Washington State and Oregon are considering building more tsunami shelter facilities along the Pacific Coast

If you’re on the Pacific Northwest Coast when the next huge Cascadia earthquake—also known as “The Big One”—the standard advice is to run to higher ground once the shaking stops. But in some low-lying places like Ocean Shores, Long Beach, Washington, Warrenton, and Seaside, Oregon, the closest elevated area can be a long walk over winding roads.

According to a new state study, dozens of elevated evacuation platforms are needed along the Washington coast to ensure people can escape the tsunami caused by a major earthquake in the offshore Cascadia fault zone.

“There is no way for a lot of people to get to high places in time,” said Maximilian Dixon, a geohazard superintendent for the Washington Department of Emergency Management. “It’s not physically possible given 10 to 15 to 20 minutes before the first wave arrives in that area. So, we’re going to have to build vertical evacuation structures. There’s no way around it.”

A new assessment by the Dixon Agency identified the need for 55 to 85 evacuation buildings on the Pacific Coast between Illoaco and Nea Bay, Washington. The state study suggested potential sites in coastal towns and cities to build towers, artificial mounds or multi-purpose safe havens, but Dixon said it was up to local officials to apply for federal grants to build them. Each tsunami shelter structure could potentially have a price tag in the millions of dollars.

The Study of Vertical Tsunami Evacuation on the Outer Coast was the culmination of more than ten years of tsunami modeling, inundation and evacuation mapping, community meetings and engineering design exercises. University of Washington experts and students collaborated on an initiative called Project Safe Haven that laid the foundation for the new analysis.

“At the state level, we wanted to know how many of these things needed to be built so we could handle the scale of the need,” Dixon said. “This is supposed to be a starting point.”

An earthquake and tsunami preparedness officer for the Oregon Office of Emergency Management said she hopes her state and coastal communities can take a fresh look at vertical evacuation needs.

“We have put the pandemic back on our feet,” geohazards program coordinator Althea Rizzo said in an interview Thursday. “Oregon definitely needs to think about this.”

Both Oregon and Washington christened their first model tsunami evacuation structures before the coronavirus pandemic to control emergency managers’ time.

Shoreside in Newport, Oregon State University’s heavily reinforced new Marine Studies building is built with a spacious exterior staircase leading to its flat roof, where there is room for about 900 people to ride the tsunami waves.

In Westport, Washington, the Ocosta School District has built a new gymnasium with a reinforced roof capable of accommodating 1,000 people. The ceiling height of 53 feet above sea level is calculated to be comfortably higher than the worst tsunami wave.

The Shoalwater Bay Tribe appears to be the next to first appear in a vertical tsunami shelter. The tribe in Willapa Bay secured funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to build a stand-alone evacuation tower on the vulnerable Tuckland Peninsula. The director of the tribe’s emergency management said that the foundation of the steel tower containing the two-story shelter platform will be completed next week. The tribe hopes to have everything done by the spring of 2022. The completion of the $2.5 million tower has been delayed by nearly a year due to supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Some emergency planners have concerns about relying on vertical evacuation structures because it entails leaving potentially large groups of people in the middle of a disaster area who will need to be rescued later. While these survivors wait, they will be exposed to the elements on a structure that is likely to be attacked by tracking debris and possibly subjecting them to hazardous waste runoff.

Faced with this point, Rizzo said, “If that’s possible, we want people to get out of the tsunami zone.” “Going to natural higher ground is much better than vertical evacuation.”

Unless people are willing to give up living and vacationing along the coast, she continued, “there are places where people are going to die unless we do something.”

That’s also the conclusion reached by city leaders in Ocean Shores and Westport, Washington. Both cities are located on a long and flat peninsula. Dixon said Westport has applied to FEMA for funding to build the second tsunami vertical evacuation structure.

Ocean Shores Mayor Crystal Dingler said her town has now secured enough funds from federal, state and local sources to build its first vertical shelter.

Dingler said the planned tower in a city-owned building is currently in the design phase and a pilot date has not yet been set. She said it would be located near Ocean Shores Elementary School and a large church.

“People are very passionate in our community,” Dingler said in an interview Thursday. “We are moving in the right direction.”

Copyright 2021 Northwest News Network

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