EDITOR’S NOTE: Corrects the fully loaded displacement of the USNS Bob Hope.
PORT TOWNSEND — Although the Cascadia Rising exercise concluded this week, the lessons learned will impact the way emergency personnel respond to major natural disasters for years to come, Jefferson County organizers said.
The four-day drill ran from Tuesday through Friday for civilian participants throughout Washington state, Oregon and British Columbia.
Military drills will continue at Naval Magazine Indian Island into this week.
Organizers of the drill are assessing how emergency responders would handle the inevitable tsunami, loss of power and broken landscape a massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake from the Cascadia Subduction Zone would cause in coastal communities throughout Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.
The 800-mile fault, which stretches from southern British Columbia to Northern California, spawns earthquakes an average of once every 200 to 500 years, with the last in about 1700.
‘Interesting week’
“It has been a long week but a very interesting week,” said Bob Hamlin, Jefferson County director of emergency management, on Friday.
“We learned a great deal. We had some problems like one would expect for something as huge as that, but boy, it was a learning experience for all of us.”
In Jefferson and Clallam counties, the drill included the arrival and setup of Joint Incident Site Communications Capability units at Port Hadlock, Carlsborg Road near Sequim and William R. Fairchild International Airport in Port Angeles.
The regional drill was largely a tabletop exercise for first responders and emergency management officials as they prepared for possible isolation, lack of electrical power and other hazards after a major earthquake.
However, five neighborhoods in Jefferson County — Cape George, the bluffs in upper Uptown in Port Townsend, Kala Point, Port Hadlock Heights and all of Marrowstone Island — practiced reporting damages, injuries and needs to the emergency command center.
Each day of the drill represented one full week of the disaster calendar, Hamlin said, adding that the final day involved long-term logistical planning.
One priority was to formulate strategies to address the estimated 7,000 homeless people expected to be displaced by the natural disaster on a long-term basis, he said.
“We had a lot of displaced persons with no housing, and we had to think of their needs,” Hamlin said, “which means either moving them out of the area — which is really undesirable — or concentrating them in one place locally.”
Hamlin’s team ultimately decided to “concentrate them and put all of our resources on that,” he said.
“That means food, water, sanitation and mental health, medical assistance. We have a large senior population, so that was pretty challenging to come up with all the resources.”
Housing responders
Planners on Friday also considered options about how best to bring “in fresh crews to replace our existing emergency responders, and all the logistics that go with that — how to house them, how to feed them and how to deal with all those issues.”
It is essential to formulate long-term plans in advance “because if we just react to problems, that is all we will ever be doing,” Hamlin said.
“Our strategy is to think out of the box,” he said.
“It is an opportunity for us to do strategic planning.”
Planning ahead, and practicing those plans, not only helps emergency responders prepare for large-scale natural disasters, but also for smaller calamities should they arise, Hamlin said.
“It is good for the little ones because everything you learn is applicable in some degree of magnitude,” he said.
“Even if it is a small event, a smaller earthquake or whatever, the issues are all the same.”
Making mistakes
There were plenty of mistakes made during the exercise, Hamlin said, adding it is better to make such mistakes in training than during an actual emergency situation.
“We kept saying every time we ran across a faux pas, ‘Well, nobody dies,’ ” he said.
“And that is a little cavalier, but that is exactly what it is.
“We actually stopped the exercise a couple of times locally and said, ‘This ain’t working.’ We’ve got to fix this process and we’d take half an hour out, stop the boat, fix it, course correct and start up again.”
Everybody involved took the exercise “seriously for 4½ days,” Hamlin continued, “and our crew was exhausted after that period of time, and we made some pretty significant errors along the way, but those are lessons learned, and it is good to make them in these environments.”
Military partnership
During the exercise, the military provided consultants from the National Guard to work with civilian counterparts in both Jefferson and Clallam counties, while the military conducted exercises at Naval Magazine Indian Island.
“We got a lot of attention . . . from the National Guard,” Hamlin said.
“We had more colonels than a corn crib. It was kind of fun to deal with them.”
Personnel at Naval Magazine Indian Island are offloading supplies from the USNS Bob Hope as part of the interagency Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) exercise, said Lt. Andrew Anderson, future ops officer for Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 of Coronado, Calif.
The practice is to ensure personnel know what to do when docks are gone.
The 951-foot, 62,069-ton supply ship that is visible this week in the waters between Port Townsend and Indian Island will use smaller vessels to bring the camp’s infrastructure and supplies to shore.
Offloading the vessel will “continue until we are done,” Anderson said, expected to be by Monday.
The USNS Bob Hope is one of seven fully loaded vessels stationed around the world ready to respond to disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis, Anderson has said.
For domestic use, the empty rescue vessels are stationed in San Diego, Calif., and are then loaded and sent to the trouble zone.
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Reporter Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56650, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
Reporter Charlie Bermant contributed to this report.
