CRITICAL BUT NOT URGENT: SEATTLE PREPARES FOR THE BIG ONE, 2005 - 2019 SYNOPSIS In the early 1990s, scientists discovered that the city of Seattle faced far severer seismic hazards than previously known. Their findings showed that a devastating earthquake would occur-perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next year, or maybe not for decades. In any event, the coastal city-the largest in the Pacific Northwest region of North America-was gravely unprepared. The uncertainties surrounding the timing and extent of such a disaster worked against the case for immediate, significant, and unified government action. Beset by more-pressing priorities, elected officials were reluctant to commit significant tax dollars, extensive amounts of time, and substantial political capital to the issue. Municipal emergency managers and community organizers took on much of the responsibility and tried to address important aspects of how to respond to the population's immediate needs amid the devastation a massive earthquake would cause. They worked especially hard to build networks of organizations and people that would strengthen the city's preparedness and resilience. Still, organized efforts directed toward two other elements of preparedness-mitigation and recovery-lagged. Seattle's effort to grapple with those problems spotlighted a bigger question: How should a society prepare for a high-consequence disaster of uncertain timing? Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Seattle, in July and August 2019. Case published October 2019. INTRODUCTION In the late 1980s and early 1990s, geologists made a series of exciting-and disturbing-discoveries. Off the coast of the US Pacific Northwest, part of Earth's crust known as the oceanic Juan de Fuca Plate was plunging beneath North America, thereby creating the Cascadia subduction zone, a 700-mile fault that ran from northern California, past Oregon and Washington, to Vancouver Island, Canada. Seismologists found that the fault had slipped 41 times in the past 10,000 years-each time triggering a magnitude 9 earthquake, among the most powerful on record. The most recent one had occurred in 1700-nearly a century before the first European settlers arrived in the area. The region was due for another.1 The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) projected that a magnitude 9 Cascadia earthquake and tsunami would constitute the worst natural disaster in recorded North American history. As many as 13,000 people would die, 27,000 would suffer injuries, and a million would be displaced. By contrast, the deadliest temblor in US history-the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which spawned a massive fire-had killed an estimated 3,000.2 At the same time as they identified the Cascadia hazard, seismologists discovered another threat: a shallow, active crustal fault running east-west through Seattle. That Seattle Fault had last ruptured in 900 BCE, causing a magnitude 7 quake that triggered tens of thousands of landslides and a tsunami in Puget Sound that struck the shoreline within seconds. It would rupture again, but scientists had little data to approximate when the next slip would occur. In 2005, engineers and scientists conducted a scenario study of a magnitude 6.7 Seattle Fault earthquake, and the results were grim. The earthquake and tsunami would rip across the heart of the city, topple buildings, rupture water and sewer pipes, disable hospitals, and disrupt transportation networks for months. The city would suffer as many as 1,600 deaths, 24,000 injuries, and tens of billions of dollars in property damage.3 Although seismologists couldn't predict when a disastrous earthquake would occur, they could calculate the likelihood of such an event over a certain time period. The US Geologic Survey (USGS) determined that within the next five decades, there was a 10 to 14% probability of a Cascadia magnitude 9 earthquake, and a 5% probability of a Seattle Fault quake-meaning, there was an approximately one-in-five chance that a catastrophic earthquake would strike Seattle by 2055.4 Longtime Seattle residents knew their city was seismically active. Earthquakes struck every 30 to 50 years-most recently in 1949 and 1965 and then again in 2001 (called the Nisqually earthquake). These were magnitude 6.5 to 6.8 temblors, but they originated deep beneath Earth's surface, so the seismic waves weakened, causing relatively minor damage. Unlike residents of San Francisco or Los Angeles, no Seattleite had ever experienced a catastrophic earthquake. By the late 1990s, the city was beginning to grapple with the fact that it faced far greater seismic hazards than it had previously known. The science showed that the Big One was likely to devastate Seattle and that it might strike in the not-too-distant future. Government officials and activists faced a difficult task: how to prepare for a cataclysmic event that was certain to come but at an uncertain time. THE CHALLENGE At the root of seismic hazard preparedness lay a challenge related to human nature. Since the 1970s, psychologists and economists showed that people generally paid little attention to risks that had low probabilities of occurring on any given day. And for good reason: One study in 1977 found that homeowners living in flood- and earthquake-prone areas preferred to purchase insurance for high-probability, low-loss risks rather than for low-probability, high-loss ones. The researchers concluded that because people had a "finite reservoir of concern," it was irrational to worry about unlikely hazards-catastrophic though they might be. "Unless we ignored many low-probability threats, we would become so burdened that any sort of productive life would become impossible," they wrote.5 That psychological bias was even stronger in Seattle because there was no local memory of a severe earthquake. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision making, wrote: "Victims and near victims are very concerned after a disaster . . . However, the memories of the disaster dim over time, and so do worry and diligence . . . protective actions, whether by individuals or governments, are usually designed to be adequate to the worst disaster actually experienced."6 Or, as Eric Holdeman-former director of the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) of King County, which includes Seattle-more vividly put it: "Real change only happens after people die. Every line of the fire code is written in blood." As a consequence, the Seattle municipal government struggled to muster the political will to implement seismic-preparedness measures commensurate to the known risk. The city had a strong-mayor, strong-council system, in which the mayor-a politician elected to the post-served as the chief executive and negotiated policy decisions with a nine-member city council, the legislative body. Across the United States, many cities had adopted council-manager systems that vested in a nonpartisan appointee some of the responsibility for day-to-day administration and planning. But in Seattle, the mayor's larger role and its council's activism meant city policy making was exceptionally political, and its executive's time and attention were in short supply. Seismic preparedness was a low-profile, long-term issue that carried high potential costs in terms of taxpayer dollars. For instance, the most hazardous feature of Seattle's urban landscape was its roughly 1,100, pre-1930s brick-and-mortar buildings-especially prominent in the historic downtown neighborhoods of Pioneer Square and the International District. The prolonged shaking caused by a major earthquake would topple those unreinforced masonry structures (URMs), imperiling the lives of some 33,000 people who on any given day would be working in, residing in, or passing by them.7 But seismic retrofits were expensive. And because the buildings were older, apartments within them usually had lower rents: one out of every seven URMs contained affordable-housing units.8 If the city mandated lifesaving retrofits, building owners would raise rents or demolish their properties to erect more-modern structures. That would worsen the city's shortage of low-cost housing and add to the homeless population. Both were top city priorities pushed by vocal constituencies. "The dilemma-and the political leadership recognizes it-is that we're damned if we do, damned if we don't," said Jon Siu, principal engineer at the Seattle Department of Construction & Inspections. "Low-income and minority residents will be disproportionately affected by displacement caused by collapses or damage if the quake happens, but disproportionately affected by displacement caused by rising rents if retrofits are done." Much of Seattle's critical infrastructure was seismically vulnerable, including most of the city's more than 150 bridges and a water system that would lose all pressure within 16 to 24 hours of a major earthquake.9 Retrofits would run in the billions of dollars; precise costs were unknown in the early 2000s because city departments hadn't even calculated them. The challenge was as much political as budgetary. Seattle voters regularly approved levies for capital projects, such as new libraries, community centers, or public transportation. Proposing a levy, however, required a political champion-either the mayor or members of the city council-and it was rare to find someone eager to press taxpayers to spend a lot of their money now on what many considered a distant problem. "It's not as if anyone was against seismic-hazard preparedness. It just wasn't a big priority," said Richard Conlin, a city council member from 1998 to 2013. Despite growing awareness of Seattle's severe seismic risk, preparedness was an extremely low priority for most of the city's departments as well. Disaster response required a citywide effort in which different departments would be responsible for different support functions. A department's ability to execute its function depended on widespread awareness, effective planning, and close coordination, yet many departments had no dedicated staff position responsible for emergency management. The Office of Emergency Management, whose job was to prepare the city for disasters and coordinate the responses, was buried within the Seattle Police Department and had little influence across the city government. In 2005, the office had only nine staff; it was in an old facility; and, because of what the director described as a contentious relationship between himself and the mayor, it lacked executive-level support. Departments bristled at the OEM's requests to develop response plans and commit staff time to exercises. Paraphrasing a line from Sheri Fink's book about Hurricane Katrina Five Days at Memorial, OEM information technology system coordinator T.J. McDonald said, "Emergency management people were seen mostly as earnest basement dwellers who made the hospitals do emergency drills at inconvenient times." City officials also faced challenges when it came to making the public aware of seismic hazards. As the high-tech hub home of Microsoft, Amazon, and offices of Google and Facebook, Seattle grew rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s. Many of the newcomers were unaware of the city's earthquake risk, and some were transient workers, who had less interest in solutions for long-term problems that required immediate investments. Plus, although it was relatively prosperous, Seattle had large low-income and non-English-speaking immigrant populations. According to census data, 24% of the city's population spoke languages other than English at home.10 Among those vulnerable populations struggling to make ends meet or navigate a new culture, the reservoir of concern for vague possibilities was especially shallow. FRAMING A RESPONSE Disaster preparedness had three components: mitigation to lessen the impact, response to save lives in the immediate aftermath, and recovery to restore the city to pre-disaster health. Prior to 2005, Seattle city officials had laid some groundwork-most of it in response, some in mitigation, and little in recovery. Mitigation meant hardening the city's structures to withstand a major earthquake. A study by the National Institute of Building Sciences found that on average, every dollar spent on mitigation saved six dollars in emergency response.11 And despite the high up-front expense and general lack of political will, Seattle had made some investments in mitigation in the years after the heightened seismic risk was revealed. In 1998, FEMA selected Seattle as a pilot city for Project Impact, a federal program that gave $1-million grants to cities for natural disaster preparedness. The city's OEM used the grant to fund USGS seismic-hazard maps, to launch a do-it-yourself home retrofit program, and to finance nonstructural retrofits to furnishings, electrical fixtures, shelves, and the like for 46 schools. Project Impact spurred a flurry of public meetings and community events. In 2001, three weeks after the completion of one such retrofit at an elementary school, in which a massive rooftop water tank was drained and the water system reworked, the Nisqually earthquake struck. Had the retrofit not been performed and the tank been full, hundreds of gallons of hot water would have inundated a third-grade classroom. "Project Impact saved lives," said Jim Mullen, director of the OEM from 1994 to 2005. But shortly thereafter, the federal government discontinued funding for Project Impact. "I learned a powerful lesson from that: Don't rely on outside help," Mullen recalled. Seattle voters approved some funding for mitigation. Citing his experience from a visit to Kobe, Japan, after a 1995 earthquake there and capitalizing on a bump in public awareness because of the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, Mayor Greg Nickels championed what the press called the Fire Levy. The levy passed in 2003, when 69% of Seattle voters approved $169 million to upgrade, replace, and modernize more than 30 of Seattle's 33 fire stations so they could withstand seismic shaking and to build a new, state-of-the-art facility for the city's Emergency Operations Center-the hub that activates after a disaster to coordinate the response.12 Disaster response depended on planning. The OEM had created the Seattle Disaster Readiness and Response Plan based on the National Incident Management System, a comprehensive framework for joint operation and personnel organization released in 2004 by the US Department of Homeland Security (text box 1). Under the plan, city departments fulfilled 15 emergency support functions (ESFs). Transportation (ESF-1) was handled by the Department of Transportation; communications (ESF-2) was the domain of the IT Department; and so on. Box 1: The National Incident Management System Template In its own planning, the Seattle Office of Emergency Management drew on the framework, vocabulary, systems, and processes for emergency response established nationwide in 2004. The template, initially designed to help fight California forest fires, had gradually evolved over decades. It was premised on the idea that in any sort of emergency speed was crucial, as was the ability to integrate diverse capabilities, including different levels of government. The incident response system pre-defined roles and responsibilities with respect to resource management, command and coordination, and communications and information management. It could be tailored to the demands of a specific type of disaster or emergency (flexibility). It identified essential functions and job definitions (standardization). And it outlined a command structure that permitted agencies or levels of government to retain authority while also collaborating with others to achieve a common goal (unity of effort). For more on this system, see FEMA, National Incident Management System, third edition, October 2017 accessible at https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1508151197225-ced8c60378c3936adb92c1a3ee6f6564/FINAL_NIMS_2017.pdf As prescribed by the federal template, in the event of an earthquake the OEM would activate the city's Emergency Operations Center and coordinate communications and operations between city departments as well as with the government of King County, the government of the state of Washington, and the federal government, including requests for military assistance. The Fire Department-responsible for firefighting (ESF-4), search and rescue (ESF-9), and hazardous materials (ESF-10)-would lead the immediate response to an earthquake.13 The Seismic Hazard Annex to the plan delivered an unambiguous message to Seattle residents with regard to the event of a major earthquake: You're pretty much on your own. Emergency response resources would be insufficient to "address all or even a majority" of life safety needs; the emergency 911 network-in the low likelihood it was still operational-would become overloaded; it would take several days to establish shelters; with no stockpiles of food or water for the general public, it could take days before emergency supplies were available; and, most ominously, the number of expected deaths would likely exceed the capacity of city morgues, so the public would be responsible for the dead or, in the words of the plan, "fatality management."14 Taken together, those limitations meant that community preparedness had to be a crucial element of disaster-response planning. In 1996, LuAn Johnson, public education adviser at the OEM, developed a neighborhood program that organized and trained citizens to serve on response teams that could be self-reliant for three days. After the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, an OEM survey found that 92% of the 459 participating neighborhoods had responded effectively.15 Mullen also established the Auxiliary Communication System-a network of trained volunteer amateur, or ham, radio operators spread throughout the city that would mobilize in the event of a disaster to provide emergency communications. Because residents involved in disaster preparedness tended to be more affluent, preparedness planners had to engage more closely with low-income, minority, and immigrant communities. Those residents, who typically struggled to make ends meet while trying to navigate a new culture and city, would be disproportionately affected by an earthquake. The city of Seattle still lacked the third element of preparedness, a disaster recovery framework. Recovery would require a more-intensive planning process, given the scope and variety of stakeholders involved. "Long-term recovery is about investment bankers and schools and the health department, not the police and fire departments," Mullen stressed. GETTING DOWN TO WORK From 2005 onward, Seattle implemented some mitigation projects, but those efforts fell far short of what was needed to meaningfully reduce the impact of the anticipated threat. Much of Seattle's progress came from the city's improvements in seismic-hazard awareness, planning, and response capability, all of which fell within existing department mandates. A new emergency manager took responsibility for extending seismic-hazard awareness in departments, for developing plans, and for coordinating across sectors. To help prepare the city for a disaster, she and other city officials and community organizers developed and augmented various networks within individual city departments, between city departments; between the city and certain private organizations, between the city and the public, and within individual communities. Building municipal support for preparedness In 2005, Mayor Nickels hired Barb Graff to head the OEM. Unlike her two immediate predecessors, both of whom had come to the job from other lines of work, Graff was an experienced emergency manager. She had been director of the corresponding OEM in the nearby city of Bellevue for 15 years. Her background gave her credibility with the mayor. And she positioned herself as an apolitical professional. "She plays the bureaucratic game very astutely," said Mullen, who was OEM director for 12 years before Graff. "She's one of the smartest people politically in emergency management." One of Graff's top priorities was to elevate the issue of seismic preparedness in the municipal government. Taking advantage of support by the mayor, she set out to build citywide coalitions and institutional structures that would not only improve coordination and awareness for preparedness but also compel city departments to take greater responsibility for the issue and implement their own plans. Doing so was no easy task. City department employees were busy, and like the residents of Seattle, they had more-pressing priorities than preparing for an earthquake that was certain to happen but had a low probability of occurring in any given year. Graff's job was to get them to care. Rather than bully or browbeat, she relied on co-option, subtle nudging, and innovations in bureaucratic structure and process. Graff's playbook was in the form of Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP) standards, a set of 64 emergency management best practices and protocols developed by an independent, nonprofit organization of emergency management professionals. The standards covered mitigation, response, and recovery and provided a blueprint of ways Seattle could improve its preparedness.16 Graff's ultimate goal was to obtain EMAP accreditation for the city's own emergency management program, which would mark formal endorsement of the city's efforts by outside professionals. Graff recognized that achieving the standards would require first, getting city departments more involved and second, building partnerships both within and outside the city. The OEM had assigned the 15 emergency support functions to different city departments, but before 2005, neither the OEM nor the mayor's office had held the departments accountable for completing the often substantial amount of work and planning each function entailed. Graff began pushing the departments to deliver, but many of the departments lacked the resources to do that. So, during the 2006 budget season, several requested funding for a full-time staffer to fulfill the emergency support function work. The mayor called in Graff and suggested to her that the city locate these new employees in the OEM, so that she could help oversee and coordinate their work. Instead, Graff persuaded him to put them into their respective departments but require their participation in weekly meetings at the OEM to ensure accountability and share ideas. She reasoned that by embedding emergency management staff departments, the OEM would be able to exercise more influence over those departments. Those 15 or 16 employees-depending on that year's budget-came to form what was called the Strategic Working Group. Graff had inherited a separate forum-the Disaster Management Committee-which in 2005 was an exclusive group of nine senior-level members from within the city who met a few times a year. Graff expanded the committee, adding the Strategic Working Group members and inviting stakeholders from the community, nonprofits, the private sector, and other governments in the region to participate. She increased the frequency of the committee's meetings to at least once a month and diversified their content. Besides discussing policy issues and city plans and procedures, some meetings featured guest speakers, such as the mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand, who conveyed preparedness lessons to the Seattle committee in 2011-months after an earthquake had devastated his city. "There was immense value in bringing in speakers who had been through what we hadn't been through," Graff said. The committee created institutional momentum for preparedness issues because members would return to their respective departments with new information, ideas, and connections. Graff also recognized the importance of high-level buy-in. Copying an idea from the city of Los Angeles, Graff created the Mayor's Emergency Executive Board, which comprised the directors of 22 city departments. The board met quarterly to review policy issues related to emergency management and make recommendations to the mayor. The city budget was another mechanism that compelled departments to invest more time and effort in seismic-hazard preparedness. Graff found an ally in Conlin, a city council member who was a rare champion for the issue. In 2007, Graff and Conlin saw an opening. When the government passed its annual budget, Conlin attached "statements of legislative intent" to executive department appropriations that said those departments would produce assessments of how a catastrophic earthquake would affect their operations. The council or mayor's office could then follow up with those departments to keep the issue in the public eye. "The goal was to get the departments to start thinking about seismic hazards and why they needed to plan for them," said Conlin. As another tactic to get departments involved, in 2013 Graff led the creation of a multiyear citywide strategic plan that set department emergency-preparedness goals and implementation targets. "We had been conducting strategic planning just within OEM. But we realized that in a city with a workforce of 12,000, our staff of 14 wasn't enough to make sure targets were realized. We needed the active participation of other departments," Graff recalled. In June 2013, the OEM's Strategic Working Group gathered for a daylong retreat to brainstorm and set citywide preparedness priorities for the next three years. The group finished developing the plan in five subsequent sessions and presented it to the Mayor's Emergency Executive Board and the Disaster Management Committee, which voted to approve it. The Strategic Working Group updated the plan annually and reviewed progress on plan goals. The OEM regularly updated other plans, performed exercises to test the plans' efficacy, and hired a dedicated staffer to socialize them across the city. "For a plan to be effective, you need to have partnerships with the people and organizations that are involved in that plan," said Graff. The OEM also developed new plans on all-hazards-mitigation (2009), continuity-of-operations (2012), and comprehensive training (2013), as well as a disaster recovery framework. The Seattle Disaster Readiness and Response Plan was renamed the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan. Updated every three years, it covered emergency operations and included several disaster-specific annexes.17 Public-private coordination: Health care Improving planning and preparedness within the municipal government was not enough, however. The private sector was essential to an effective earthquake response. "Emergency disaster response is very much a government function. And yet the government depends heavily on the private sector to realize a lot of the capabilities that must be in place to protect our communities," said Onora Lien, executive director of the Northwest Healthcare Response Network, a health-care coalition in western Washington. "Disaster response has to be a public-private partnership." That was especially true for health and medical services in the United States, where the private sector was responsible for almost all health-care delivery. In the event of a mass-casualty earthquake, an area's hospitals, clinics, surgery centers, and care facilities for older adults would have to have ways of coordinating with one another and with local government. In response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and fears about bioterrorism and pandemics, the US Department of Health & Human Services issued guidance on the formation of health-care coalitions for the handling medical surges resulting from disease outbreaks or mass-casualty events.18 Drawing on that guidance as well as models from other counties across the United States, the Department of Public Health-Seattle & King County in 2005 launched the King County Healthcare Coalition, which would bring together competitive health-care organizations to share information and communicate with one another and with local government departments in the event of a disaster. In 2012, the King County coalition merged with a similar network in neighboring Pierce County and rebranded itself as the Northwest Healthcare Response Network. Two years later, the network transitioned out of the public health department and became an independent nonprofit. For Lien, longtime program manager for the coalition who became executive director of the healthcare network when it became a nonprofit, the transition was a challenging though necessary move. Working with the coalition's leadership, they determined that separating from the government would help guarantee the long-term financial viability of the. Previously, the coalition had been entirely dependent on federal grant funding. Now, as a nonprofit, it could receive contributions from members. In 2016, those contributions accounted for 30% of the network's funding. Nonprofit status also reinforced the health network's role as an intermediary and neutral broker among health-care providers that were in competition with one another and between those providers and local offices of emergency management and public health departments. In the event of an earthquake or other catastrophe, the network would contact all of its participating health-care organizations to determine how severely they were affected and the extent of their resource needs. Is the hospital open? Does it need to evacuate? How many patient beds are available? The network would collect that information, relay it to offices of emergency management and public health departments, and seek solutions from other health-care providers. In that way, the network served as a clearinghouse for information between local government responders and the hospitals and clinics. An office of emergency management had no need to contact every hospital to learn where the fire department could send urgent-care patients. The network maintained a patient-tracking database and was the only organization with a complete picture of where patients were and which hospital beds were available across the region. The network also facilitated preparedness planning among its member health-care organizations. Here Lien encountered the same inertia Graff and other planners had run into. "Our work is critical, but it's not considered by others to be urgent," said Lien. "Few people would argue that preparing for a big earthquake isn't necessary. But when you compare that with the priorities of keeping your hospital resourced and operating day to day, it's not the most pressing issue." By 2019, the network had grown to incorporate 15 counties and 25 tribal nations in western Washington. Its staff had more than doubled-to 18 from the original 7. It served more than 3,000 health-care organizations, including 64 hospitals, 143 skilled-nursing facilities, and 70% of all hospital beds in the state.19 Saving lives: The fire department The work of getting victims to hospital beds would fall largely to the Seattle Fire Department. In the event of a major earthquake, the city's 1,000 firefighters would be the first responders. They were trained and equipped primarily to extinguish fires and provide emergency medical services. A catastrophic earthquake would ignite blazes and injure victims, but the shaking would also cause hundreds-possibly thousands-of structures to partially or totally collapse. Research had shown that structural collapses were responsible for 75% of earthquake-related deaths.20 (Text box 2) Box 2: Enlisting Engineers to Support an Effective Response In an earthquake, the robustness of city systems—the likelihood they will operate correctly after a disaster despite damage—affects the ability of a community to quickly respond and recover. Focused on the needs of the Seattle Fire Department, which would play a crucial role in any response, teams of engineers at the University of Washington and Princeton University had started to assess interdependencies among systems and the risk of cascading hazards that could impede its effectiveness after the Big One struck. The department especially worried about interactions between (1) building collapses, (2) fire ignitions, (3) the effect of debris fields on transportation access, and (4) the water network. Earthquake magnitude, the location of the epicenter, soil types, building structures and materials, population size, and topography were among the many things that would affect those four elements—and the interactions between them. Working with city offices to map some of the elements, engineers created models that would help the fire department learn which areas were most vulnerable to building damage, determine whether the department’s planned scouting routes were likely to be blocked with debris and which might provide access, and calculate the probability that the water supply would be adequate to extinguish a blaze in a given location. (For a more detailed discussion, see the accompanying video on the Innovations for Successful Societies website.) The identification of such challenges began to help focus the fire department and the city on where they wanted to direct time, money, and effort. For example, the debris models underscored the utility of purchasing a drone the fire department could use to scout routes in the event of a disaster. Not only would a drone be able to see more and faster, but it would also mean the department would not have to divert scarce human resources and vehicles it needed for firefighting. (A drone could also help address a human problem: in a disaster, obtaining data to help set priorities was at a premium, but firefighters were trained not to pass by an emergency and relay information back to headquarters, but to stay and help, something that would actually impede the overall response.) Other recommendations were to take special care to clean up underground and create firebreaks in the Pioneer Square neighborhood, which sat on risers; to purchase—or invent—mobile and floating water pumps that could tap water from cisterns on top of undamaged tall buildings or from Elliott Bay; to stock deployable water pipelines; and to use ductile (flexible) motion-resisting frames instead of rigid building frames. Helping people know the specific risks in their communities and what to do was most important of all. Victims trapped in collapsed buildings would begin to die from injuries and exposure within hours. Although firefighters were trained to extricate motorists from crushed automobiles, rescuing earthquake victims trapped beneath tons of rubble was another thing entirely, and expert urban search-and-rescue teams were mainly federal and regional operations that would take days to arrive.21 Seattle's fire department saw that it had to develop its own capacity. Under Chief Gregory Dean, who led the department from 2005 to 2015, Seattle firefighters began receiving structural-collapse rescue training consistent with FEMA standards. Using mostly FEMA grant funds, the department procured heavy search and rescue equipment-including tools such as steel-cutting torches and concrete-boring drills-that it maintained in a tractor-trailer parked at a designated location in the city. An average of 50 firefighters per year took the two-day course, and by 2019, about 700 had been trained in how to rescue people from collapsed structures. Responding to a catastrophic earthquake required special department procedures. The Seattle Fire Department was a centralized organization, with a top-down paramilitary chain of command; and most of the dispatch and resource-allocation decisions were made in the department's downtown fire alarm center. But a major quake likely would render most if not all of the coastal city's bridges impassable, fracturing Seattle into islands that would each have its own particular needs. The solution was to decentralize. The city's 33 fire stations were divided into five battalions, each of which could operate independently. Each battalion chief would decide where to deploy the equipment and firefighters in that battalion's region. Headquarters would staff a city Resource Management Center with an incident command team that would try to rebalance resources based on where lifesaving needs were greatest. Under the department's previous protocols, the firefighters in the field would call in incidents and resource requests over 800-MHz radio to the battalion chiefs, who would in turn call in to the resource center. Emergency preparedness officer Captain Cody Scriver said he recognized that this "push" model would be chaos after a catastrophic earthquake because the volume of reports and requests would likely jam the communication system. Resource allocation would depend more on who could get through than on the severity or urgency of an incident. In 2018, Scriver developed a "pull" communications model, wherein battalion chiefs would call the engine companies. A general announcement would go out telling all units to prepare to report. Then, one by one, the battalion commander would ask each company for its top three incidents, the nature of each incident, the intersections involved, and the level of severity of each. The resource center would then reach out to the battalion chiefs in the same fashion. The department tested the pull communications system and implemented it citywide in early 2019. Preparing residents At the same time that Seattle's OEM was building coalitions for preparedness across the city government, Graff focused on making a greater number of Seattle residents aware and ready for a catastrophic earthquake. When Graff took over in 2005, she discontinued the OEM's core outreach program of creating and maintaining neighborhood response teams. The program had required a major time commitment from participants, entailing completion of five courses over two years plus a full-day exercise. "That worked for residents who were more established and better off, but it was not reaching the vast majority of our community," said Graff. Instead, the OEM adopted what staff jokingly called the Burger King outreach program, a reference to the fast-food chain's well-known advertising slogan "Have it your way." "If your organization or group wants a single presentation on earthquake preparedness, fine; we'll provide that. If you want more-intensive training or more hand-holding, we'll do that," said Graff. The OEM hosted Community Emergency Response Team training, a 36-hour (later, 20-hour) FEMA course that equipped volunteers with disaster response skills, such as first aid, search and rescue, fire suppression, and utilities control. Each year, the city held two courses and graduated 50 to 80 volunteers. In 2015, it began offering shorter community-emergency-response modules that focused on specific skills such as first aid and light search and rescue. The changes sharply expanded the program. The OEM could host an average of three 2-hour classes a month. And instead of training only 80 people a year, the office was now training closer to 1,000. Many Seattle residents and organizations requested information and disaster preparedness training from the OEM. But they were usually people with free time who were thinking about preparedness already and were least likely to need instruction. The challenge was to reach those who did not request the training, many of whom tended to be members of low-income, non-English-speaking, or otherwise vulnerable populations less likely to be aware of the city's seismic risk. In the early 2010s, the OEM began increasing its efforts to reach members of those groups. In 2015, the OEM launched the Community Safety Ambassadors program to reach immigrant and refugee communities and those with low English proficiency. OEM public education coordinator Matt Auflick and his staff identified leaders or otherwise well-connected persons in those communities and hired them. OEM paid them a stipend and trained them to lead disaster preparedness and conduct courses focused on lifesaving skills in their communities-in foreign languages and tailored in a way that would resonate. "We make the message relevant," said Auflick. "Someone who just moved to the city from Myanmar and is figuring out things like where to get groceries and how to ride the bus-if we jump right in to talking about a catastrophic earthquake, that's not especially relevant to that person. So, as an entry point, we incorporate things that aren't traditionally in our wheelhouse-like how to dial 911, how to find an interpreter, how to do CPR. Most people have a hard time imagining an earthquake, but they can imagine a scenario in which a loved one has a heart attack." By 2019, the OEM had 15 Community Safety Ambassadors who could provide training in Amharic, Burmese, Cantonese, Chin, Hindi, Khmer, Lao, Mandarin, Nepali, Oromo, Romanian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Tigrinya, and Vietnamese. The program expanded to train not just individuals but organizations as well. For instance, the OEM trained staff of the International Rescue Committee, a global refugee-support nonprofit, which began including basic preparedness and hazard awareness in the new-immigrant orientations it conducted every few weeks. Auflick found other ways to make the message relevant to underreached communities. "We also wanted to reach folks who won't come sit through a two-hour class or go to our website because, well, they're 22-year-olds who would rather go to the bar," he said. He partnered with a movie house in the hip, Capitol Hill neighborhood that regularly showed B movies to heckling audiences to screen a series of disaster films-such as Sharknado and Twister-with Auflick speaking for five minutes at the beginning of the screening about disaster preparedness. The media also helped galvanize public awareness. In 2015, New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz published a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The article triggered a surge in requests to the OEM: 252 people attended home retrofit classes-the highest total of any year-and public requests for disaster-skills classes shot up 58% to 13,298 in 2015, from 8,391 in 2014.22 Reporting by Sandi Doughton and Daniel Gilbert at the Seattle Times informed the public and put pressure on elected officials. A 2016 special report on what the newspaper called the city's and the state's "seismic neglect" prompted Governor Jay Inslee to convene a special committee on seismic-hazard planning for Washington State.23 Community hubs The most-effective methods of community preparedness came from within the community itself. Starting in 2007, Graff and her staff helped facilitate a spontaneous volunteer effort to create a network of community gathering points, called hubs, that would activate in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake. Seattle had a history of strong neighborhood association. The area's fractious topography-molded by glaciation into hills, waterways, and valleys-encouraged the development of distinct neighborhoods. Early residents founded local cooperatives, such as outdoor gear and sporting-goods chain REI and one of the strongest US labor movements, famous for holding a general strike in 1917. "We don't really have a seismic culture here, like California does," said former city council member Conlin. "But we do have a culture of collective action and of helping your neighbor." Graff had studied the immediate responses to recent California earthquakes-Loma Prieta in 1989, Northridge in 1994-and observed that most first responders were not trained professionals. "Regular people get out and try to help one another," she said. "We wanted to see how we could facilitate that impulse." Graff's insight gelled with a growing awareness in the national emergency management community that the key to disaster resilience was social capital: the networks and resources available to people based on their connections to others. As Daniel P. Aldrich, a political scientist specializing in disaster resilience, wrote, "Higher levels of social capital-more than such factors as greater economic resources, assistance from the government or outside agencies, and low levels of damage-facilitate recovery and help survivors coordinate for more effective reconstruction."24 "We've gotten away from the thinking that if you have a big enough emergency kit, you can get through anything like a superhero," said Auflick. "What matters is who you go through the disaster with." In December 2006, a windstorm left nearly 1 million residents in the Greater Seattle area without power-some for as long as two weeks-disrupting businesses and services.25 Cindi Barker, a Boeing employee active in her West Seattle community association, and other community group leaders agreed to designate seven emergency communication hubs spread evenly across the West Seattle and Delridge neighborhoods. The idea was to have known gathering points where residents could share information and resources during an emergency or disaster-such as where to get a hot shower or charge a cell phone or access a computer. At the same time, community groups in two other Seattle neighborhoods had come up with similar ideas. When one of those groups applied for a city grant to develop a disaster response plan, Graff became aware of the initiatives and brought the community members from the three groups together for a meeting. "All of us had this aha moment," recalled Barker. "There was a natural network here." The participants developed a template for community hubs in the form of post-disaster outdoor gathering points where community members could share information and match resources with needs. Each hub was different, but each generally had three components: (1) an information area with announcements, maps, and answers to frequently asked questions related to food, water, sanitation, and so on; (2) a message area where people could post lost-and-found notices, list missing persons, and leave notes for others; and (3) an exchange where community members could request-and offer-resources and services ("Who has a chainsaw?" "I'm a nurse; who needs medical care?"). The three groups formed a network for sharing ideas. Barker and others went to community group meetings in other neighborhoods to share the hub idea and galvanize the creation of new ones. They piggybacked on existing community associations and social groups. When the OEM held outreach activities, Barker or other hub captains would attend. For instance, when the office sponsored disaster-skills classes for faith-based organizations, Barker attended and encouraged churches to sponsor hubs in their parking lots. Barker held what she called Hub 101 classes, in which she would describe how to form a hub. In 2012, Barker created the idea of hub in a box. Previously, the materials for a hub-a folding table, whiteboards, radios, maps, and the like-were kept by a community member who would be responsible for bringing them to the hub when the hub activated. But what if that person was incapacitated or otherwise detained? Instead, Barker proposed purchasing large metal, lockable boxes filled with the necessary supplies and placing them permanently at the hub location. Barker procured hubs in a box with funds allocated by the city council and with matching funds from the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, a city department founded in 1988 that facilitated local planning for neighborhood projects and provided grants of $4,000 or less matched with in-kind contributions or volunteer hours. Each hub had a captain and a handful of designated volunteers. Hub captains met monthly and communicated regularly with one another via an e-mail list to share ideas and best practices. They regularly held outreach events and tabletop exercises, and once a year, all the hubs conducted a field drill. There was no formal organization; these were simply self-organized community volunteers who received minimal support from the city. The OEM's target was for every Seattle resident to live within a half mile of a community hub. By 2012, there were 45 community hubs-far fewer than the city's goal. Moreover, the majority of hubs were in the more-affluent areas of the city. Communities that were predominantly low income, immigrant, or minority lacked hubs. In 2012, the OEM partnered with the Department of Neighborhoods to win a $35,000 FEMA Community Resilience Grant that they used for establishing and supplying hubs in 18 community gardens (called P-Patches, a term specific to Seattle) in lower-income areas of southeast Seattle.26 The OEM and hub captains held six trainings that were interpreted into 11 languages. In the following years, the city designated additional P-Patches as community hubs. By 2019, the city had 132 hubs-and nearly every Seattle resident lived within a half mile of one. OVERCOMING OBSTACLES Perhaps no issue underscored the political and psychological difficulty of seismic-hazard mitigation more than Seattle's 1,100 unreinforced masonry structures did. These charming, brick-and-mortar buildings, concentrated mostly in the historic heart of downtown, would partially or totally collapse in a major earthquake and kill people. The city had been aware of the risk for decades, and yet it persistently failed to retrofit them. In 1974, not long after the 1965 deep earthquake damaged several buildings, the city council passed an ordinance mandating seismic retrofits for URMs; four years later, it repealed the ordinance over protests from private building owners. Though the city retrofit several publicly owned URMs-schools, community centers, fire stations-in the subsequent years, it had all but given up on mandating retrofits for the 950 URMs in the city that were privately owned. Graff made creating and implementing a city URM retrofit policy a priority. She again worked closely with council member Conlin. In 2011, Conlin requested that the Department of Planning (renamed the Department of Construction and Inspections in 2016)-which set building codes and in 2008 had recommended the city adopt a retrofit standard commonly used in California-convene a URM policy committee that would develop recommendations in a mandatory retrofit program. The committee comprised 22 members, including private-building owners, a USGS geophysicist, structural engineers, and historic preservationists.27 During the next five years, the URM policy committee met 15 times and developed a course of action for retrofitting the city's URMs in order of risk priority. In 2017, Graff briefed the committee's report to the mayor and the city council, emphasizing that without a URM policy, the historic character of downtown was at risk and communities of immigrants and people of color would be disproportionately affected by an earthquake-a salient argument for a city council that considered social justice a top concern. Still, the report triggered no action from the mayor or the council. The primary obstacle remained: finding a way to help building owners pay for retrofits. Washington was the only US state with a constitutional prohibition on the use of public funds for private benefit. That meant it was illegal for the city to provide public loans, subsidies, or any kind of financial assistance for owners of private buildings. During the next year, Graff searched for financing solutions. She held more than 40 different meetings with bank officers, loan agents, foundation board presidents, and others to ask for their ideas. Separately, a group of developers formed a coalition with other private and nonprofit stakeholders called the Alliance for Safety, Affordability, and Preservation. The coalition held a series of working groups to identify financing solutions for homeowners. At the same time, Eric Pettigrew, a former Seattle OEM director who was elected to the Washington state legislature to represent a district that included Pioneer Square and the International District-neighborhoods with the greatest concentration of URMs in the city-worked to change the constitutional prohibition on using public funds for private benefit. He encountered resistance in the legislature when colleagues argued that URMs represented a strictly Seattle issue. So, in 2018, Pettigrew secured a $200,000 budget allocation to survey all URMs in the state. The surveyors produced a map showing some 4,000 URMs were spread across Washington. Proving that it was in fact a statewide issue was a first step toward persuading other lawmakers to change the law. But as of 2019, the law was still in place, and Seattle still lacked a policy for helping private-building owners finance retrofits. "We still don't have something, but we've made progress," said Siu, principal engineer at the city's construction and inspections department. "We have the policy committee report, we have a growing list of financing suggestions, and we have approval from the mayor's office to move forward with the work." "It's a complex issue that done haphazardly can disproportionately affect lower-income populations or communities of color, so our approach has been to be more thorough in conducting the building inventory, to investigate all conceivable financial incentives, and to do the right things that get us to a well-thought-out, strategic retrofit ordinance with incentives," Graff said. ASSESSING RESULTS National and global standards for assessing disaster preparedness and response capability were still evolving when Barb Graff took the helm at Seattle's OEM.28 In the United States, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, took responsibility for working with others to create these standards. At the international level, the UN Disaster Risk Reduction organization began to oversee adherence to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, beginning in 2015. Seattle could also compare itself to other earthquake-prone cities, to help gauge its progress. Mitigation Despite the political difficulty of implementing seismic mitigation, Seattle made incremental progress after 2005. The Seattle Department of Transportation retrofit a dozen bridges from 2005 to 2018, and voters passed a transportation levy that, among other things, would retrofit more than a dozen more by 2024. Seattle Public Utilities, the city agency that provides water, sewer, and other services, spent tens of millions of dollars on seismic retrofits to the water system. And acting on new science from the USGS that showed basin effects would amplify the low-period ground waves from a Cascadia earthquake in such a way that would cause tall buildings to sway more than previously believed, the Department of Construction and Inspections strengthened the seismicity requirements in its building codes in 2013 and again in 2018. Though positive steps, adequate seismic mitigation remained a distant prospect. More than 100 of Seattle's bridges remained vulnerable. Retrofits to keep the water system flowing for fighting fires would cost billions of dollars. And thousands of buildings were at risk of partial or total collapse-not just URMs but also nonductile, concrete buildings constructed before the mid 1970s. "Lots of those have collapsed or been severely damaged in past earthquakes. We haven't even inventoried them in Seattle," said Siu. "If we can't get URMs done, we have no chance of going after those. It's much more expensive to retrofit a concrete building than a URM." Response First-response resources also were lacking. The Seattle Fire Department conducted a gap analysis that showed the city would need 3,000 technicians trained in structural-collapse rescue to adequately respond to the likely need. As of 2019, only 700 firefighters had received the training.29 Even though mitigation measures came slowly, the Office of Emergency Management helped city departments gain awareness of the earthquake threat and the need to consider seismic preparations in planning. Under Graff's leadership, the OEM became an influential division in city government. "Barb was able to come in and turn a position that was four or five tiers down in the police department into one where she could walk in and talk directly to the mayor. And she's done that because she is a trusted agent and seen as someone who is politically neutral and not one to take sides," said OEM technology coordinator McDonald, who first joined the office in 1995. "We've become the go-to people in multiple mayoral administrations to do ad hoc coordination, collaboration, and convening." Through the creation of new committees and new plans, Graff got more and more city officials involved in preparedness activities. "A point of success was how Barb worked the bureaucracies in the city. For nearly all of the city's 20-some departments, seismic preparedness was way, way down on the priority list. Getting them to participate in emergency management activities was hard, but we got that to happen. The Health Department, for instance, got excited about it. The Parks Department is even engaged now. And a lot of that is Barb. She really went out and proselytized and pushed. She got the support of the mayor and carried the ball," said Conlin. "You need a champion at the bureaucratic level, and she has been one. She's organized, a good leader, keeps issues up front," said Siu. "Having the regular meetings she organizes [of the Disaster Management Committee and Strategic Working Group] gets people talking to one another, and that's really helpful. It helps departments in the city identify how they can help one another." As an example, after having conversations at OEM meetings, both fire department and police department emergency-preparedness officers began developing a joint earthquake plan in which patrol officers would assist firefighters in the immediate aftermath of a quake-the first time the two departments collaborated on an earthquake response plan. And in 2016, Seattle earned formal recognition from the Emergency Management Accreditation Program by meeting all 64 required standards. Community-level networks had also grown. As of summer 2019, Seattle had 132 designated community hubs. Their quality varied widely, however. Some were well-known to residents and fully stocked with materials. Others were simply community gardens that few people knew doubled as emergency hubs. The OEM reported that each year it conducted 250 outreach and preparedness programs and reached an average of 10,000 new people.30 A 2015 OEM survey of 1,800 Seattleites found that 85% of respondents recognized earthquakes were likely risks and that it was important to prepare for them. But more than 75% of respondents admitted to having only three days or less of food and water-even though they recognized they should have more.31 The psychological bias to not worry about low-probability events remained. "I know the dangers better than just about anyone, but am I prepared? Do I have an emergency pack? No," said former OEM director Pettigrew. "I think about it a lot, but I haven't done it. It's hard to get people into that mind-set. If it's hard for me to do it, imagine how hard it is for most people in the city." Recovery "If I had all the money in the world, I would put all of it into mitigation and community preparedness," said former OEM director Jim Mullen. Seattle's self-reliant culture and the grassroots organizing of the community hubs boded well for resilience. But what would happen when, as soon as 24 hours after an earthquake, the city's entire water system went out? and, What would happen when damage to roads and bridges severed just-in-time shipping lines to grocery stores? Plans called for the US government-in the forms of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Defense-to fly emergency supplies to staging grounds, such as at McChord Field Air Force base near Tacoma south of the city, or to Lake Moses over the Cascade Mountains to the east. Trucks would then drive the supplies in along two major highways (so-called seismic lifelines), Interstate 5 running north-south, and Interstate 90 running east-west. From 1999 to 2019, the Washington State Department of Transportation had spent nearly $200 million on seismic retrofits to bridges along those routes.32 But despite that work, the state still assessed that the bridges would be impassable for days or potentially weeks or months after a major earthquake.33 As of 2019, however, there was a growing recognition that a top-down, federally based response may not be the optimal solution for supplying the city. Planners and emergency managers at FEMA, King County, and the state of Washington were beginning to convene meetings with private sector grocers and retailers, companies such as Costco, Amazon, and Kroger, whose business was logistics and supply chains. As with nearly every aspect of the city's effort to gird for the Big One, uncertainty was the elephant in the room. Ultimately, no one knew what the aftermath of a catastrophic Seattle earthquake would look like. "People will have to leave the city on foot because they are not individually prepared for disasters," predicted Holdeman, former director of the King County Office of Emergency Management. "Critical supplies like food and medicines will rapidly run out. Without potable water, people will start dying in 72 hours." "We don't have the experience, so it's hard to know what will go wrong. Will we run out of food? I don't think so, but maybe. For water, we do have Lake Washington. Once we talked about mobilizing all the backpackers in the city to take their filters down to the lake. I don't know how realistic that is, but I'm sure we will stumble into some way to access the lake," Conlin said. And yet, recovery was the piece Seattle appeared to be paying the least attention to. "The [Office of Emergency Management] disaster recovery plan is impressive, but it is not the centerpiece," said Scott Miles, a disaster resilience researcher at the University of Washington. "I think all disaster planning should be driven by long-term recovery planning. Understand where you want to be in the long term, and then work backward from that. All these plans Seattle has now-they're not a system, they don't link, and they might lead to a lot of decisions that might not be worthwhile for helping the community recover. Broad-brush mitigation often isn't achievable because there's only so much political and financial capital out there for this stuff." REFLECTIONS So, given the public and political inertia that has hindered preparedness, what should Seattle do? When posed that question, Eric Pettigrew, the state representative whose district likely would sustain immense loss of life and property in a catastrophic earthquake, offered a metaphor. Some 150 miles southwest of Seattle, the Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean, creating violent, unpredictable waves that have wrecked thousands of ships since the 1600s, yet native inhabitants piloting wooden canoes safely navigated the seaway. They stayed along the banks and moved only with the current. When the current shifted favorably, they paddled as hard as they could. "And that's what I try to do," said Pettigrew. "When the current is moving in the right direction, when there's a new study or piece of science or an earthquake somewhere else that catches people's attention, we need to paddle like hell to try to keep the discussion moving forward and make a little bit of progress." The city had fewer and fewer paddlers, however. In 2013, Richard Conlin had lost his seat on the city council, and no city politician-neither a mayor nor a council member-stepped up to fill Conlin's role as a champion for seismic-hazard preparedness. Politically, the issue was a loser. Barb Graff, director of the Office of Emergency Management since 2005, had built committees and networks that pushed the city toward greater organizational recognition of the problem, but she planned to retire at the end of 2019. Late in the year, questions remain about what lies ahead for Seattle's efforts to prepare for the Big One. "I think the big question for the future of preparedness in the city is Barb's successor," said Conlin. "[Barb] has kept the network in the city active and moving in the right direction. That network will persist if her successor is good. Otherwise, I fear it might not." References 1 City of Seattle, Seattle Hazard Identification and Vulnerability Analysis, updated April 10, 2019. Available at https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Emergency/PlansOEM/SHIVA/SHIVAv7.0.pdf. 2 Kathryn Schulz, "The Really Big One," New Yorker, July 13, 2015. Available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one. 3 Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Scenario for a Magnitude 6.7 Earthquake on the Seattle Fault, June 2005; https://www.eeri.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/seattscen_full_book.pdf. 4 Probabilities calculated by Art Frankel, USGS. Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Scenario for a Magnitude 6.7 Earthquake on the Seattle Fault, June 2005. Available at https://www.eeri.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/seattscen_full_book.pdf. 5 Howard Kunreuther and Paul Slovic. "Economics, Psychology, and Protective Behavior." Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, New York, December 1977, 7. Available at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/22306/slovic_102.pdf?sequence=1. 6 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, 137. 7 Sandi Doughton and Daniel Gilbert, "'This is an urgent issue': Seattle makes little progress on buildings that can kill in earthquakes," Seattle Times, February 15, 2018. Available at https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/seattle-makes-little-progress-on-buildings-that-can-kill-in-earthquakes/. 8 National Development Council, Funding URM Retrofits: Report to City of Seattle from National Development Council, May 2019. Available at http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/SDCI/Codes/ChangesToCodes/UnreinforcedMasonry/FundingURMRetrofits.pdf. 9 Seattle Public Utilities, Seismic Vulnerability Assessment: Executive Summary, 2018. Available at http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/SPU/Documents/Seismic/Executive%20Summarya%20final%20press%20ready.pdf. 10 Seattle Office of Emergency Management, City of Seattle Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, updated May 2015. Available at https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Emergency/PlansOEM/SDRRP/Final_CEMP_V15_08_08.pdf. 11 National Institute of Building Sciences, "National Institute of Building Sciences Issues New Report on the Value of Mitigation," January 11, 2018. Available at https://www.nibs.org/news/381874/National-Institute-of-Building-Sciences-Issues-New-Report-on-the-Value-of-Mitigation.htm. 12 City of Seattle news release: "Mayor celebrates completion of upgraded fire station in Rainier Beach," September 19, 2009. Available at https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/FireLevy/PressReleases/FS33dedicationrelease.pdf. 13 Seattle Office of Emergency Management, City of Seattle Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan: Emergency Operations Plan Earthquake Incident Annex, updated November 2012. Available at http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Emergency/PlansOEM/EOP/2017-11-06_AnnexIV.EOP_Earthquake%20Incident%20Annex.pdf. 14 Seattle Office of Emergency Management, City of Seattle Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan. 15 Interview with Jim Mullen, Seattle, August 6, 2019. 16 Emergency Management Accreditation Program, "Our Mission." Available at https://emap.org/index.php/what-is-emap/our-mission. 17 For the plans, see City of Seattle, "Emergency Management Plans." https://www.seattle.gov/emergency-management/plans. 18 US Department of Health & Human Services, Medical Surge Capacity and Capability, February 14, 2012. Available at https://www.phe.gov/Preparedness/planning/mscc/healthcarecoalition/Pages/executivesummary.aspx. 19 Northwest Healthcare Response Network, 2018 Annual Report. Available at https://nwhrn.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/NWHRN-2018_Annual_Report.pdf. 20 A. W. Coburn, R. J. S. Spence, and A. Pomonis, "Factors determining human casualty levels in earthquakes: Mortality prediction in building collapse," Earthquake Engineering, Tenth World Conference, 1992. Available at http://www.iitk.ac.in/nicee/wcee/article/10_vol10_5989.pdf. 21Washington State Military Emergency Management Division, Puget Sound Region Structural Collapse Rescue Annex, July 2014. Available at https://mil.wa.gov/uploads/pdf/PLANS/structuralcollapserescueannexnew.pdf. 22 Seattle Office of Emergency Management, 2015 Annual Report. Available at http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Emergency/AnnualReports/Annual_Report_2015.pdf. 23 Sandi Doughton, Daniel Gilbert, and Justin Mayo, "Seismic Neglect," Seattle Times, May 14, 2016. Available at https://projects.seattletimes.com/2016/seismic-neglect/. 24 Daniel P. Aldrich, Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 2. 25 Seattle City Light, December 2006 Wind Storm Report, May 31, 2007. Available at http://www.seattle.gov/light/news/Docs/DCI_SCLWindstormReportFinal.pdf. 26 Seattle Office of Emergency Management, 2013 Annual Report. Available at http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Emergency/AnnualReports/2013-12-30_Annual_Report.pdf. 27 National Development Council, Funding URM Retrofits. 28 In the United States, the leader in setting standards is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Its standards for mitigation, response, and recovery appear with other information at https://www.fema.gov/earthquake. Working with the US Geological Survey, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, FEMA produced a strategic plan for earthquake hazards reduction accessible with related documents at https://www.nehrp.gov/ At the international level, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) monitors national preparedness with respect to standards contained the Sendai Framework, accessible at https://www.unisdr.org/we/coordinate/sendai-framework. . 29 Interview with Captain Cody Scriver, Seattle, July 31, 2019. 30 Interview with Matt Auflick, Seattle, July 29, 2019. 31 Seattle Office of Emergency Management, Emergency Preparedness Survey 2015, June 30, 2015. Available at http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Emergency/Preparedness/City_of_Seattle_Preparedness_Survey_2015(0).pdf. 32 Kris Rietmann, "Are you ready? Today's earthquake is a reminder to get prepared," WSDOT blog, July 12, 2019. Available at https://wsdotblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/are-you-ready-todays-earthquake-is.html. 33 Washington State Emergency Management Council: Seismic Safety Committee, Resilient Washington State, Washington State Seismic Safety Committee, November 2012. Available at http://www.dnr.wa.gov/Publications/ger_ic114_resilient_washington_state.pdf. Innovations for Successful Societies makes its case studies and other publications available to all at no cost, under the guidelines of the Terms of Use listed below. The ISS Web repository is intended to serve as an idea bank, enabling practitioners and scholars to evaluate the pros and cons of different reform strategies and weigh the effects of context. ISS welcomes readers' feedback, including suggestions of additional topics and questions to be considered, corrections, and how case studies are being used: iss@princeton.edu. 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