Ocean Shores committee reviews scalable earthquake response plan with new tsunami appendix

Emergency management staff member Mike Mandela told the Ocean Shores Public Safety Committee on Feb. 17 that the city’s draft earthquake emergency response plan has been expanded with an informational tsunami appendix and is intentionally scalable to incidents of varying size.

Mandela, who led the presentation, said the plan breaks response into the first four hours, then 12, 24, 48 and 72 hours and beyond, and prioritizes life rescue and rapid windshield surveys to build a common operating picture. "Everything is covered, and you only use the parts of the plan that are appropriate for what you're seeing when you go out and do your windshield surveys and you get a common operating picture," Mandela said.

The plan is approximately 20 pages long and Mandela described the tsunami material as informational rather than an operational tsunami response. He said the tsunami appendix explains differences among advisories, watches and warnings and is intended to be refined once the city obtains more science from the U.S. Geological Survey and Washington State Emergency Management Division. "The tsunami, response plan itself, that's gonna get kicked down the road a little bit till I get some more science from this from, the department of, USGS," he said.

Mandela told the committee the city needs a broader shelter strategy. He recommended identifying a dozen short-term shelter sites beyond the few currently used, working with hotels and motels to expand capacity, and holding a focused planning session with operators. "Let's start to identify more than the 2 or 3 or 4 places we have now," Mandela said. He added that the response focus for the first 42–72 hours will be personnel-intensive life-rescue operations and that recovery times could range from months to years depending on event magnitude.

Committee members asked whether the plan accounts for seasonal population changes. Mandela said the document is scalable to handle low winter populations and much larger summer populations and that operational decisions will depend on the incident footprint and available resources. He also noted liquefaction risk in sandy soils and said critical infrastructure—such as wastewater treatment facilities—must be included in the common operating picture.

The committee expressed appreciation for the work and Mandela said he sought consensus that the plan "looked good and is ready to go" pending integration of additional scientific guidance. Next steps cited in the meeting included further refinement of the tsunami appendix using USGS and Washington State EMD guidance and follow-up planning with local hotel operators and Grays Harbor EOC for sheltering and resource requests.