By Melissa Slager
For Peninsula Daily News
NEAH BAY — Melissa Peterson was rattled. She had just sat in a meeting and listened to experts paint a dire picture.
A wall of water will one day hit Neah Bay, wiping out Peterson’s home and hundreds of others that lay in its path. There will be scant minutes to escape to higher ground.
A tsunami-producing megaquake has hit the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the Northwest coast before — last submerging Neah Bay and turning Cape Flattery into an island in 1700, researchers have said — and it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.
People need to be aware, the experts told those gathered, and they need to be ready.
Myriad thoughts filled Peterson’s head as she drove home after that meeting with Clallam County staff over a year ago on the Makah reservation.
“What if my grandkids are with me? They spend the night and hang out,” she said. “I think about my neighbor — she’s handicapped. Another friend has a bad knee. Everybody in my little community here in East Nursery is older.”
The thoughts rushed in, one after the other.
“I was feeling grief, thinking about this,” Peterson recalled. “Oh my God, we’re going to lose everybody.”
Peterson, who is in her 60s, is an elder in the Makah tribe. Peterson, whose Native name is Walsebot, is a master tribal basket weaver and cultural instructor.
“I’ve taught my children so much. They’re our next generation of culture-keepers for our family. This idea of losing any of them to this catastrophic event … it’d be catastrophic culturally as well,” she said.
So she took action.
After looking at the tribe’s evacuation map, showing roads that lead to high ground in case of a tsunami, she set out to create a new uphill trail that’s closer to her neighborhood.
With her own money — and a talent for gathering willing volunteers — the trail was blazed, basic bridges were installed with donated culverts and metal grating, and ropes were added to help with the uphill climbs. The trail will help people get 200 feet above sea level.
But it is only a rough beginning. And Peterson’s personal funds have run dry.
Now, with help from a friend, Peterson has a page on the fundraising website GoFundMe.
The goal of the page at https://tinyurl.com/PDN-makahtrail is to raise $4,000 to complete the trail.
Signs of progress
The trail project is an example of the kind of grassroots planning that state and regional emergency planners long to see elsewhere.
“All disasters start locally and end locally,” said Maximilian Dixon, hazards and outreach program supervisor for the state Emergency Management Division.
When another Cascadia event strikes, many communities will be isolated for possibly weeks at a time.
Those who live in the inundation zones need to take that to heart, he said.
“It’s really them — the boots on the ground, doing what they can to protect themselves and their communities,” Dixon said.
The Makah Nation is fortunate to have a number of hillsides for evacuation routes.
Other coastal communities are not so favored.
“Not everyone can run six miles to the nearest hill,” noted Hannah Cleverly, Grays Harbor County’s deputy director of emergency management.
After a federal land transfer in 2012, the Quileute Tribe is working to move much of its critical administration and cultural buildings to higher ground.
Other communities are building vertical evacuation structures, which can be stand-alone towers or incorporated into new construction, like gyms or parking garages.
Ocosta Elementary School near Westport built the first such structure in the nation in 2016 using local tax dollars. The structure was incorporated into a new gym.
With the help of new federal grant dollars, other communities are now planning their own structures.
The Shoalwater Bay Tribe will build a vertical evacuation structure with a $2.2 million pre-disaster mitigation grant from FEMA. It’s the first vertical evacuation structure to be funded with the grant.
Now, three more communities are taking steps to apply for their own FEMA grant: Ocean Shores, Aberdeen School District, and Westport.
Groups must compete nationally for the money. The pot is big, but so are the needs. The program is offered annually; so if a community falls short one year, it can try again the next.
And once the money’s won? “As you’re building one, you’re planning for the next,” Cleverly said.
Signs of need
The few structures built or in planning stages are a drop in the ocean of what’s needed to provide a way out to the tens of thousands of people who could be in a tsunami’s path, especially during summer tourist seasons.
A previous state study, in 2010-11, identified a need for 54 structures. But that was just for Pacific and Grays Harbor counties, and there are even more people across the region now, Dixon noted. The structures vary in design, but a rough average might be $4 million — in today’s dollars, that is.
More sirens to warn people of an approaching tsunami also are on the needs list.
At least 47 more sirens are needed, based on a state survey of coastal communities.
The state Legislature will determine what kind of funding comes in the next budget.
In past years, the agency has received enough to add a couple sirens, which cost roughly $60,000 each, Dixon said.
This year’s proposal from the governor’s office would provide enough for about 15 sirens.
Every solution comes with a price tag.
That can be especially tough for small coastal communities, which can’t take on the debt obligations required for big construction projects.
The Quileute Tribe plans to break ground in summer 2020 on its new school campus on the high ground, thanks to a $44 million federal Bureau of Indian Affairs grant.
The school is the first town structure that will be relocated from sea level to the hilltop.
A courthouse and public safety would likely be the next to follow, along with government offices, housing and retail areas, said Larry Burtness, the tribe’s general manager.
Just the baseline cost estimates to do all that is daunting.
“We can just look at the insured value of the facilities and you come up with numbers that are well over $100 million,” Burtness said. “It’s a project that will take a long time to do. There’s no way we’ll come up with the many millions of dollars in one bucket.”
Burtness hopes new federal options like Opportunity Zones — that offer capital gains tax breaks to investors who keep their money in economically distressed communities — can help.
“But those are complicated funding mechanisms,” he said. And they won’t provide all the money that’s needed.
Meanwhile, a website for the tribe’s Move to Higher Ground effort, at mthg.org continues to take donations.
The donations help with planning for a cultural center and support for school cultural programs.
Signs of hope
Beyond steel beams and blaring sirens, disaster planners largely focus on outreach.
And that means connecting with individual people at a gut level.
The state Department of Emergency Management, for example, is creating animated videos for several communities that show tsunami waves inundating those communities in real time.
“You can say, ‘Hey, you’re going to have 20-foot waves coming.’ OK, what does that mean? (With the video) they can see, ‘Oh, that’s my house. That’s where I work. That’s my school,’” said Dixon, the state program supervisor.
Another effort is creating evacuation maps for pedestrians, showing people how to get to higher ground on foot with estimated walking times to get there. Port Angeles and Aberdeen are among the first to get the maps.
Being able to get out on foot is key, said Rickson Kanichy, the Makah tribe’s emergency management coordinator.
A major earthquake would likely make roads impassable, causing downed trees and power lines, and liquefaction.
The Makah tribe’s goal is to reduce each of its evacuation routes to six to 10 minutes of walking time, he said. The trail project, started by Peterson, the Makah elder, fits right in with that goal, he added.
There’s a long way to go to finish the trail.
So far, Peterson’s fundraising effort has brought in $655, which already has been spent to lay gravel, purchase supplies and finish other tasks.
Peterson has hired local men for the heavy grunt labor during the local fishing industry’s off-season. She shovels gravel, too.
The next step is adding wide stairs, allowing two people to ascend the hill side-by-side.
The trail heads uphill off Backtrack Road, behind the town’s lone general store, and connects to old logging roads that then lead down the other side of the hill to a wellness center that serves as an assembly area in emergencies.
There’s now an official tsunami evacuation sign to mark the trail’s location.
Peterson called that a milestone for a project that has proved both challenging and gratifying.
“It’s been an amazing journey,” she said. “It provides hope.”
________
Melissa Slager, a former Sound Publishing reporter, is a freelance writer who has been researching the 1700 Cascadia event for a novel project. A brief version of this article first appeared in her newsletter. Reach her at http://melissaslager.com/.
Melissa Peterson worked to create an evacuation trail.
