Pacific Northwest counties prepare for ‘The Big One’

Key Takeaways

The Cascadia subduction zone is a fault line off the coast of the Pacific Northwest that stretches 700 miles from Northern California, through Oregon and Washington up to British Columbia. 

When it eventually ruptures, which scientists predict could happen in the next 50 years, it will devastate the Pacific Northwest in an unprecedented way, generating an earthquake that could reach a magnitude 9.0 or greater and setting off a 100-foot tsunami that could alter the floodplain footprint for centuries. If only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way, the resulting earthquake will have a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.6, which scientists predict there’s a 37%-43% chance of happening within the next 50 years. 

If the entire zone gives way at once — a full-margin rupture — the magnitude will reach somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2, which researchers say has a 16%-22% chance of happening within the next 50 years. According to FEMA, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake on the Cascadia fault would kill an estimated 14,000 people in Oregon and Washington. 

Not a matter of ‘if’

What scientists refer to as “The Big One” could happen in five minutes or it could happen in hundreds of years; what is known is that it will happen, and counties must work to mitigate its destruction through inter-governmental and -agency collaboration, according to Chris Voss, emergency management director for Multnomah County, Ore., one of the communities in the Cascadia subduction zone. 

“This isn’t an ‘if,’ it’s an absolute ‘when,’” Voss said. “Fifty years, well it may seem like a long time, but from a geological sense, it’s nothing. It’s a blink of an eye.”

Robert Ezelle, Washington state’s emergency management division director, has said it will be “the worst natural disaster in our country’s history,” and if the natural disaster happens in the winter, destruction will be even “twice as worse,” because wet soils cause more damage, according to Voss. 

The rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will also have drastic effects long-term. Models released in April, created by U.S. Geological Survey scientists and researchers at Virginia Tech, the University of North Carolina and the University of Oregon, show that the number of structures — such as hospitals, airports, water and electricity plants — and roads exposed to frequent flooding will triple in the aftermath of the disaster and it could remain that way for centuries. 

When The Big One hits, people living in coastal counties along the Cascadia subduction zone will have to be self-sufficient for at least two weeks — the time it’ll take for external aid to come in, according to county emergency management officials in the Pacific Northwest. 

Establishing evacuation plans

The majority of people won’t be able to evacuate, which is why it’s so important for communities to establish strategy ahead of time — especially because, during disasters, people often make irrational decisions because of how emotionally charged they are, so having a set individual plan ahead of time is key, according to Tiffany Brown, Lane County, Ore.’s emergency management manager.

“In that moment, your head isn’t working clearly, and so to what extent you can think about things ahead of time, do so,” Brown said. 

“Prepare yourself ahead of time, so that you’re not having to ‘MacGyver’ your way through that very bad day. And one of the key things, yes, physical preparations, but what’s most likely to leave us unhinged in that environment is not knowing where our people are — not knowing where our loved ones are, if they’re safe. 

“So, a big part of preparing emotionally and psychologically is coming up with a communication plan ahead of time about how you’ll reunite with people, how you’ll communicate with them.”

Neighborhood teams

Pierce County, Wash. has established a model of neighborhood emergency teams, in which communities go through a planning process ahead of disasters to determine what hazards and assets it has as far as response, according to Mike Halliday, Pierce County Emergency Management’s public information specialist. 

“So, who in your neighborhood has medical training? Who maybe has tools that could be useful for helping do some minor extraction of people from a collapsed structure or who has understanding of how to shut off electrical panels and gas lines?” Halliday said. “And then, who in your neighborhood is going to need extra assistance? The elderly or disabled neighbor — knowing who those people are. 

“And then from there, you practice, so that when we have this situation, you’re ready to help your community.”

Evacuation that does occur will likely look like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where the goal was to get people far away, as opposed to evacuation to nearby counties, which will likely also be devastated, according to Voss. Vulnerable populations — including the thousands of people in Multnomah County on dialysis and in assisted living and nursing homes — will have to be airlifted out of the area by the federal government, he said. 

While federal recovery support and funding flows in the aftermath of a natural disaster, the on-the-ground work and immediate response is done at the local level, which sets up other counties to be the best frontlines of support when Cascadia ruptures, Voss said. 

It will be beneficial to bring in “people from counties across the country who understand the local environment and work in the local environment on an everyday basis,” Voss said. “When we’re asking for law enforcement, I think bringing in state and locals from other counties, that’s the way you want to go. When we’re asking for firefighters, when we’re asking for public works organizations to assist — the best way counties are supported during a big emergency is from other counties.”

Beyond establishing collaborative emergency management plans, counties in Oregon and Washington are working to better prepare for the eventual Big One through grant-funded projects that include seismic retrofitting infrastructure, including hospitals and bridges, and creating resilience hubs. 

“It’s a race for time,” Brown said. “And we’re never going to be ready, so it’s really just everybody trying to get done what they can in the meantime.”

Resilience hubs

King County, Wash. is building resilience hubs, which provide a safe space for resource distribution and communication coordination before, during and after emergencies, and it’s also something Brown said she wants to see implemented in Lane County. 

“In my vision, my perfect world of what I see happening in the future, every county is sliced into hubs and regions and locations,” Brown said. “So that we can start encouraging folks to start looking at how they will take care of themselves after an event, whether that’s with our support ahead of time, or them coming up with solutions on their own, a combination of both.”

King County’s preparation work has also included projects that look at “population islands” that would develop in the wake of the earthquake, identifying issues such as roads that would be unusable and bridges that would collapse throughout the eight counties in the Puget Sound region; creating connections with the maritime industry to arrange bringing in supplies with the knowledge that traditional, over-the-ground transportation networks will be disrupted and working with local suppliers to get food and other basic necessities to people as quickly as possible after the disaster, according to Brendan McCluskey, director of King County’s office of emergency management. 

Earthquake-resistant bridges

Multnomah County is in the process of replacing the Burnside Bridge in Portland, making it seismically resilient to better withstand natural disasters, including The Big One. The bridge will be critical infrastructure in emergency response and recovery efforts. 

“We are getting better and better prepared, but we also have more than twice the unreinforced masonry that the city of Seattle has,” Voss said. “And we’re smaller, so we have real risks.”

One of those risks is liquefaction. Oregon has no refineries, so about 95% of Multnomah County’s fuel comes from Washington through a pipeline, which has a capacity to carry around 350 million gallons, according to Voss.

“To put that in perspective, we’re expecting between 100 million and 200 million [gallons] to leak,” Voss said. “Exxon Valdez [the 1989 Alaskan oil spill] was 11 million. 

“So, you’re potentially talking about an environmental disaster that’s going to be caused as well. We won’t just have the fuel, but a lot of it’s going to be in our river or on our land — there’s these layering of incidents.”

The majority of local government mitigation work is made possible through federal grant funding. FEMA’s cancellation of its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which provided local governments with funding for hazard mitigation projects that reduce the risks and costs related to natural disasters, has been a rough pill for counties to swallow, according to Brown. Grant funding sources like BRIC are the only way some communities, particularly those that are rural, can even conceive of completing infrastructure projects, she noted. 

“With respect to Cascadia, loss of the BRIC funding is huge,” Brown said. “They were hard enough to get; we had too few of them already. It’s demoralizing in terms of the little progress that we do feel like we’re making.”

Lane County’s small coastal neighbor, Clatsop County, Ore. (with a population of just over 41,100 people), received more than $20 million in BRIC funding for tsunami and seismic resiliency to retrofit its rural hospital, which is in the tsunami inundation zone. FEMA’s cancellation of the BRIC program has left the rural community without funding to complete the project. 

The report released by Oregon’s emergency management following the 2016 Cascadia Rising exercise scenario, which brought together multi-level government agencies to assess how coordination will work during the natural disaster, stated that Clatsop County will likely have the highest number of tsunami-related injuries and deaths — with an estimated 4,000 casualties in the city of Seaside alone. 

Clatsop County Commissioner Mark Kujala, who is also the executive director of the Columbia Memorial Hospital Foundation, co-signed a letter to FEMA earlier this month requesting its original funding agreement for the project. 

The hospital is not part of a larger health care network and receives no tax revenue. Outside of the BRIC grant and philanthropic donations, the project is entirely self-funded, with the hospital borrowing funds for capital construction with “substantial” monthly interest, according to Kujala and Erik Thorsen, the hospital’s CEO.

“Significant harm to the Clatsop County community will result if grant funds are rescinded from this project that [Columbia Memorial Hospital] has been promised and depended on for almost two years,” the letter reads. “We respectfully request your review and approval of obligating the remainder of the grant award. Doing so will enable us to move forward with constructing a resilient, cost-effective facility that will be a model for other vulnerable, coastal communities.”

With federal funding sources up in the air, localities can also incentivize homeowners and businesses to do mitigation work. King County and the city of Seattle have special tax program incentives to seismic retrofit buildings, according to McCluskey. 

“This is the proverbial, ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ And it’s one by one,” Voss said, of mitigation work. “I imagine that at some point, we’ll be finished with the Burnside Bridge in a few years, and then we’ll be looking toward, ‘OK, what’s the next one that we try to retrofit or improve?’ But it will take us probably decades to be at a point where we’d say, ‘Our bridges are going to be in good shape. They will fare well.’

“We’re trying to eat this elephant one bite at a time, but you’d like, sometimes, if those bites could be a little bit bigger — it’ll get us there a little faster, rather than just nibbling at this thing, because I don’t know that we have 300 or 400 more years to prepare.”

Ahead of the storm: Breakthroughs in disaster prevention, management

by Mary Ann Barton

editor

As disasters become more frequent and more costly, counties are getting more creative in ways to prevent or plan for them. The following are some examples of some of those innovative actions, from cutting-edge tech to old-fashioned standbys.

Wildfire technology

“As the founder and chairman of the Douglas County (Colo) Wildfire Action Collaborative — a coalition I launched after the Chatridge II Fire came within feet of destroying the Backcountry neighborhood in Highlands Ranch — I know just how close we’ve come to catastrophe,” Commissioner Abe Laydon said last month at a press conference to discuss how the county is fighting back. 

“That fire was a warning shot, and Douglas County heard it loud and clear,” he said. “Today, we are leading Colorado in wildfire defense — and are the only county in the state with a dedicated firefighting helicopter and Helitack team on standby 365 days a year.”

To ensure the county’s access to year-round aerial wildfire support, the Douglas County Board approved a contract for $1,530,000 in January for a company to provide use of a helicopter to fight wildfires through the end of the year.

Keeping an eye out

In addition to the helicopter, the county also mounted camera stations on 12 cell towers that identify the first signs of smoke and alert emergency responders. The wildfire detection system is funded by utility companies in a public-private partnership with the county.

California also uses cameras to check for wildfires; during a two-month trial period, 77 wildfires were spotted before 911 calls were made, according to a recent report by the Sonoma County Gazette.

Using drones for 
evacuation decisions

In Horry County, S.C., the fire and rescue department is using drones to make evacuation decisions during wildfires. 

“For example, here with this fire, the night of the fire, we have four [drones] relay real-time video data back to the incident commanders, so they were able to make real decisions, seeing where the fire was going, what it was doing, what neighbors needed to be evacuated in real time,” Captain Mike Rice with Horry County Fire and Rescue told WPDE-TV in March. That’s when the county was battling a 2,000-acre wildfire in the region.

“We’ve been using drones around the perimeter, especially if we need to go check a remote area of the fire using the thermal imaging, and especially in the evening when the sun goes down, we can see where the hotspots are and it saves a lot of time and a lot of manpower,” said Rice.

Wildfire app

Watch Duty is a new app for wildfire alerts that has interactive maps allowing users to track evacuation zones, shelter locations, live camera feeds and fire perimeters as well as information about containment on specific fires. 

The basic version is free to download, and the non-profit that makes it is funded through donations and subscriptions to advanced and pro versions. The app draws from various official sources of wildfire information. The app is populated with information from a small army of volunteer contributors and staff reporters with firefighting, emergency dispatch and journalism experience who watch wilderness camera live streams and listen in on firefighter radio communications in the field.

Everything old is new again

When it comes to managing disasters, not every new idea is cutting-edge. When the power or cellphone networks fail during disasters, some of the old tried and true ways of communicating become a godsend. 

When Hurricane Helene took out power and cellular communication across western North Carolina, first responders were able to stay connected using radio infrastructure. 

Many counties are upgrading their existing radio systems to take advantage of new feature sets that make radio even more effective during a disaster.

Illinois’s Madison County, for example, is investing $10 million in a new emergency radio system, and in Pennsylvania, Washington County commissioners recently approved a contract to install a new emergency radio system for first responders.

Amateur radio

Another old-fashioned way of communicating during a disaster, amateur radio or ham radio, also has its proponents. When Hurricane Helene made landfall near Perry, Fla., Sept. 26, as a Category 4 storm with winds of 140 miles per hour, it was the strongest hurricane on record to slam into Florida’s Big Bend.

Ham radio operator volunteers were embedded with county officials and at the State Emergency Operations Center. The “hams” passed along more than 100 surface reports that were used by forecasters to make more informed decisions about the storm and helped coordinate communication for relief efforts as the storm moved to the Carolinas.

Ham radio also has its proponents on Capitol Hill. U.S. Senators Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), recently reintroduced the Amateur Radio Emergency Preparedness Act, which would give amateur radio operators the right to install amateur radio antennas and serve their communities. 

Many homeowner associations prevent amateur radio operators from installing outdoor antennas on residential properties. However, this communication method has proven to be essential in emergencies and natural disasters.

The Amateur Radio Emergency Preparedness Act would limit the scenarios in which homeowner associations could ban, prevent or require approval for the installation or use of amateur radio antennas. Among other provisions, this legislation would:

• Prohibit homeowner association rules that prevent or ban amateur radio antennas;
• Clarify the approval process for installing amateur radio antennas; and
• Give amateur radio operators a private right of action.

“They’re able to relate real time information about what is happening and give ground truth as far as flooding and tornadic activity or whatever,” Josh Jonston, director of emergency management with the National Association for Amateur Radio, told Texas Public Radio. 

“But they’re also able to pass health and welfare traffic or be able to get word out if they know that a family is safe and they’ve got a family member they’re trying to contact.”