ASTORIA, Ore. — With construction underway in Seaside to build schools outside the tsunami inundation zone and a bond on the ballot in Warrenton in November to do the same, preparing schools for a disaster is in the limelight.
But as schools look for opportunities to relocate to higher ground to be safer in an earthquake and tsunami, administrators will face a new task: how to prepare to be a community’s default shelter when disaster strikes.
Schools are at the center of the state’s emergency planning strategy. The state has emphasized making aging school buildings more earthquake resilient, with programs such as the seismic retrofit grant, which has awarded more than $225 million to bring schools up to building code standards.
While schools are traditionally expected to serve as shelters, an analysis by the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission found there has been little to no planning by school districts for how schools would be used following a Cascadia Subduction Zone quake.
“People have a lot of assumptions that schools would be good shelters,” said Tiffany Brown, the Clatsop County emergency manager, who helped author the report. “They are buildings that accommodate large numbers of people, but that’s where it stops. That’s where our planning has kind of stopped.”
For schools to be ready, more needs to be done to educate staff on what it takes to run a shelter, as well as the importance of planning for necessities like food, water, communication and medical supplies. Preparing a school to serve the mass care needs of a community takes planning well outside the scope of the typical responsibilities of educators, but because there is no state mandate requiring it, little to no coordination between schools and other agencies has occurred, the report said.
That’s why the advisory commission recommended to the Legislature to have clearer guidelines for what should be expected of schools, including requiring preparedness messaging and encouraging supply storage near school grounds.
“I think there are two different stages: Preparing your own constituency and preparing as a community shelter,” Brown said. “Clatsop County is at the first.”
A community effort
The majority of schools in the county have some coordination with the American Red Cross to be used as shelters, said Jenny Carver, the local Red Cross disaster program manager.
For some, like Warrenton Grade School and Seaside High School, gearing up to be a community shelter didn’t seem practical given the likelihood the campuses would be inundated by a tsunami, but this fact isn’t disqualifying, Carver said.
“We look at inundation zones, but that’s not the only disaster we prepare for,” she said.
This strategy can also be complicated. As was seen in the Great Coastal Gale of 2007, regions like the Oregon Coast can become so isolated, agencies like the Red Cross can’t get access to run shelters.
“Having new schools be seismically sound and out of the inundation zone will change the conversation,” Brown said. “But we have to build them, plan for them, with shelters in mind.”
Thinking about the school district’s community role in an emergency has been on the mind of Seaside School District Superintendent Sheila Roley ever since the $99.7 million bond was passed by voters in 2016.
“We will have the physical site, but we can’t on our own provide the extended resources the community could possibility need,” Roley said.
In some avenues, the school district has started to plan ahead. Every administrator has been trained to use ham radios to help communicate if phone lines go down. Plans have been discussed to establish cache sites filled with food.
