Regional earthquake experts say more coordination and investment needed to prepare for ‘big quake’ • Oregon Capital Chronicle

PORTLAND — If the “Big Quake” — a massive earthquake expected in the Cascadia region — strikes today, Oregonians west of the Cascades would be luckier to find themselves in the newly updated state Capitol in Salem or on the roof of the new terminal at Portland International Airport.

Port of Portland engineer Tom Wharton’s comment drew laughter from the audience Thursday at the 13th Annual National Earthquake Engineering Conference in Portland, but it wasn’t exactly a joke. Few of the 4,000 buildings the state owns will survive, said Jonah Papafthymiou, state resiliency officer in Gov. Tina Kotick’s office. She said only five were likely to remain standing and could be used immediately in the following weeks and months.

The Port of Portland and the Governor’s Office are among the members of the multi-agency, region-wide Cascadia Lifelines Program headquartered at Oregon State University, which serves as a think tank for stakeholders who meet twice a year to discuss preparedness for seismologists’ project of a magnitude 7.4 or larger earthquake in the Northwest in the next 50 years.

A Cascadia earthquake occurs off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and California every 500 years, and was last recorded in 1700. It could cause the Northwest’s coastlines to sink and subside, trigger widespread flooding and landslides and displace millions of people.

Disaster Prep advocates face opposition over raising the seismic level for new school construction

Experts discussed progress: renovations at Portland’s airport and the state Capitol that made buildings more earthquake-resistant, a plan to ensure Washington County residents get water from sources outside Portland’s system and Kotek’s 2025 executive order requiring large, state-owned buildings to be retrofitted over the next 35 years and new buildings built to earthquake code in worst-case scenarios.

But experts also discussed policies they say must be enacted urgently.

If U.S. Coastal Highway 101 isn’t upgraded before the big quake hits and closed for any extended period after the quake, “you’re going to lose those coastal communities, and you won’t be able to get them back,” said Mike Olsen, a civil engineering professor at Oregon State University and director of the Cascadia Lifelines Program.

The highway is already under frequent threats from coastal landslides and flooding.

“We don’t need to wait for the earthquake to cause a lot of damage to it. It is already under a lot of pressure,” he said.

Race to retrofit

In coastal areas that will be hit hard, and which rely heavily on grid power from the Bonneville Energy Department, policies that encourage community microgrids and battery storage will be key to post-earthquake recovery, said Leon Kempner, a BPA engineer.

BPA controls most of the Northwest’s electricity distribution network. In some coastal areas, such as Lincoln City, it is the source of almost all the energy.

Kempner said the agency is racing to upgrade the grid to withstand earthquakes, but it did not begin implementing the seismic code on projects until the 1980s, and it lacks the resources to move as quickly as required.

He also suggested that the Oregon and Washington state legislatures require the BPA and all regional facilities to provide regular reports to state officials on what they are doing to prepare for the major event to increase awareness and transparency about planning gaps and potential for collaboration.

The Port of Portland needs nearly $500 million to develop a runway that can survive an earthquake and handle large FEMA planes and other aircraft landing for support or evacuation, said Wharton, who explained that much of the state will depend on the airport and the port’s four Willamette and Columbia River terminals to receive recovery aid.

He and Papafthymiou said port officials will meet with Kotick’s office in the next few weeks to discuss some potential budget requests. Some funding could also come from requesting an advance on annual maintenance dollars from the FAA or grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “as long as the agency is still around,” Wharton said.

He said that a recent study conducted by the National Institute of Building Sciences concluded that the investment, which currently amounts to about $450 million, will achieve a net saving of $7 billion for the state as it attempts to recover and rebuild after the earthquake. But none of this matters if the roads and bridges are unusable or non-existent.

Critical paths

The Oregon Department of Transportation has identified $40 million in bridge deficiencies that, if left unaddressed, would make them vulnerable to an earthquake, said Yumi Wang, a civil engineering, infrastructure resiliency and risk expert from Oregon State University.

Olsen and other experts also called for more investment in preparing the state and region’s disaster response workforce, which can require months of emergency attention and years of rebuilding. Everyone agreed that municipal governments, state leaders and all regional infrastructure stakeholders need to talk and plan together more regularly now.

Mike Bretch, director of engineering and construction for the Tualatin Valley Water District, is overseeing a $1.6 billion water infrastructure project to convert the half of Tualatin that relies on water from the Portland Water Bureau to water sourced from the Joint Water Commission, which also supplies water to the cities of Hillsboro, Forest Grove and Beaverton.

Part of the project included building a 2,000-foot “mini-tunnel” under the Tualatin River to transport drinking water. The Roy Rogers Road bridge over the river would not survive the major earthquake, leaving people south of the bridge stranded and unable to get to any hospitals in the area, Bretsch said.

“If I could make policy and get people to do things, I would say I want the state to designate some of these really critical corridors,” he said. “We need some kind of policy to address that.”

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