Tag: Community Vitality The Ford Family Foundation

A Storage Solution for Emergency Preparedness Supplies

Posted on by Julia Havens

OPDr Oregon Partnership for Disaster ResilienceEvacuation support sites help provide shelter, water and food for thousands in Cannon Beach

Thanks to an innovative pilot project sponsored by the city of Cannon Beach, North Coast residents have some help in place today in case of an earthquake or tsunami tomorrow.

Three evacuation support sites will help provide shelter, water and food for the thousands of people in the area that are expected to be affected by a Cascadia Subduction Zone event. At the first site, two 20-foot shipping containers were placed on a concrete pad; each one can benefit about 700 people for at least four days. With the recent addition of two more sites, Cannon Beach can provide sustainable support for up to 4,200 survivors.

“The success of the Emergency Preparedness program in Cannon Beach is a direct result of citizen involvement and city council commitment to supporting the program,” says Public Works Director Dan Grassick.

Combating fear

Public reaction to this natural disaster planning has been very positive. “The goal is to take practical steps to increase the odds of surviving those events as opposed to living in fear of them happening,” Grassick says. Emergency Preparedness Committee members and city staff continue with community education efforts for both local and part-time residents. Since the inception of the program in early 2012, between 15 and 20 additional barrels are added to the cache sites each year.

Each shipping container is loaded with three different types of supplies: family cache containers; medical, administrative, and support equipment; and tourist, employee and visitor kits. City emergency management personnel will open the containers in case of an emergency.

Coastal families are invited to obtain storage containers at cost from the city and fill them with their own supplies, to be stored at the evacuation site nearest to their home.

Families can choose from 55-gallon drums, 30-gallon barrels or 5-gallon buckets. The city also charges an annual maintenance fee based on the size of the container. The cost for a 55-gallon plastic barrel, for instance, is $57.90, plus $55 for the annual maintenance fee.

OPDr Oregon Partnership for Disaster ResiliencePacking workshops

Cannon Beach offers container packing workshops and a written guide to filling the caches, with community priorities identified as shelter first, water second and food last. The shipping containers are opened for three days every spring and fall to enable families to restock their supplies, and the city plans to make the openings a community gala that will include disaster awareness training, education and tsunami information.

Because tourists could make up the largest population segment at certain times of the year, Cannon Beach developed its innovative employee and visitor kit, consisting of a shelter system (poncho, space blanket, tube tent), water and food for 500 survivors.

The idea is catching on: Arcadia Beach has established its own program directly patterned on the Cannon Beach model; Arch Cape is launching its own emergency cache project; and Bandon is looking into an emergency storage system for businesses and community members.

“The key to the success of the Cannon Beach program is the folks that have stepped up,” Grassick says. “When you have people that actually live in the high-risk area, it’s real and they have a stake in it.”

 

Article reprinted with permission from Community Vitality Publication, Spring 2014, © 2014 The Ford Family Foundation. For the full Community Vitality edition of ”The Time to Prepare”, visit http://www.community-vitality.org/Spring2014TimeToPrepare.html

Experts Warn that We Need to Prepare Now →

Posted on by Julia Havens

Socio-Economic Resilience is Key to Recovery After a Disaster Strikes

Josh Bruce OPDR Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience The Ford Family FoundationNo one likes to think that he or she will ever experience a catastrophic event — a natural or manmade disaster that puts lives and communities at risk. Yet we’ve seen it happen again and again — Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Japan, the earthquake in Haiti. Closer to home, we’ve had forest fires in Southern and Central Oregon, train derailments in Eastern Oregon, flooding at the coast and, decades ago, an explosion in Roseburg when a truck loaded with fertilizer and dynamite caught fire.

The reality is that catastrophic events can happen anywhere, at any time. When we talk about a regional disaster in the Northwest, the first thing that comes to mind is a major earthquake. It’s not just a distant possibility. Scientists warn that the next rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, located just off the Pacific coast, may happen in the next 50 years. And it could be devastating — a 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami would wreak devastation from the coast to the Cascades.

We don’t know how or when disaster will strike, but we do know that we need to start getting ready now. The Ford Family Foundation is joining this effort as it embarks on a project to explore socio-economic resilience in rural communities in Oregon and Northern California.

Socio-economic issues — social and financial realities that make up quality of life — are deeply affected by disasters of all kinds. If we are to have healthy communities, we also must have the ability to deal with disasters if they strike. We call that ability “resilience,” and it’s all about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events of all kinds. It’s about being able to bounce back more quickly — sometimes even stronger.

This issue of Community Vitality explores a host of issues relating to community resilience. We look at what Oregon is doing to prepare for a potential earthquake and an article on what neighborhoods are doing to build resilience. We also talk with a Ford Opportunity Scholar about her work in Haiti, and to a high school student about her efforts to set up a teen Community Emergency Response Team in her town.

Particularly vulnerable
These kinds of efforts are of vital importance. Although rural communities are used to depending on themselves to some extent, they are particularly vulnerable to large-scale disasters because of fewer resources and access to help during the recovery process.

Communities are perhaps the most important element in a successful recovery from disaster. A survey from the Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience (OPDR) found that Oregon residents have more confidence in local efforts to support resilience than national or state-level efforts. This perception seems to be borne out in the wake of actual disasters. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, for example, 31% of the people affected reached out to nearby friends, family and neighbors for help, according to a recent poll from the AP and the University of Chicago. Only 17% reached out to government programs.

Economic development and physical infrastructure, of course, play a big role in recovery efforts, according to the same report. But interestingly, recovery rates after Superstorm Sandy often differed in adjacent neighborhoods — even though they had similar economic and structural resources. The difference? Social resources. Community bonds. Trust. This connectedness could be drawn on, resulting in a faster recovery.

But still, economic resilience is crucial; Oregon respondents to the disaster resilience survey ranked medical services, utilities, and grocery/drug stores as critically important both before and after a catastrophic event. They also expressed concern regarding current conditions of those services. If economic resilience is already at risk, the aftermath of a catastrophic event becomes even more dire.

Earthquake. Fire. Chemical spill. Train derailment. It is up to us to plan for these events now, so our communities will be in a better position to deal with them should they happen. It’s time for us to start figuring out what we can do to prepare. By building resilience, we can prevent disasters from becoming community catastrophes.

Article reprinted with permission; Community Vitality Publication, Spring 2014, © 2014 The Ford Family Foundation. For the full Community Vitality edition of  ”The Time to Prepare”, visit http://www.community-vitality.org/Spring2014TimeToPrepare.html

About the Author: David Frohnmayer was president of the University of Oregon from 1994 to 2009. He served as Oregon’s attorney general from 1981 to 1991. He is a former member of The Ford Family Foundation board of directors.