After tsunami warning, calls grow to modernize Oregon’s disaster preparedness

The tsunami warning that hit the Oregon coast earlier this month triggered more than just alarms — it revealed deeper cracks in the state’s emergency response system. For two state representatives who are helping lead efforts to modernize how Oregon prepares for natural disasters, the incident underscored the gaps in Oregon’s disaster readiness, from outdated emergency notification systems to underfunded infrastructure and training.

Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth, has a $300 million proposal to modernize Oregon’s disaster preparedness, aiming to improve communication systems, strengthen infrastructure, and expand local readiness efforts over the next decade.

He and Rep. David Gomberg, D-Otis, join us to discuss where Oregon has made progress, where significant vulnerabilities remain and how new investments could help the state better prepare for the next major crisis — whether it’s a tsunami, wildfire or another emergency altogether.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The huge earthquake off Russia’s east coast earlier this month triggered tsunami warnings on the Oregon coast. Thankfully, the resulting waves did not cause damage. They only raised the level of the water by about 1.5 feet. But they were a somber reminder of what could happen. And for lawmakers who are leading the effort to modernize how Oregon prepares for natural disasters, the incident underscored gaps in the state’s disaster readiness.

I’m joined now by two of those lawmakers. Paul Evans, is a Democratic representative from the Mid-Willamette Valley. David Gomberg is a Democratic representative from Oregon’s central coast. Welcome to you both.

Rep. Paul Evans: Thank you.

Rep. David Gomberg: Good to be back with you. Thank you.

Miller: David Gomberg, first – did you get an alert after that Russian earthquake?

Rep. Gomberg: I did indeed. It was a Tuesday night. I was having dinner with some friends from out of town just a few feet from the beach when my phone lit up. There’s a major earthquake, someplace that we can’t pronounce. We really didn’t know how far off it was, how long it was going to take to get to us or how big it was going to be. And we scrambled to get that information, but the salient point was that my phone, as a Lincoln County resident, lit up. My guests from out of town did not get that alert. Now, that’s significant.

At the end of the day, as you indicated, the wave arrived very late at night, with few people on the beach. It was only 18 inches and many Oregonians may be inclined to just kind of shrug it off as a non-event. But I think it’s a dire reminder that whether it’s earthquakes or tsunamis, fires, floods, heavy snowfalls, these things don’t happen to somebody else, somewhere else, they can happen to us right here.

Miller: Did you get that alert because you live in Lincoln County or because you had signed up at some point in the past to get alerts?

Rep. Gomberg: Both. Both of those things happened. And I think it’s really interesting that I was in Portland last week when they did a test alert and again my phone lit up even though I was not a Multnomah County resident, which indicates that there are different ways that these alerts can be sent out and different people that they reach.

Miller: In other words, the friends who were with you on that Tuesday night who didn’t get the alert, technologically it’s possible for them to get that alert simply based on being close to the tower that’s close to the inundation zone, for example?

Rep. Gomberg: If the county chooses to use that process. As I understand it, the alerts have several different options. One is to alert only people who have signed up for county alerts. The other is to send it to everybody who is within reach of the cell towers.

Miller: Well, what would it take for them to be then geographically based? I mean, if you’re near those cell towers, why shouldn’t you get that warning?

Rep. Gomberg: That’s an interesting question and I think, at the end of the day, this was not regarded as a life-threatening, life-saving event. So local decision makers decided not to alert everybody, but to send out a general alert about it. I think it’s important that people get information, because failing to do that just adds to the confusion.

Miller: Wait, let me make sure I understand what you’re saying. That decision happens on a case-by-case basis at the local level. So somebody in, say, Lincoln County was saying, looking at what’s happening in Kamchatka, “I don’t think this is important enough to make it so everybody who’s close to our towers gets the warning?”

Rep. Gomberg: That’s my understanding of the process at this point.

Miller: Paul Evans, I’m curious what you took away specifically from this recent tsunami alert? Then we can expand this conversation to bigger questions about readiness, but what’s it out to you?

Rep. Evans: I think that what occurred was demonstrable progress. More people found out about it. But what it emphasized is that we need to continue to refine what we have available. There is a program that we are anticipating to be up July 1, 2026 at the Department of Oregon Emergency Management. It should improve some of the quality control of what messaging is provided. And hopefully, ongoing conversations with carriers will give us the ability to send very clear, direct, timely messages regardless of whether people signed up or not. But again, it’s a process that takes a few years to get right because of personal privacy issues and other kinds of factors.

Miller: What exactly do you think is going to change as of July 1, 2026?

Rep. Evans: Well, I think three things will change. Number one: the Department of Oregon Emergency Management will be a full-time 24/7 operation center, which we do not currently have. Second: the technology that will be put into the new center will be top of the line, not legacy equipment, and will be much more able to connect with the providers in the methodology that is necessary. And third: some of the contracts that we’ve been working with, [Everbridge] and some other organizations, should be online by then so we can have better quality control. It’s taken us a few years to get where we’re at, and again, warning is only one small piece of a larger puzzle. But I think we’re actually on track to make progress and on track to get it right.

Miller: How has Oregon’s emergency response system as a whole, at the state level, changed in the last four years?

Rep. Evans: In the last six years, what we’ve done is we’ve effectively restructured how we provide response and recovery. We took the Office of Oregon Emergency Management out of the Military Department. We took the State Fire Marshal Office out of State Police. We allowed agencies to play to their strengths, so they weren’t competing internally for funds and priorities. But we also were very careful to create the Oregon Homeland Security Council and the Emergency Preparedness Advisory Council to ensure that agencies are working well together, that they’re just not fighting over priorities internally – which often led to a lot of not great results.

So we first fixed the structure. Then we have supported grants and investments in something called SPIRE [State Preparedness and Incident Response Equipment], which is a [grant] program that helps local providers get equipment that the state will buy and own, but that locals can use during times that the state doesn’t need the items. We’ve also started the work on building the statewide stockpile that is basically a top-down effort to provide the necessities, PPE and other things like that, that we know we’re going to need with any disaster.

We’re trying to move a battleship. When I first came into office in 2015, the Office of Oregon Emergency Management had about 35 employees. It was about one-fourth the size of the state of Washington. I didn’t count the county functions and liaisons. We’ve slowly been trying to get it right and build it in the appropriate way, and I’m hoping that in the 26th session, we can lay the groundwork for the next phase, which is supporting the training requirements necessary for sustainment.

Miller: Before we get to the changes you’d like to see, I’m curious if you could describe how the changes that have already happened over the last six years, what they might mean in practice in the case of an emergency?

Rep. Evans: I will talk about what has happened, rather than what could happen. What has happened is the State Fire Marshal now has the ability, because they’re their own department, to form partnerships to work more closely with Oregon State Forestry for wildfire planning, wildfire development, instead of a superintendent of State Police trying to make sense of what is or isn’t a smart investment for the agency.

Now, the superintendent of State Police is focusing on state police issues like the lab or having more focus on getting folks out on the roads. The State Fire Marshal Office has played a significant role in rethinking, basically how to invest, after we had the major wildfires 2020, 2021, 2022.

The outcomes speak for themselves. Every agency involved in the delivery system has reported to the legislature, multiple times, that now their coordination is a lot more effective because they don’t have to go through extra hoops. It’s more timely. And the citizens involved that are getting the services are much happier because fire marshal and state forestry can basically target funding and investments. When one is short, the other one can kind of help out.

In terms of other activities that have been helpful, the recovery capacity that ODEM has been able to put in place … the good is, they’re getting a lot better at recovery; the bad is, because they have to. With flooding and wildfires being at historical levels, we’ve been working with ODEM, and they’ve been working with the Office of Resilience inside DHS much more closely than they would have previously. We’re getting a heck of a lot of bang for our buck right now. The problem is, global climate change is accelerating some of these threats and we need to be more prepared, in more places, more often.

Miller: Paul Evans, you noted that you tried in the last session to put forward some new pieces of the ongoing evolution of emergency management in the state. This time though, [in] the most recent session, it was unsuccessful. What exactly were you trying to do in the big picture?

Rep. Evans: House Bill 2858, which had an acronym called SPARTICIS, had three elements. The first element was to keep a promise that was made in 2001 by DPSST [Department of Public Safety and Standards Training] to actually build facilities around the state that are all-hazards training for first responders and support responders. In addition to that, it would have established a little more capacity for the state resilience officer, in terms of directing strategic investments through the agencies.

And third, it would have required every state agency to actually have a deputy level position that is focused specifically on resilience. Because, quite frankly, with what’s going on at the federal government, the state has to become a little more able to do things on our own, which means using every last little capacity we have in agencies – state, county and local – to be able to do as much good to help each other and help Oregonians until the federal government is able to respond.

Miller: Did this get stuck in committee because of the price tag or because of philosophical differences?

Rep. Evans: Price tag. [It’s] all about money. In fact, the good part is, the reason that we’re moving forward in 2026 with an omnibus package including 2858, is that there is widespread consensus that we are losing our volunteer and our part-time responders at a historic clip because the training requirements, and the operations scale, scope and time is so large now.

We have about 8,000 volunteer firefighters, as an example. We will lose them if we don’t make training more available on their schedules. And that requires investments in making sure that, not only firefighters but medics and the secondary folks, the CERT – community emergency response teams – Red Cross, etc. all have facilities that are able to both train up for the events we have, as well as facilities that we can move people out of a hot zone, for example, for evacuation and recovery operations.

Miller: How reliant are we on volunteers or just community members for our overall emergency preparedness?

Rep. Evans: I don’t think we can overestimate the value of volunteers … and let me explain why. Our entire structure of fire, for example, and emergency response, in general, is primarily thought of as a local function. Because of Measure 5, 47, 50, over time, we’ve constrained those resources to where they literally are on a skeleton crew.

On top of that, we’ve built everything that we have, in terms of especially wildfire support, with the thinking that used to be true that wildfires happen east of the mountains. As Rep. Gomberg can tell you when he talks, we now have wildfires along the Oregon coast and we have wildfires in the Willamette Valley.

So a lot of the departments that used to be able to send folks across the mountains, now have to literally protect their own, which means that more places around the state are even more reliant than they were before on volunteers and part-time folks. It’s an evolving problem that we must get on top of or we are going to be woefully ill prepared for the worst day in American history, in terms of natural disasters, when the Cascadia Subduction Zone rips.

Miller: David Gomberg, before we say goodbye, what other issues are you thinking about specifically on the coast?

Rep. Gomberg: Well, let’s start with this. This latest tsunami warning landed on us in the midst of a very serious fire season. If we’d had a major event at the coast at the same time, our resources would have been spread very, very thin. Now, you asked about the price tag, and if we’re looking at a couple hundred million dollars to get ready for major disasters and legislators are sitting down saying, “how do we pay for schools, for healthcare, for wildfire response and public safety,” it’s hard to take money away from those things looking at some undefined potential major disaster on the horizon.

What am I looking at here? As Rep. Evans has outlined, we’re looking at institutional improvements that need to be made. We also need to look at infrastructure changes, moving fire departments out of the tsunami inundation zone, moving our police stations further from the beach. And I look at our coastal hospitals that each have an average of about three days’ supply of drinking water and generator fuel. So we’re asking Oregon families to be two weeks ready and our hospitals are only three days ready. Those are all necessary investments in small communities that don’t have the big dollars those kinds of projects normally need.

And the final thing I want to add is that we’re looking at the government in terms of institutional changes and infrastructure changes, but at the end of the day, Oregonians themselves need to be better prepared as well. Because before the government can be here to help you, you’re gonna need to help yourself. And you’re gonna need to be in a position to reach out to your family, to have your go-kits in place, to have your go-plan in place, where you’re going to leave to and how you’re going to meet your family, how you’re going to take care of your neighbors, how you’re gonna take care of your community – all of that in the immediate aftermath of a major event. We need to be better prepared.

Miller: David Gomberg and Paul Evans, thanks very much.

Rep. Evans: Thank you. Have a good day.

Miller: You too. That’s David Gomberg, the Democratic state representative from the Central Oregon Coast, and Paul Evans, Democratic state representative from the Mid-Willamette Valley.

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