Earthquake focuses attention on San Juan County emergency planning
A 4.5 magnitude earthquake struck Orcas Island at 5:02 a.m. on March 3, rattling windows north to Vancouver, B.C., and south to the outskirts of Seattle, causing county officials to review emergency preparedness practices.
The San Juan County Department of Emergency Management received no reports of damage, but, by Noon, assistant director Dave Halloran was addressing “community preparedness” before a spontaneous group at Eastsound’s Senior Center.
“It is easy for people to forget about it,” Halloran told Salish Current. Even a mild quake like this reminds people to review common sense guidelines like those on the county website.
Halloran and 22-year veteran director Brendan Cowan believe “information should be accessible,” to drive preparedness. “Overall,” said Cowan, “preparedness, self-sufficiency and self-reliance are baked-in here, relative to mainland communities.” Island residents, he said, have a “strong sense of place.”
Chain of command
On March 17, Cowan updated the San Juan County Council on preparedness, emergency procedures and public education. He highlighted the county’s inventory of emergency resources and network of communications hubs — fire stations around the county — and the cooperative agreements with neighboring counties.
Cowan’s prior history with FEMA has given him “a lot of exposure to big disasters.”
Under county code, the San Juan County Council “bears responsibility for coordinated emergency response,” said council member Justin Paulsen, also noting that Cowan has an independent contract with Friday Harbor for the same set of services.
The code empowers the director to coordinate and an interagency the response, which may involve non-governmental organizations such as the Food Bank. Cowan can recommend — if not overrule — actions being taken by other agencies such as fire department.
Four levels of preparedness
Cowan, a former FEMA reservist, defines preparedness in an ever-widening arc, offering four levels of advice in a universe of five disaster scenarios — earthquakes and tsunamis, winter storms, oil spills, health crises and wildland fires.
Under the deceptively-simplistic slogan, “keep it simple, begin today,” Cowan publishes practical checklists to guide big-disaster preparations for a prototype household, an island neighborhood, businesses and organizations and, finally, a guideline for an omnibus plan.
The department’s working premise is that fulfilling these checklists ensures two weeks of survival in the face of a disaster large enough to sever one’s ties to the community supply lines we take for granted every day of our lives.
The household-based preparation calendar is a case in point. Cowan has assembled an exhaustive 12-month blueprint for purchases and activities to convert an average residence into a small warehouse of necessary supplies.
Getting ready can seem overwhelming at first, the calendar reads. Like most big projects, it makes sense to break up into smaller, manageable tasks.
Month one, for example, calls for storing “10 gallons of water per person and each pet.” By month three, canned fruit. Month nine? Batteries and duct tape. And last on the list — begin doubling “everything from the prior 11 months.”
In total, the calendar asks for 120-odd purchases and activities. “It’s a work in progress,” Cowan admitted, “but it’s a good fit for the islands.”
From time to time, Cowan and Halloran are invited to speak to neighborhood groups. “I have heard from people who executed the whole 12-month playbook,” he said but declined to mention names.
One way in, one way out
Many neighborhoods around the islands have but “one way in, one way out” — a potential nightmare scenario for disaster planning.
Orcas Island’s Rosario District faces double jeopardy, where the “Y” configuration of Rosario Road creates the potential for isolation of the properties near the historic resort, the highlands area east of the resort or both.
Gregory Hancock, chair of the Rosario Property Owners Association, made preparedness a focus of the association when he assumed leadership five years ago of what had previously been little more than a social club.
“Yes, Rosario has a single access road,” he wrote in an email, “but I will point out that our entire side of the island can be separated … by losing Olga Road.” Hancock’s organization works closely with Cowan and Halloran to distribute the county’s comprehensive checklists for household preparations.
When the torrential rains of 2021 washed out Point Lawrence Road — another single access bottleneck — the Doe Bay community built a sturdy footbridge, paired “shopping buddies” with locals outside to bring grocery orders from Eastsound and asked Orcas Island Fire and Rescue to station dedicated emergency response vehicles on both sides of the washout, all within a day or two of the storms.
“What we witnessed was a lesson in resilience,” commented then-executive director of the Orcas Island Community Foundation Hilary Canty. Canty supported Doe Bay through the Community Emergency Response Fund.
Coincidentally, Canty’s personal residence sits on another single access road within 250 meters of the epicenter of the March 3 quake.
“We felt a good 30 seconds of shaking,” Canty said later that day. “Didn’t wake the dogs, though.”
A growing conversation
The community fund’s executive director, Lindsay Jennings, hopes more grants come out of the now-five-year-old fund. “The last grant we made was for the Doe Bay response,” she said. “The Orcas quake has triggered a renewed interest in a community conversation on resources and coordination.”
Like Cowan and Halloran, Jennings wants community engagement to include more voices. Councilmember Paulsen pointed to the provision in the county code which calls for the creation of a “local emergency planning committee” with at least 16 members from the relevant public and private entities.
Two weeks
Cowan and Halloran acknowledge that neither shelves of supplies nor neighborhood disaster plans can correct for all the “what ifs” massive earthquakes, floods, fires or pandemics can throw.
But, if one survives the impact of a big disaster, Cowan reasoned, and — absent a medical emergency — if a household is stocked with everything needed for a benchmark two weeks, “we will reach you.”
— By Toby Cooper
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Local counties face climate vulnerabilities,” March 21, 2025
• “Signs of a hidden threat: preparing for the really big one,” Sept. 6, 2023
• “Rising seas, high tides, storm surges and waterfront homes,” Jan. 20, 2023
• “Prepared for the worst, local agencies plan wildfire-fighting strategies,” Aug. 5, 2021