Planners keeping earthquake prep on community’s radar

As attention from one natural disaster understandably turned toward another, numbers of volunteers with the Community Emergency Response Teams — or CERTs, for short — has waned a bit.

But Blaine Zechenelly, the Sequim-area volunteer disaster planners for Clallam County Fire District No. 3 and CERT leader, said numbers are picking up once again.

The idea of a 30-foot wave rushing down the Strait of Juan de Fuca will do that.

In reality, Zechenelly said last week, the scenario he and other emergency response organizers prepare for known as the L1 scenario of an earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone — one that runs for about seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, Calif., continuing along Oregon and Washington state and terminating around Vancouver Island — could be as tall as 40-plus feet, depending on the land formation and the tide level.

Helping citizens on the Olympic Peninsula prepare for that kind of disaster, from the initial quake to the damage to homes and other structures to the relatively long period of recovery, is all part of the job, as is keeping those citizens interested in preparing while dealing with pandemic on top of that.

“We’re slowly building [CERT interest] back up again,” Zechenelly said in mid-July. “Some of older teams are struggling to get new members, so we’re starting to revive the older teams.”

Local CERT numbers were at about 575 prior to the pandemic but dropped to about 450 when organizers were unable to host classes and a CERT academy. Those numbers are now at 523, Zechenelly said, and growing particularly in certain areas such as the Palo Alto Road, Louella Road and Third Avenue areas. Two brand new area teams formed in the past year, he said.

But volunteer numbers have dropped in some area such as the 3 Crabs region, where CERT members Phyllis Morales, Mac Macdonald and others recently led a walk of an evacuation route from 3 Crabs Road toward Dungeness Community Church and the Brigadoon neighborhood, via residential property (with permission) and the Friendly Lane county road.

With a maximum sea level height of about 15 feet, the residents at 3 Crabs can’t depend on their homes surviving a Cascadia earthquake-caused tsunami, Zechenelly noted.

“For them, in an earthquake, the safe route is: get out,” he said.

Leading the way for a small group of 3 Crabs neighborhood residents on July 18, Macdonald offered safety and preparedness tips, from having a backpack full of supplies (including medicines) to keeping shoes and something to break out windows close by, such as under one’s bed.

One evacuation route tour participant asked if a wheelbarrow be used to help a fellow injured resident.

Absolutely, Macdonald said.

A big enough earthquake would take out nearby bridges, and even if the first wave doesn’t destroy a home a bigger one may be on the way, he said.

He and about a dozen individuals traced the route, tying reflective ribbons to trees in the event the earthquake hits at night and residents need to find their way in the dark.

“Don’t plan on coming back,” Macdonald said.

Gearing up for what’s anticipated to be long recovery from a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake — including field and table-top exersizes in conjunction with City of Sequim entities in mid-June — emergency organizers are working with entities such as the Sequim Food Bank as well as large commercial businesses to secure stores of food in preparation, Zechenelly said. (In 2021, Sequim Food Bank officials began planning a storage facility adjacent to its building on West Wlder Street that would give the region a 16- to 20-day food storage capacity, with work toward obtaining grants under way.)

“Generally speaking, stores don’t have more than three days [of food and medicine], so that’s a problem,” he said.

They are also working with a number of local churches to establish recover centers, primarily because those structures are generally timber frame or laminated beam construction and figure to weather an earthquake better than other buildings.

Some school buildings would likely survive a major earthquake — in particular, the late 1990s-era Sequim Middle School — but it’s classrooms, rather than the large space that multi-purpose rooms, that would likely be standing, Zechenelly said.

“Generally speaking, prior to 1972, buildings are not earthquake prepared,” he said. “We expect the churches to do much better.”

Zechenelly said that emergency planners are aware that residents can get a kind of disaster fatigue.

“We try to be very aggressive in the eastern Clallam County. We’re reaching out in a multitude of ways [but we’re] careful how [we] message it,” he said.

“We plan for the worst case [scenario], that everything, for the most part, fails.”

CERT academy classes are being held in October and November. Find out more information by emailing to cert@ccfd3.org or visiting ccfd3.org/community-outreach/community-emergency-response-teams-cert-program.

View the 2022 Peninsula Emergency Preparedness Guide at tinyurl.com/PEPG2022.

Sequim Gazette photo by Michael Dashiell Members of the Community Emergency Response Team, including Phyllis Morales, second from left, help lead a tsunami evacuation route practice on July 18.