| "I think more and more planners are beginning to realize that this is the most important community planning you can do." | |
| Kevin Cupples, City of Seaside Planning Director |
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During the evening of March 28, 1964, a magnitude 8.4 earthquake—the largest ever recorded in North America—struck the area of Prince William Sound, Alaska. This generated a tsunami that struck the Oregon coast at 11:30 p.m. Waves as high as 10 feet hit the state’s coastline, swamping houses and destroying bridges and seawalls. Four children camping on Beverly Beach with their family were washed out to sea and killed.
Forty years later, the city of Seaside partnered with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries and Oregon Emergency Management to develop a Tsunami Awareness Program that possibly could serve as a model community outreach effort, not only for tsunamis, but also for other coastal hazards.
"Doing this type of planning will save lives," says Kevin Cupples, Seaside’s planning director. "I think more and more planners are beginning to realize that this is the most important community planning you can do."
Seaside’s Tsunami Awareness Program ran for nine months and utilized volunteer-driven outreach efforts. Surveys were taken before and after the program to gauge how much the outreach efforts influenced the public’s tsunami preparedness.
Vulnerability Seaside is considered Oregon’s most tsunami-vulnerable community, notes Cupples. The city’s residential population of 6,000 can swell to 40,000 with summer tourists, and most of Seaside is located in a tsunami inundation zone.
In the event of a local tsunami, notes Darci Connor, the former tsunami outreach coordinator for Seaside, "people would have to cross one or more bridges and travel up to a mile within 30 minutes to get beyond the inundation zone."
While the city has evacuation signage and emergency sirens, "more needed to be done" to alert the public to the dangers, Cupples says.
Wake-Up Call
The city began its awareness program in September 2004, after hiring Connor with funding from the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program.
A survey was first sent out to get a baseline of people’s awareness of tsunami hazards. Then the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 struck. A second survey was done to document the impact of the event on Seaside residents so the influence of the outreach events could still be gauged.
The survey found that the Indian Ocean tsunami raised people’s understanding of a tsunami, but "the thing that didn’t change was people’s understanding of what they had to do" in the event of one, Connor says.
Target Audiences
Connor assembled a working group to help develop the program. They identified key community groups to target, including businesses, neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, the municipal staff, churches, governmental agencies, and the media.
In addition to mailing evacuation brochures to all the city’s water customers and getting articles published in the newspaper, the strategy they developed was to reach these different groups through a series of outreach events. Outreach information also was provided in Spanish.
Aside from Connor’s nine-month contract, the program had a budget of about $50 per month. Almost the entire program was run by volunteers.
Door-to-Door
The first—and most time-intensive—outreach effort was the Neighborhood Educator Project, which was designed to reach every Seaside household.
Eighty-nine volunteer neighborhood educators ranging in age from 17 to 89 selected city blocks that they would oversee. After attending a training class, the volunteers then went door-to-door sharing information and handing out educational materials.
"This is the effort that people weren’t sure would work," notes Connor, "but I consider it the most successful component of the total project. . . It really built a sense of community."
Down to Business
A business outreach workshop targeted the local business community and helped business owners think about "what kind of planning they need to do and what information their employees should be providing to customers," Connor says.
"Reaching businesses was key," she explains, "because they potentially have the first and only contact with visitors to the coast."
Preparing children for a tsunami event was done through the school outreach program. Events were held in the middle school and two elementary schools. The information was geared for children and looked at the differences between local and distant events, evacuation routes, and family emergency plans.
A public workshop was held for individuals and families, who were given the opportunity to ask experts questions and participate in small discussion groups.
One of the main successes that came out of this workshop, says Cupples, was people realizing they weren’t prepared if they just had an evacuation route planned from their homes.
"When you’re at Safeway, where do you go? When you are at the mall, what’s your evacuation route? Being ready all the time—that’s something people really weren’t keyed into," Cupples says.
Just a Test
After all the outreach events were completed, a tsunami evacuation drill was held on a Saturday in April. When tsunami sirens were sounded, residents, business owners and employees, and visitors practiced what they would do in the event of a real emergency.
Of the 436 people who practiced their evacuation routes, all but two participants made it to safety in the designated 30 minutes.
"What that told us," says Connor, "was that the existing evacuation routes provided enough time for people to get to safety. It was a great educational experience."
Final Assessment
A final survey was conducted to gauge how the outreach strategies influenced the public’s awareness of tsunami preparedness.
Connor points out that before "anything," people’s awareness of where to go in the event of a tsunami was low. This awareness increased "slightly" after the Indian Ocean tsunami and increased "significantly" after the awareness program.
Although the pilot program is over, Seaside is continuing its tsunami awareness efforts.
The month of April is Tsunami Awareness Month in Seaside. The community sends out a newsletter, and the newspaper runs articles on the topic. In addition, the city hosts a Web site with tsunami information, and tsunami awareness maps are posted in businesses and in every city building.
"I think the awareness program was an example of what could be done, of what should be done," says Cupples. "Given the time and amount of money that went into it, I think we did a really good job."
To view the city of Seaside’s tsunami education Web site, point your browser to www.cityofseaside.us/tsunamiinfo/. For more information on Seaside’s Tsunami Awareness Program, go to www.oregongeology.com/sub/earthquakes/Coastal/TsunamiIntro.htm, or contact Kevin Cupples, at (503) 738-7100, or kcupples@cityofseaside.us. You may also contact Darci Connor at (503) 440-4737, or darci_connor@yahoo.com.
