When reaching out to community members for these events, we targeted three groups: on-campus students, off-campus students on Palatine Hill, and neighbors on Palatine Hill. Our reasons were twofold, and included both the proximity and the vulnerability of residents. Our primary objective was to provide information, skills, and feedback to people that would potentially rely on Lewis and Clark College in the event of a major disaster.
Students on campus are included within the school’s emergency planning, but can be considered vulnerable because they are not included in the decision making processes of emergency management (Logan 2014). They are likely to rely on the school for food, water, and shelter. Since the extent of the damages of a major earthquake on the school and in the community are unclear, it is critical that students be able to adapt and improvise in the event that the school becomes overwhelmed or unable to support them.
Off-campus students rely less on school resources such as food and water, but are still under the protection of the school. It is similarly unclear on the expected condition of houses in the Palatine Hill residential neighborhood, so off-campus students will likely need to adapt to uninhabitable houses. Palatine Hill could potentially be subject to a combination of amplification and landslide hazards that can damage the structural integrity of houses (DOGAMI 2016). These hazards are difficult to predict because the size of the earthquake is unknown and the quality of house varies depending on location, age, and more. It is likely that students living near the school will look to the school for support, perhaps for shelter, food, and/or water. Similar to on-campus students, it is important for off-campus students to be able to adapt and improvise if the school becomes overwhelmed or unable to adequately support all of the students.
We included neighborhood families for a number of reasons. Neighbors of Lewis and Clark often are dealing with different circumstances than students. After mapping the demographics and relative geological hazards of the area surrounding Lewis & Clark in GIS, we discovered that the neighborhood has a high number of residents that own their homes, instead of renting. Neighborhood families are more likely to have sufficient financial resources to retrofit houses or pay for more intensive kits and other preparation resources. They are also likely to have accumulated more material resources in their houses, if they have been living in them for a while, that might be useful in the event of an earthquake. They also, however, might have young children, or themselves be older or living with disabilities (Logan 2014). It is unclear whether neighbors would be more likely to provide support to students living on or near campus, or if they themselves would seek the school for post-crisis support. There is a Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET) that has the ability to influence how these realities would come into play during the Cascadia earthquake.
In order to reach all three of these groups we created color posters to distribute on-campus, black and white posters with a map of the campus to distribute to neighborhood houses, and facebook events to share for both the open house and skills clinic. We did not distribute any posters on the SE side of the Willamette River, even though many students live in Sellwood. We felt this was appropriate because students would be exposed to event information on campus, and neighbors on the other side of the river would be unlikely or unable to cross the river.