Washington is one of multiple states participating in next month’s Cascadia Rising exercise, a disaster drill aimed at preparing emergency response agencies from the federal government to local organizations for a large-scale earthquake and tsunami. But while the exercise will prove useful for the agencies and help improve communication among them, the exercise does not address the underlying fact that Washington is behind when it comes to earthquake policies and legislation.
The Seattle Times on Monday released the first in a series of articles addressing the fact that Washington is one of the highest-risk states for earthquakes, but has no formal policies related to school safety, hospital safety, funding for seismic mitigation or seismic monitoring. The observation is nothing new. Multiple studies have been done comparing Washington’s seismic preparation to other states, such as California, Alaska, Oregon and Missouri. In fact, a 2010 presentation from Western Washington University’s Resilience Institute to the Washington State Division of Emergency Management showed that despite being the third most at-risk state for earthquake damage, according to FEMA, Washington has “the poorest policy coverage of any state with significant seismic risk, except for Alaska.”
Another Seattle Times article from December of 2015 reports that Washington is “the only state on the West Coast that hasn’t completed a detailed, comprehensive (seismic) assessment of all school facilities.”
The article goes on to report that California started evaluating and upgrading schools in the 1930s, while British Columbia has spent $2.2 billion to strengthen highrisk schools and Oregon’s state legislature has set aside $300 million to retrofit schools and other critical facilities, “spurred by a survey that found 1,100 school buildings potentially at a high or very high risk of collapse in a major quake.”
On Vashon, this problem can be seen in the island’s schools. Both McMurray Middle School and Vashon High School have seismically unstable buildings that incurred damage during the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Both of
the school’s gyms need to be seismically upgraded, and funding for the projects has been in discussion among the school board.
Earthquakes are nothing new to Washington and the state needs to secure funds from either taxes or the federal government in order to jump onboard earthquake preparedness, determine the critical issues to be addressed and
fix them. School buildings and hospitals need to be retrofitted and brought up to, or exceed, the standard set by other states along the earthquake-prone West Coast.
