If COVID-19 can teach us anything, it should be about the need to plan and prepare for high-risk events. For our communities in Oregon, that event is the ominous “big one” — a 9.0 magnitude earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone located off the coast of Oregon, Washington, and California. This earthquake would result in tremendous damage due to ground shaking and the ensuing tsunami.
Fortunately, many governmental, nonprofit, and educational organizations are working on several fronts to improve our preparedness and resilience. As an example, we have the Cascadia Lifelines Program (CLiP) at Oregon State University, which funds research to enhance our fundamental understanding of the nature of the Cascadia earthquake and to develop innovative measures to mitigate its effects. Still, it is important to consider what the full recovery of hard-hit communities would look like.
One aspect of post-disaster recovery that is quite often overlooked due to more urgent matters (i.e. providing medical relief for survivors, first response operations), is how to address the staggering amount of debris that is produced. We will need to remove, sort, and dispose all this debris before any rebuilding can happen. The Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC) estimated that about 10 million tons of debris would be produced after the Big One, needing roughly a million truckloads for their removal and disposal.
To put these numbers into perspective, imagine 13 years’ worth of trash for the entire state being produced in a just a single day! When we consider that this trash consists not just of regular household waste, but also of construction material, vegetative debris, hazardous waste, and a host of other materials that need to be separated, treated, and disposed of appropriately, we can start to appreciate the scale and complexity of the required debris removal effort.
Although this is a huge burden for communities to plan for, federal and state agencies have many resources to help. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), along with the Oregon Office of Emergency Management (OEM) at the state level, provide guidelines and best practices to help local authorities to develop their own debris management plans to ensure smooth operations in the aftermath of a disaster.
Some important actions that are recommended include establishing pre-event contracts and the identification of suitable locations for temporary debris management sites. These sites serve as debris processing and storage centers while routes to landfills are being still being repaired. This is particularly important for our coastal neighbors, for whom the nearest landfills are much farther inland in Corvallis and McMinnville.
Knowing the location and capacity of these sites beforehand, along with forecasting debris amounts and spread can help emergency managers determine the size of their debris removal equipment fleets (think excavators, bulldozers, and dump trucks). Understanding these logistical factors and the dependencies between them are essential when answering critical questions about the time taken for community recovery and restoration of essential services.
While we may not know when and how our communities will get back to normal after this period of self-isolation, we do have the opportunity to act upon available information to plan our recovery after the big one strikes. And it all starts with cleaning up after the ground has stilled and the waves have receded!
This article appeared in the Corvallis Gazette Times on 17th May 2020. The story can be found here: https://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/what-will-it-take-to-clean-up-after-big-one/article_c45f3618-6aca-5395-898c-0daddd204eb1.html
