By Pepper Fisher
CLALLAM COUNTY – The Cascadia Rising emergency earthquake exercise that was held throughout the Northwest in 2016 was supposed to be updated and repeated 5 years later in 2021. Then the pandemic hit, and agencies at every level of government had to put a lot of plans on hold.
Now, officials from your Clallam County Emergency Management Center have announced their plans for Cascadia Rising, Part 2, scheduled for June 13-17.
The original exercise was a 4-day simulation that gave statewide agencies a chance to run drills on how they will react on the day of a 9.0 earthquake. This year will be different. Instead of practicing our reaction immediately following an earthquake in full, boots-on-the-ground mode, this will be a tabletop exercise simulating the response 96 hours after an earthquake.
The new format is meant to pick up where the 2016 exercise left off. Emergency Response Coordinator Justine Chorley, appearing on the Todd Ortloff Show, says Days 1 and 2 will look at critical transportation routes and how we will service communities that will likely be cut off from one another.
“The focus really is going to be our working with our neighboring counties, because we are reliant on Jefferson County and their roads to get into Clallam County, or to get goods and services in. So, we’re also going to be working on a regional scale.”
Day 3 will focus on mass care, or how we assure that everyone has adequate food, water and medicine for an extended period.
There’s also a Day 4.
So, Day Four is a Hot Wash. And that again is at the state level, and people will be contributing to that any criticism. The point of the hot wash is to learn. So, it’s also very important that we identify things that went well, because you want to remember what went well. And then that all plays into, sort o,f a corrective action program, where you identify, “what can you do to fix these issues?” And then you correct those moving forward, and then you might even have another exercise to test them again.”
Cascadia Rising, Part 2, scheduled for June 13-17, happening throughout the Northwest and British Columbia.