Sometime, probably during the next 50 or so years, everyone living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States will experience an odd sensation which those who survive will never forget, and which will form the basis of legends for a century or more.
For a brief moment every single person will experience what scientists refer to as “a sudden jolt”.
It will feel like a slight upward pressure and it will be over so quickly that some will think they only imagined it.
Only the well informed will know it’s a sign of disaster.
For the next 90 seconds there will be no other, perceptible, physical effects. The only sign that something has gone wrong, very badly wrong, will be the sound of every dog, for miles around, barking and howling mournfully.
And then the first shockwaves will hit as the ground bucks and rears in some places, buckles and collapses in others. Power grids will fail in the first 30 seconds. If it happens at night they’ll experience the next four or so minutes in total, terrifying darkness. And by the time it ends and the ground has stopped shaking, much of what they knew and loved will be gone … and then around ten minutes later the tsunami will roll in.
They call it The Cascadia, and when the earthquake hits it will level everything for hundreds of miles, and before the Discovery Channel put all this where we could see it, most people had never heard of it. Many, including some of those who live within its deadly reach, still haven’t.
Or maybe they just don’t want to.
Because you can know too much. You can be too aware.
Most people don’t realise how close they dance to the edge of death on a semi-regular basis, and really, who wants to? There is comfort in locking out the more awful realities of life … it’s even necessary, if we aren’t all to go stark raving mad. But that state of affairs doesn’t last.
Eventually, the more awful truths we live with hit us and even if, on every level, we’ve accepted that they are coming we’re never, ever prepared for them. The Pacific Northwest is not even remotely prepared for the mega-quake, although the phenomenon has been understood for years now.
It’s easy to understand why; the last earthquake there was in 1700, before regional records were being kept. They have no frame of reference for what a disaster like this would look like, and therefore they are still dreadfully complacent about it.
Sevco fans have suffered a mega-quake before, but what never ceases to amaze me is how unprepared they are for another one. If you listen, you can hear the dogs howling and barking over there. They’ve already felt the compression wave, what we would experience as the “sudden jolt.”
The next disaster over there is coming, it’s just a matter of time.
And although the ground isn’t shaking yet the tsunami might already be rolling in.
Over on the Scottish Football Monitor, a site I still believe is the most important forum in Celtic cyberspace, BarcaBhoy has written a post on the false logic at the heart of all this talk about Sevco finding “major investment.”
As I’ve written here before, he points out that even the language they use is disingenuous if not outright deceitful; this will not be “investment”, and no-one should believe that it is. This will take a sugar-daddy to write them a cheque with no prospect whatsoever that there will ever be a return on the money.
He postulates a scenario in which Sevco is “gifted” £60 million, and as he clearly demonstrates, even that would not change the fundamental problems which face that club, including a 3-1 earnings ratio in our favour. He makes it plain that any effort by their club to spend such a sum will send their running costs into the stratosphere and have calamitous effects on them. It is doubtful they would even survive the consequences of it.
All this garbage about Gerrard coming to Ibrox and being given a war-chest, it is pure fantasy.
Even if the initial capital were there – it is not – they would have to grow the infrastructure and earning potential of the club to the point where they could meet the costs that would be associated with spending huge sums of money on players.
The reality is that their next manager will have to find a way of getting the best out of the bloated team currently there, short a few players they can ship out of the door. The talk of huge money coming into the club will not help them; what they need is a complete rebuilding of the infrastructure, to maximise earning potential beyond what they currently have, and the laying of foundations for a future built on youth.
But they won’t do that. I already know, and we all already know, that they won’t. They persist in this notion that their club has to spend money, that it has to be “challenging”, that it has to be geared towards winning the SPL. If Aberdeen or Hibs acted in such a reckless manner and tailored their entire strategy towards such a goal we would all rightly be calling it madness.
Unlike with the Cascadia, the first undeniable sign most Sevco fans will have that something catastrophic has gone wrong will be when they see the ticker-tape bar on Sky Sports News with the word ADMINISTRATION on it again.
But they will never be able to say that they weren’t warned in advance.
When the big one hits over there it will bring everything down they’ve been able to build over the last six years, levelling them all over again. By the time the tsunami rolls in, in the form of the auditors and forensic accountants, what’s left will only be fit for the buzzards.
They don’t believe that, much as the people of the Pacific Northwest don’t believe that the Cascadia fault will ever unleash its full power. They continue to live in blissful ignorance. Some experts think a lot of them are going to die that way too.
Another Ibrox club dying in ignorance will be poetic … it’s how they’ve existed, after all.
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