Cascadia Earthquake: Report Says We're Not Ready For What's Coming

At some point in the future - it could be today, ten years from now, by the time you finish reading this story - it is almost guaranteed that a 9.0 earthquake will strike along the 700-mile Cascadia Subduction Zone that runs through Oregon and Washington. And when it happens, bridges will be knocked down, land will liquify, tsunamis will strikes, people will die.

A document prepared for last year's Cascadia Rising training exercise paints a very grim picture.

"Medical facilities in the region may experience a surge of as many as 30,000 injured survivors seeking medical treatment. Some injured survivors may arrive at the hospital only to find out that it has been damaged beyond use. Others may never make it to the hospital because of impassable roads.

"Thousands of critically injured people may need to be evacuated by air or sea if they are to be saved."

The training exercise, which took place over four days last June, involved 20,000 people from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia. In Oregon alone, there were representatives from 23 counties, the nine tribal nations, 17 state agencies and departments, several major cities, and the local branch of the Red Cross.

The state's office of emergency management recently completed their assessment of how everyone performed.

"Are we prepared?" Oregon Emergency Director Andrew Phelps asks in the report. "More than we were yesterday.

"We need to continue to add resources to our developing and existing capabilities, build capacity and reinforce a culture of preparedness so we can continue to say without hesitation we are more prepared today than we were yesterday, and we will be more prepared tomorrow."

The assessment found many positive things on which to build including:

• Jurisdictions of varying size and complexity activated and coordinated internal operations with limited preparedness and training.
• Partners leveraged existing relationships to inform decision-making and facilitate information sharing.
• Auxiliary amateur radio communications were established quickly throughout the state and were maintained throughout the exercise.
• Exercise development provided participating jurisdictions with significant data regarding risks, vulnerabilities, capabilities, and operational considerations prior to and during exercise play.
• The exercise provided an extraordinary opportunity for the state, FEMA, and other agencies and organizations to practice their response to a catastrophic event and to identify gaps in individual and collective capabilities.
• Oregon Health Authority and American Red Cross began developing plans to assess the safety of shelters and the medical needs of shelter residents. Having well developed relationships and coordination plans at the local and state levels enhanced connectivity and resulted in rapid shelter activation within many impacted areas.

Since the purpose of the exercise was to figure out areas where the state needs to improve, much of the language in the assessment is critical.

"Current emergency planning is not adequate or comprehensive enough to effectively address catastrophic disasters and their impact on the whole community within Oregon," the report found. "Government, at all levels, is ill prepared and equipped to implement effective Continuity of Operations (COOP) and Continuity of Government (COG) operations based upon the level of impact identified during the exercise.

"Government’s stability, post-disaster, poses a direct impact to both response operations and recovery efforts."

The report concluded:

• There's not a coordinated plan to accept resources that would be expected to flow into the state after a disaster and to incorporate those resources;
• The extent of damage expected from the earthquake and tsunami is of such a scale
• The exercise demonstrated that a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami would cause damage "well beyond conceptual conceptual impacts to life, safety, property, infrastructure, and heightened response complexities." In other words, the damage would be way beyond what people can think of looking at things in the traditional way would be "ineffectual;"
• Traditional communication systems were disrupted for the first four hours to test alternative communication methods such as amateur radio networks and satellite phones. The satellite phones were found to have "mixed results;"
• Throughout the exercise, many jurisdictions found the contact information within their communication plans was either inaccurate or unavailable;
• Several jurisdictions indicated their amateur radio teams lacked the knowledge of which frequencies to use, and others indicated the “communications out” period (the first four hours of Day 1) illustrated a lack of planning for prioritized back-up methods of communication;
• Lack of coordination between local, state, and federal health and medical agencies resulted in reduced efficiency and delayed deployment of needed response resources to impacted communities;
• Pre-established federal and state missions were not coordinated with local needs and knowledge. This led to state and federal agencies being prepared to provide resources and services either not identified as a need for locals, or not planned for by the locals;
• Agencies were sometimes unable to fill public health and medical resource requests because of a lack of identified staging areas at the local level;
• Government and community service providers should develop more robust operational plans, collaborative working agreements, pathways of communication, and staff training to ensure that mass care support flows quickly and effectively among all involved organizations;
• Movement/mass sheltering of evacuees and patients via ground, air and port transportation routes required greater coordination and planning with local/tribal jurisdictions, NGOs, transportation operators, and federal response organizations;
• Local, state and federal emergency management organizations were not synchronized when it came to prioritizing movement and mass sheltering of simulated patients and casualties from impacted areas.
• The delay was often a result of inadequate communication, non- existent integrated plans, poorly defined operational parameters, and a failure to organize and coordinate responses quickly enough to manage effective responses.

Phelps says that Cascadia Rising "was merely one step in a process" and "will continue for years to come as recommendations and implemented and lessons learned are put into practice."

Phelps praises emergency workers in the state saying they are "some of the most skilled, talented, and experienced" he's ever worked with.

"Despite the challenges of this exercise, each obstacle was met with the determination, flexibility, and creativity to go around, dig under, jump over, or push through to a solution and
move on to the next one," he says.

Illustration via FEMA