Tiffany Brown: Lessons from Japan

Presenter: We can learn a lot about the Cascadia subduction zone earthquake from Japan. At the Lane Preparedness Coalition Feb. 20, Lane County Emergency Manager Tiffany Brown:

Tiffany Brown (Lane County, emergency manager): What happened on that night in 1700 was that that tsunami was so severe that it landed on the coastal shores of Japan. And they were surprised because it was significant but they hadn’t had any earth shaking. And so they wrote it down and they called it ‘the orphan tsunami.’

[00:00:31] It would be not until the 1980s that coastal geologists ran across this written record and they were studying Cascadia at the same time and they put two and two together. And they said, ‘You know, we think that this event that happened in 1700, we’re not really sure when it happened, but now we are sure, because it’s absolutely the same event that arrived on the Japanese shores.’

[00:00:58] With the core sampling that was conducted by Oregon State University, we were able to recover a 10,000-year history of events, and that’s when we learned that this had happened 19 times in 10,000 years. Now we have statistics and we’re able to start thinking about probability of the event happening again. And that’s when you really started hearing about it, 10 or 12 years ago.

[00:01:26] I’ll tell you what really brought it home, and that was the ‘Great Japan Earthquake’, sometimes referred to as 3/11. That really brought home how devastating that event was going to be when it occurred again.

[00:01:38] Presenter: She described how the earth’s strongest earthquakes occur where the slowly-moving tectonic plates meet. Tiffany Brown:

[00:01:46] Tiffany Brown: That’s what’s happening here. The one plate is getting thrust under the continental plate. It’s moving very slowly, about how fast your fingernails grow. That’s how fast it moves every year. The plates remain locked, moving ever so slowly until the stress exceeds the strength of the two plates, and then it unlocks and it generates the most powerful earthquake in the world.

[00:02:14] On the coast, we’re looking at very heavy shaking and the greatest amount of devastation across the state. The Coastal Range and partly into the valley is going to be heavy shaking, serious damage to unreinforced masonry and buildings shifting off their foundations, and then moderate to heavy, we’re in store for pretty considerable shaking in Lane County.

[00:02:41] When we get into the Central Oregon, the shaking is not as intense. In fact, somewhere like Bend, Pendleton, over on the east side of the mountains might experience just some minor shaking. Maybe the light fixtures move and maybe some things fall off the wall.

[00:02:59] This is important because this is the part of the state that we anticipate will serve as a staging area when the event occurs, where we’ll be seeing resources coming from the other side of the country and staging in Central Oregon, getting ready to come into the valley and coastal regions.

[00:03:16] Presenter: The tsunami will inundate Oregon’s coastal communities. Tiffany Brown:

[00:03:20] Tiffany Brown (Lane County, emergency manager): On the coast the tsunami is expected to arrive anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes. It tends to be 15 minutes the more south you get in the state and the time increases as you come up.

[00:03:34] If you’re talking about inland communities like Astoria, the Columbia River, we expect the tsunami to take 35 to 45 minutes to get upriver.

[00:03:45] I visited in 2018 a city called Rikuzentakata and when I went to Japan, I heard this over and over: ‘We don’t talk enough about aftershocks in Cascadia preparedness.’ Within one week of the Japan earthquake, there were 300 aftershocks. One year later, there had been more than 5,000. And as recently as last year, they were still having aftershocks. In 2021, that was the most recent statistic I could find, they had 208 aftershocks 10 years after the event. So that’s interesting, right? Ten years after the event.

[00:04:27] But let’s talk about that first week after the event. I heard repeatedly from tsunami survivors that the aftershocks were absolutely terrifying. None of them resulted in additional tsunamis or necessarily additional damage.

[00:04:44] But because they had just experienced the tsunami associated with the sound, which I’ve been told is the loudest thing that you’ve ever heard, and it’s something that you probably can’t even relate to unless you’ve been part of infantry or worked on the rail system or something like that.

[00:05:04] And so imagine that sound coming and then imagine it coming 300 times again in the next week after you’ve experienced this devastation. And so it’s just something to be ready for and something to understand. They can cause damage. They can continue, you know, there can be additional earthquake damage. But I bring it up because I think it’s something that we don’t think about happening after.

[00:05:28] Presenter: She emphasized that Cascadia is survivable, and that building neighborhood preparedness groups is essential. Lane County Emergency Manager Tiffany Brown:

[00:05:38] Tiffany Brown: Cascadia is survivable. When I talk about personal preparedness, I like to talk about it in terms of concentric circles.

[00:05:45] Individual preparedness is absolutely your first step. Once you’re prepared individually, stepping outside your front door to work together with neighbors or to prepare at work. And then finally, when you’ve got it all dialed in, finding a place to plug into the community, like many of the folks here in the room, in a volunteer capacity.

[00:06:09] And this is really how we start changing our thinking about how to prepare for a Cascadia (event). When we talk about the landslides and we talk about the infrastructure failure and we talk about the flooding, what we’re talking about is cutting communities off from one another.

[00:06:25] And so we come up with this idea that’s called ‘islanding’ or ‘island planning’ or ‘island communities’ and it is just a gift for emergency managers because instead of saying, ‘What’s the city of Eugene going to do?’ They can leverage those neighborhood groups to start talking about how we slice the jurisdictions up and how people can start turning to themselves and planning as a community.

[00:06:51] Presenter: Her visit to Japan also emphasized the importance of psychological preparedness. Tiffany Brown:

[00:06:57] Tiffany Brown (Lane County, emergency manager): Here’s something we don’t talk about often enough, is the psychological preparedness piece. One of the things I heard in Japan was that they had not talked enough in advance about their roles and responsibilities. I went six years after the ‘Great Japan Earthquake’ and I’ll be honest with you, I wondered what I was going to see six years later.

I saw a lot of debris piles.

[00:07:20] I saw a grocery store open in a community of 40,000 the weekend I was there. Six years it took for the grocery store to open after the Japan earthquake.

[00:07:32] I saw an entire community who had not sent their children back to school because every time they came together, one child said to the other, ‘Why did my dad die closing the tide gates and your dad didn’t feel like he needed to go?’ And so it was collective survivor guilt and trauma.

[00:07:53] And what they said to us was, ‘We’re the most prepared nation in the world. But we didn’t talk about this piece of it. And so talk about those things.’ And here’s the takeaway. In this moment, we will have seconds and minutes to make a decision. And all decisions have consequences. So think about as many of them in advance as you’re able.

[00:08:18] They ran us through a tabletop exercise. We didn’t spend time talking about physical preparedness in Japan. All of our time was spent talking about mental preparation. They kicked off the scenario and they said, ‘Now, who would you die to save? What situation could be put in front of you?’ And on the way home from that trip, people were working on their advance directives. It really made us think about it.

[00:08:47] And so it was a way of really getting you to think about that decision-making process. You have minutes, seconds to make decisions; all decisions have consequences. I’ll tell you, I came home. At the time I was working in an unreinforced masonry building in Astoria, 100 years old.

My husband was working in a 130-year-old unreinforced masonry building kitty-corner from my office.

[00:09:12] And I said, ‘Hey, we need to talk about this Cascadia thing. We had three young children at the time. If this happens, we need to make a commitment to one another that we will not put our own lives at peril trying to come over and save each other.’

[00:09:25] I can see his office from my office. ‘You have to say, you have to commit that you will not put yourself in danger looking for me and I will do the same.’ He said, ‘Why are we talking about this?’ And I said, ‘Well, because it’s important.’ You know, it took us a year to kind of finish that conversation?

[00:09:43] So psychological preparedness is critical, and it’s what we heard most often when we met with survivors of the Great Japan earthquake.

[00:09:54] Presenter: Lane County Emergency Manager Tiffany Brown shares lessons from our neighbors in Japan. They say psychological preparedness is critical, and we should start talking about the aftershocks.  To learn more and to practice with your neighbors, connect with your neighborhood association.