated between the Coast Range on the west and the Cascade Range on the east. A <br />series of discontinuous faults subdivide the Willamette Valley into a mosaic of fault-bounded, <br />structural blocks (Yeats et al., 1996). Uplifted structural blocks form bedrock highlands, while <br />down-warped structural blocks form sedimentary basins. <br />The site is underlain by the Quaternary age (last 1.6 million years) Willamette Formation, a <br />catastrophic flood deposit associated with repeated glacial outburst flooding of the Willamette <br />Valley (Yeats et al., 1996). The last of these outburst floods occurred about 10,000 years ago. <br />These deposits typically consist of horizontally layered, micaceous, silt to coarse sand forming <br />poorly-defined to distinct beds less than 3 feet thick. Local geologic mapping identifies the near <br />surface soils in the vicinity of the site as Holocene age Alluvium derived from weathering of the <br />Willamette Formation in the pathways of modern drainage morphology (Gannet and Caldwell, <br />1998). <br />The flood deposits are underlain by the Columbia River Basalt Formation (Gannet and Caldwell, <br />1998). The Miocene aged (about 14.5 to 16.5 million years ago) Columbia River Basalts are a <br />thick sequence of lava flows which form the crystalline basement of the Tualatin Valley. The <br />basalts are composed of dense, finely crystalline rock that is commonly fractured along blocky and <br />columnar vertical joints. Individual basalt flow units typically range from 25 to 125 feet thick and <br />interflow zones are typically vesicular, scoriaceous, brecciated, and sometimes include <br />sedimentary rocks. <br />REGIONAL SEISMIC SETTING <br />The Cascadia Subduction Zone is the main potential source zone capable of generating damaging <br />earthquakes in the region of the subject site. <br />Cascadia Subduction Zone <br />The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a 680-mile-long zone of active tectonic convergence where <br />oceanic crust of the Juan de Fuca Plate is subducting beneath the North American continent at a <br />rate of 4 cm per year (Goldfinger et al., 1996). A growing body of geologic evidence suggests that <br />prehistoric subduction zone earthquakes have occurred (Atwater, 1992; Carver, 1992; Peterson et <br />al., 1993; Geomatrix Consultants, 1995). This evidence includes: (1) buried tidal marshes recording <br />episodic, sudden subsidence along the coast of northern California, Oregon, and Washington, (2) <br />burial of subsided tidal marshes by tsunami wave deposits, (3) paleoliquefaction features, and (4) <br />geodetic uplift patterns on the Oregon coast. Radiocarbon dates on buried tidal marshes indicate a <br />recurrence interval for major subduction zone earthquakes of 250 to 650 years with the last event <br />occurring 300 years ago (Atwater, 1992; Carver, 1992; Peterson et al., 1993; Geomatrix <br />Consultants, 1995). The inferred seismogenic portion of the plate interface lies roughly along the <br />Oregon coast at depths of between 20 and 40 miles. <br />18-4986, 177 Day Island Road GRPT 2 GEOPACIFIC ENGINEERING, INC. <br />Version 1, August 27, 2018 <br />