Open House:
The first part of our outreach was an informational clinic held at Lewis & Clark. We partnered with College Outdoors’ (Lewis & Clark’s outdoor program) Wednesday night Open House series to host an information session about the Cascadia subduction zone earthquake in Portland aimed at the three audiences mentioned above: on-campus students, off-campus students, and neighborhood families. Open Houses are an opportunity for students to teach and develop various technical and interpersonal skills necessary for leading outdoor trips, but this particular event was part of an environmental education initiative to involve professors in these lessons. This clinic took place on April 5, 2017 from 5-6:30pm in the Sequoia warehouse on the graduate campus.
We utilized five methods to recruit for both events: personal Facebook events, posters on campus, flyers in neighbors’ mailboxes, an event posted on Nextdoor, and an announcement through College Outdoors. The Facebook event included the basic information for the event as well as the poster created for the event. Each member of the class was added as a “host” so we could share the event with our own respective networks. We printed approximately 30 color posters for each event, and hung them around campus including in academic buildings, the Dovecote, and residence halls after they were approved and stamped by the appropriate poster authority. Flyers, of which we made 120 black & white copies, were surprisingly effective for recruitment. We stuffed them in mailboxes along the streets surrounding the LC campus. The flyer was the same general design as the poster, with the addition of a small map and a short description of the event. The Nextdoor event was posted to Collins View as well as the surrounding 10 neighborhoods, and we included a description of the event, a map of campus, a link to the Facebook event, and a link to an RSVP GoogleForm. The College Outdoors email was disseminated to the usual Wednesday Open House attendees.We additionally used GoogleForms to try and get an idea of how many people were planning on coming.
Out goal was to make the clinic as interactive as possible so as to keep people interested and engaged and to discourage pessimism and complacency with the onslaught of some scary information. Throughout the session we assured people that this event would be completely survivable and their single-family homes would likely be left intact. We tried, as much as possible, to mitigate fear rather than promote it.
To begin, we briefly introduced ourselves and went around the room asking who people were, their affiliation to Lewis & Clark, and why they came to the session. Most of the attendees were Lewis & Clark students who found out about the event from College Outdoors. However, three neighbors came after seeing the posting on Nextdoor. The neighbors varied in their state of preparedness; two were awaiting NET training while one felt completely unprepared and desperately wanted information. There was a common theme of people either being from California and therefore familiar with earthquakes, and wanting to know what this one was about, or from a place not at all prone to earthquakes and not having any idea how to prepare. Many of the College Outdoors students came because they have medical training and heard that they are part of the school’s disaster plan.
After introductions, we played a quick round of earthquake trivia (see Appendix A). Groups of two or three agreed upon an answer, though for question two, one group did not come to a consensus and so there is an extra data point. We then shifted into a twenty-minute presentation about the geology behind Cascadia by Prof. Liz Safran, Associate Professor of Geological Science at Lewis & Clark College. We spent the remainder of the session in small groups based upon where people lived. There were two groups dedicated to students who lived on campus and one for the neighbors and off-campus student. We came prepared with some questions to help facilitate discussion (see Appendix B) and had a person taking notes about their answers.
The students who lived on campus put their fear aside to talk about what resources they have for this event. Many are trained as Wilderness First Responders and could see themselves playing a role in administering first aid. There were concerns, however, about how to figure out who was in charge and they eventually came to the idea that small groups may coalesce with leaders giving way to more experienced people as they come along. In addition to concerns about social structure, people were concerned about accessing material resources in their dorms. They identified camping gear, first aid kits, rain clothes, blankets, and mattresses as valuable supplies and decided that keeping those items in a car would be the best solution, but if one was carless a consolidated bag of items by the door would be a good second choice.
The community member group came away with many questions and worries, but not very many concrete ideas about the roles that they could play. Individual concerns that were then echoed by the group included how to turn off your gas, when to turn off your gas, saving pets, when to reoccupy a retrofitted house, and sanitation. Members in the community group began to come up with some solutions such as getting a bigger water heater to store more water (but remembering to strap it down), and participating in NET training. This particular discussion group did not make it through all the questions because we had to very quickly bring the groups back together so as to respect the fact that time was up. In a very quick whole-group debrief we asked how motivated people felt to take action after attending the open house and how anxious they felt, assessed by holding up one, two, or three fingers. Generally people responded with one or two fingers for their anxiety levels and two or three fingers for how motivated they felt, indicating a low to moderate anxiety, but also intent to prepare. At the end of the Open House we provided everyone handouts with additional resources and encouraged them to come to the clinic on Saturday (See Appendix C).
Clinic
Our practical clinic took place the following Saturday, on April 8, 2017 from 12:30-3:30pm in Sequoia and on the Graduate Campus main lawn. This event was very material-heavy so a group met the Tuesday before to pull gear from Sequoia. In addition to the supply list, we came with three scenarios that alluded to certain challenges associated with prolonged camping. Just as we did with the Open House, we advertised this clinic through College Outdoors, Nextdoor, flyers around campus and the neighborhood, and a Facebook event. We ultimately had twelve attendees, three of whom were community members unaffiliated with Lewis & Clark who heard about the event from the flyers and the rest Lewis & Clark students. Of these neighbors, two had NET training and one was looking to learn more. Most of the students who attended were apart of College Outdoors or were friends of people involved.
We began the event with the same introductions as the Open House. We then talked about our motivation for holding this clinic, mainly focusing on the fact that we cannot rely on typical emergency management in an event of this magnitude so we must anticipate what problems could arise, plan how we might address them, and be prepared to improvise using what we have. We then spent some time talking about earthquake basics and impacts. This was a streamlined talk similar to the Open House where Liz introduced the geologic phenomena related to earthquakes, damages to infrastructure, and what to expect and do during the actual event. This segued into an earthquake drill during which we played sound effects for three minutes and everyone (as they were able) dropped, covered, and held on. Most people were able to get under tables, or interior walls, but due to the large amount of heavy equipment in Sequoia and being a concrete tilt-up as opposed to a wooden frame residence, it was decided that this would be a very unsafe place to be during the actual event. This whole introduction took approximately forty-five minutes.
To begin the actual challenges, we split the attendees into three groups of four, making sure that there was a community member in each group. Outside, one person at a time from each group was able to pick an item from our gear pile for a total of eight items per group to start the first challenge. The first items chosen were the buckets, both full and empty, garbage bags, tarps, and bleach. There was discussion within the teams about which items would be the most useful, notably, that duct tape and tarps have a lot of varied uses, layers are very important for both warmth and making bandages, and about surroundings that could be good places to set up camp.
Fig. 1: The gear pile.
For our first scenario (see Appendix E), all groups decided that making a shelter was priority. Two teams had difficulty spanning rope between trees while the other used the metal hand railings lining a pathway after deciding that it was a safe enough distance away from the buildings. This group’s tarp shelter doubled as a water collecting system by allowing water to pool and drain off the back of it. Similarly, another group included water catchment in their design, but had many difficulties with their tarps and rope being too small and not knowing how to tie knots, which they attempted to solve with zip ties. Another group solved their rope problems by creating rope out of duct tape and foraging around for additional items like PVC pipes, branches, a pallet (used for a sleeping platform), and cinder blocks. This group also found garbage bags to be extremely useful and ended up helping out their struggling neighbors, an example of collaboration we were hoping would occur, but ultimately was due to some prompting from an organizer. After about fifteen minutes we allowed the groups to go back to the gear pile and get one more item and the groups obtained garbage bags, tarps, and bleach, respectively. The group at the railing, however, was subsequently given a handicap. While their team member was obtaining another item, an “aftershock” occurred and she was injured, no longer able to use her arm. Her team helped her fashion her jacket into a sling (mostly with her instruction, as she is a WFR) and continued on with their shelter. At the end of thirty minutes, we toured all the shelters and talked about the struggles and triumphs that people had. Problems mainly focused on location and resource scarcity, while successes included finding items in their surroundings and having neighbors offer assistance. An especially innovative group even made a mattress out of a garbage bag stuffed with wood chips.
Fig. 2: An example of a shelter made with foraged materials, a tarp, and duct tape.
The second task was water purification, and we set up with groups near each other but still with their original items. Each group was given dirty water that they needed to get to a drinkable state. One group had a towel, which they used to filter out the large particles, and ultimately ended up sharing this with the other groups. Initially another group tried poking holes in a garbage bag with a garden staple as a filter, but the towel was a much faster option. Some groups found that letting the dirt settle before filtering helped to keep the water cleaner. The next part of this challenge was getting drops of bleach from a large jug into the buckets. Sticks and grass did not work well, but one group found results comparable to an eyedropper by using a leaf. They noted difficulties guessing how large the bucket was and were not sure how many drops to use, but erred on the side of caution and decided to use a few more drops and let the water sit for longer. A NET community member carries around a chart with the proper dosages, available from the CDC here. There was much more sharing between groups for this task, as they were closer in proximity to one another and there had already been a precedent set from the last challenge.
Fig 3: A comparison between a drop from a leaf and an eyedropper.
These tasks ultimately took longer than expected and so we did not give them the third scenario and opted instead for a thorough debrief. All groups came to the conclusion that one should have more supplies than one thinks one will need, and that items like tarps and rope are the most useful when they are large. In the instance where one needs an item, foraging for supplies and bartering with neighbors are great ways to obtain more resources. Participants really resonated with the idea of having multi-use shelters that collected water into buckets and then using the leaf-drop bleach method for further purifying it. We learned from one of our NET members that bleach expires so this is a supply that needs to be replaced periodically. The items that people wished they had (or had more of) were tarps, zip ties, a pocketknife, and duct tape, as well as more planning. It was noted as something to keep in mind that even though one has a resource they could use, does not mean they should immediately use it, as it could be more useful later.
After having snacks and hot drinks, we asked participants to fill out a survey in order to determine how well we accomplished our goals, and what people took away from the clinic. We will discuss the results of this survey in the section below. We provided them with additional informational handouts (see Appendix C) and ways to contact us if needed and concluded the clinic.