What can we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic to prepare for future disasters?

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on everyone in the world. Here in Oregon, people have already been preparing for disaster in varying degrees for years. KLCC’s Rachel MacDonald talks about what we are learning now that might help in the coming crisis.

For this series on Oregon Resilience and Natural Resources, funded by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Policy, we were looking at the safety of our water supply, climate change, and the looming threat due to the Cascadia subduction earthquake. As I mentioned a few years ago in New Yorker, this event could erase parts of the coast of Oregon and Washington, and plunge the area into an emergency situation beyond anything we’ve ever seen.

We are now in disaster response due to COVID-19. I checked with Lynn County emergency director Patence Winningham

“I was thinking about snow skiing.”

I learned a lot about our resilience in reality. People think outside the box. They work together as a community.

Last February, the region was hit by a massive snowstorm.

“How did you test our community in Lin County. It affected the infrastructure. So, if you remember that we have a lot of power outages, the transportation routes have been broken through.”

Some residents were without electricity for weeks after the blizzard. Others were affected for only a few days. The epidemic is a longer barrier, but our infrastructure is not the most affected.

“A year later, we are testing the other part – the economic impact, recovery, and impacts on our healthcare system and supply chain management. So, all of the things that weren’t necessarily so much ice now accumulating, we’re looking at the other side of the spectrum.”

Winningham says this can prepare us for the Cascadia event in which we will be challenged on all of these fronts: infrastructure, transportation, electricity, healthcare, and the economy. Winningham says she is proud of Lin County and its residents for how they escalate.

“I’ve learned a lot about how resilient we really are. People think outside the box. They work together as a community.”

Winningham notes how people make masks and intensify the delivery of food to people in need.

She says while the federal government can provide funds for relief efforts, it is up to state and local leaders to take over.

This was happening at the neighborhood level. I visited David Monk, whom we spoke with last December about how the Eugene neighborhood association in the southeast of the country is preparing for disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed them forward. They set up a webpage so people can contact them to help shop groceries, walk dogs, and distribute masks.

“This is a large part of our effort to respond to the immediate needs of people around the epidemic and their need to stay at home and stay healthy to recruit new volunteers to work with us and expand the program to the neighborhood.”

Before the pandemic, disaster preparedness work included mapping the neighborhood to see who lives where, who has special skills, and who may be vulnerable. Use that information for this realistic event. Monk says there is a lot to do, in particular, to spread the word to more neighbors and higher participation.

Eugene’s mayor, Lucy Venice, says the epidemic has also forced the city to work on projects already underway – to help vulnerable people who have no homes to house.

“So things like building sanitation facilities, creating outreach teams, creating emergency shelter options. We were able to put them up fairly quickly, and of course if we had an earthquake, we would have to do it faster.”

Venice describes the epidemic as a slow-moving tsunami:

“Since we knew it would hit us, but we didn’t know how strong it was and how high the wave was and so we had time to anticipate it.”

She says they were able to set up the Emergency Operations Center early before peaking at 19 peaks.

“At the Cascadia event, in the earthquake, we have to do it right away. So, I think the lessons here are incredibly valuable to me well, what shortcuts would you take to get this in hours instead of days? What are the first What are you going to do? “

But Venice says the next step, recovering, will be a long journey.

“So now our ability to know how to deal with an economy that has been severely disrupted and destroyed the lives of the once destabilizing people, how can you bring everyone back to their feet gradually? So we’ll learn a lot about this recovery from COVID that will help us recover after an earthquake.”

Patence Winningham also helps with recovery plan from Lin County. But, at hand, you are preparing for the forest fire season this summer.

“What do first responders look like, forest fires and customize personal protective equipment? For N95s? How do you set up firefighting camps and get all of these people working together to put out the fire? So we have a lot of work to do to modify this new business model.”

In the next part of our series on Oregon’s Natural Resources and Resilience, KLCC’s Brian Paul will be on fire preparedness at the time of Covid-19.

Copyright 2020 KLCC.

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