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Oregon Resiliency Policy Agenda

What makes the difference is leadership!

Just this month, the Oregon governor published a disaster resiliency policy agenda, see Resiliency 2025: Improving Our Readiness for the Cascadia Earthquake and Tsunami.

What I like is that it does not create a laundry list of things that need to be done. There is a focus to the document and they are prepared to put funding toward accomplishing the work that needs to be done.

A couple of comments are appropriate.

  • Getting 250,000 households to become prepared for two weeks is a daunting task. Measuring that achievement will be interesting to watch.
  • Oregon has a single point of failure for their petroleum products. Everything is located in the absolutely wrong location. Achieving resilience for that critical infrastructure will not be easy.
  • Finally, someone is putting money toward warning. The $600K listed for Washington state has to be "in-kind" since the funding tap for seismic warning has been turned off up here for a long time. [FYI, I just verified my assumption about Washington State funding. These are not "real dollars" for the early warning system.]
Congrats to Mike Harryman, Oregon Resilience Officer who works directly for Gov. Kate Brown. It shows what talent, energy and proximity can do!

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.