Thousands take part in tsunami drill
COOS BAY, Oregon — Inspired by last year’s tsunami in Japan, several thousand people on the southern Oregon Coast took part in their first tsunami evacuation drill, stopping what they were doing and walking uphill to assembly points, where volunteers handed out bottles of water and grab-bags of essentials.
Unlike a real tsunami, there were no sirens and no tremors from a massive offshore earthquake on Thursday in the towns of Coos Bay, North Bend and Charleston.
But after weeks of door-todoor canvassing, advertising, and community meetings, people knew it was coming.
Most who took part were schoolchildren, like those at Blossom Gulch Elementary School in Coos Bay, were 400 kids crawled under tables and pretended the ground was shaking.
Then they lined up with their teachers and walked up the hill to the high school football field, where principal Jodi O’Mara congratulated them on “an awesome job.”
Coos Bay Fire Chief Stan Gibson said the vivid TV images of last year’s tsunami in Japan have made people on the Oregon Coast take the possibility much more seriously than about 10 years ago, when new signs laying out tsunami evacuation routes were greeted with complaints they would just scare the tourists..
“Seeing seawalls being breached, seeing buildings and cars being tossed around like nothing, I think that really got peoples’ attention,” he said.
The 2004 tsunami in Sumatra triggered federal legislation that is helping the West Coast get ready for a big one, paying for a new set of tsunami maps in Oregon, and evacuation drills in coastal communities up and down the coast, said Rick Wilson, a senior engineering geologist with the California Geological Survey. The Tsunami Warning Education Act is due to sunset in September.