The state has done little to protect its coastal communities from catastrophe
B ack when Oregon’s positive cases of COVID-19 could still be counted on two hands, Jay Wilson, the former chair of Oregon’s Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (the earthquake commission), sat in a Sellwood pub as he described to Street Roots a haunting premonition of a different disaster to come.
“After returning from Japan in 2011, I was watching people walk around at the Oregon Coast, and I felt like I was in ‘The Sixth Sense,’” Wilson said.
“I thought: These people have no idea what’s coming for them.”
What’s coming is the “Big One,” a prodigious earthquake and tsunami unleashed by the release of tectonic pressure built up over centuries across the Cascadia subduction zone, a 620-mile fault zone just off the Oregon Coast.
But as state scientists, seismic hazard experts and emergency planners pushed for years to incorporate cutting-edge knowledge of coastal hazards into state policy, they encountered fierce opposition from the Legislature’s Coastal Caucus, one of Oregon’s most powerful political alliances.
Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, a small, dedicated and chronically underfunded group of scientists, balked at the prospect of a showdown with the caucus’ members, who wield considerable power over state agency budgets.
“(The Department of Geology and Mineral Industries) is much more than just earthquake and tsunami stuff,” cautioned an agency staff member during a meeting of the earthquake commission in 2017. “So we have to be very careful about how we put the entire agency at risk for one particular part of our portfolio.”
But in an unexpected twist earlier this year, the department’s most vocal critics joined a successful public campaign to preserve the agency’s funding after Gov. Kate Brown proposed it be abolished.
Now the Department of Geology and Mineral Industries’ new allies face another decision: Will they embrace the same agency science kept out of state policy for years, if it means an improvement to their latest legislative proposal for coastal resilience?
Oregon's House has already voted to pass that proposal, House Bill 2605 . It now awaits a vote in the Senate. In many ways, the bill is the delayed payback for a deal that began coming together two years ago.
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D espite losing his boyhood home, Jin Sato still has a pleasant memory of the afternoon he spent on a hilltop with his elementary school classmates, watching a 9-foot wall of water roll into the bay of Minamisanriku, Japan.
Half a century later, as mayor, Sato found himself clinging to the same town’s disaster prevention center roof as a 33-foot tsunami swept most of his employees to their deaths.
Still grappling with the lingering trauma and controversy of that day during a 2015 interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting four years later, Sato offered a message to Oregonians: “Protect your life from a tsunami by doing whatever it takes.”
But in 2019, Oregon did the opposite.
Jeff Soulages, the incoming leader of Oregon’s independent earthquake commission that year, had a controversial proposition for his peers: agree to bless legislation that abolished science-based, statewide development restrictions.
The restrictions sought to deter coastal communities from investing in hospitals and schools that were located in tsunami inundation zones, and therefore potentially doomed to become disaster memorials.
“There are definitely people in the commission — myself included among them — who feel that moving these essential facilities outside the tsunami line, in its entirety, is really the best option,” Soulages said during a May 14 meeting of the earthquake commission that year.
But the best way forward, he argued, was to pursue what he called a “grand bargain.”
First, appease coastal politicians by opening the door for construction of critical and hazardous facilities in tsunami inundation zones. Next, mandate higher engineering standards for those structures.
Finally, leave the difficult decisions to local communities and let the developers “run the numbers.”
Trent Nagele, a member of the earthquake commission and former president of Oregon’s Structural Engineers Association, had a few questions.
“The concern that I have,” said Nagele, is “what is the emergency plan for those facilities and how do they continue to operate in a tsunami inundation zone post-event? What’s the access? What’s the roadway? How do people get to the hospital? How do the fire trucks get out of their bunker that they’ve built in the inundation zone? How does that continue to operate? Because the (building code) doesn’t address that at all.”
After acknowledging Nagele’s concerns, Soulages replied that he had recently been in conversations with south coastal representatives who “had some very interesting perspectives.”
“I think they would like to make those decisions on their own,” Soulages said. “I think that’s really what this is about.”
The following month, on June 25, a Coastal Caucus bill sailed through the Legislature and onto Brown’s desk, where it was signed into law with minimal discussion, zero public input, and nearly unanimous, bipartisan support.
In addition to negating surface mining permit requirements for the controversial Jordan Cove gas pipeline and export terminal, House Bill 3309 abolished a 1995 law outlining development restrictions in areas destined for a clobbering when the “Big One” inevitably arrives.
Brown sent a congratulatory signing statement to House Speaker Tina Kotek and Senate President Peter Courtney, noting “public safety and resiliency is a top priority for our state, and as Governor I strongly advocate for all of Oregon’s communities to be prepared in the event of a natural disaster.”
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Mike Harryman, Brown’s top official in charge of statewide resilience, later described the bill’s passage as “a slap in the face.”
But despite his praise for the life-saving legacies of people like Seaside administrator Doug Dougherty, who championed a successful campaign to move an entire school district outside of the tsunami inundation zone, Harryman did little to stop his boss from singing a bill that could allow more schools to be built in areas similar to the location Dougherty fought so hard to leave behind.
Harryman can be heard on audio recorded during the state’s earthquake commission meetings pressuring the commission on more than one occasion to limit its advisory role to advancing Brown’s policy priorities and refrain from publicly weighing in on proposals that would compete for funding in state budgets.
A few months after receiving those marching orders, the commission received a visit from Wilson, the former earthquake commission chair.
“You folks do not take orders from anyone,” Wilson said. “You advise them and it’s your job to advise them. … And if you disagree with them, you better damn tell them why — the public deserves that.”
Neither Soulages nor Harryman responded to emailed questions and requests for comment.
Jeff Rubin, a former geologist, emergency manager and vice chair of the 2014 Governor’s Task Force on Resilience Plan Implementation, had strong words for H.B. 3309’s sponsors.
“Rep. (David) Gomberg, and perhaps the rest of the Coastal Caucus, seem to be betting that they’ll be out of office, dead or both by the time the next tsunami inundates their districts,” Rubin said. “Or just that people won’t remember who made it easier to put more people and resources in harm’s way.”
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S treet Roots contacted 72 of the 90 state lawmakers who originally voted on H.B. 3309 in 2019 — nearly two dozen of whom are no longer serving in the state Legislature.
Only a handful responded to questions about whether they felt adequately informed about the issues at hand, whether they still stood by their vote, and whether they had concerns about the lack of scientific rigor underpinning tsunami models being proposed in legislation currently moving through the Capitol.
“I neither feel that I was well-informed when I cast that vote nor that Rep. Gomberg was trying to pull a fast one on anybody,” said Sen. Jeff Golden (D-Ashland) in an email. “It was one of those bills that flash by during the heat of the session.”
Sen. Chris Gorsek (D-Troutdale) forwarded Street Roots a copy of an email he sent to House leadership after casting the lone dissenting vote against the legislation as it moved out of committee.
“I have been told by our committee administrator that there is no civil liability for the state if we do enact this change (and someone is injured or killed as a result),” Gorsek wrote. “But what about our ethical responsibilities to ensure the safety of visitors and the citizens who live in those communities?”
Shortly after Gorsek sent those comments, the chief architect of H.B. 3309, Gomberg (D-Otis), sent out a newsletter calling the bill’s forward progress “a quiet victory.”
In a phone conversation with Street Roots, Gomberg was a little more circumspect.
“To be very candid with you, when the gavel came down, I think some of us had a sense that while we had prevailed, we might have gone a little too far,” Gomberg said.
But in a follow-up email he “categorically denied” putting political pressure on agencies or advisory boards.
“Instead we immediately crafted legislation to reflect the recommendations we received from OSSPAC (the earthquake commission),” he wrote.
Dacia Grayber, a firefighter and paramedic who recently entered the state Legislature in January of this year, said she joined the earthquake commission right after H.B. 3309 passed.
“I came at that with really fresh eyes — no ties to the Legislature, no ties to the Coastal Caucus, just kind of my own knowledge,” she said.
Dismayed at what she found, Grayber started asking legislators she knew and respected one question that had been weighing on her mind: “Why did you vote for this?”
“I got the same answer: ‘It’s a surface mining bill,’” she said.
In a phone conversation, Gomberg said he was disappointed by the suggestion that his colleagues didn’t know what they were voting on.
“Certainly, late in the session, we looked for a vehicle that we could use to address this problem,” he said. “And we did find a bill which we amended.”
The vehicle for that process, also known as a “gut ’n’ stuff,” was a bill co-sponsored by Caddy McKeown.
McKeown, a former state representative from Coos Bay, received tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from Jordan Cove and other fossil fuel companies who would turn her backyard into part of what would be the state’s largest climate polluter if built.
Several of McKeown’s family members also have financial ties to the project. McKeown’s brother-in-law, Joseph McKeown, owns a vacant industrial disposal site slated to become a temporary workforce housing development.
Her husband, Morgan Stanley Senior Vice President Jeff McKeown, previously secured a deal to provide investment advice to a community foundation board responsible for investing millions in anticipated community service payments from Jordan Cove.
Their opportunities to personally profit from the project now seem much less likely, given recent indications that the project may be down for the count following decades of battles over state and federal permits.
When asked if taking care of the Department of Geology and Mineral Industries surface mining permits for Jordan Cove was one of the problems he wanted to address with H.B. 3309, Gomberg said, “I’d have to look into that.”
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I f Gomberg’s legislation this session, H.B. 2605, passes, the introduction of new essential facilities in inundation zones will require careful oversight from the state’s Building Codes Division, which would be tasked with ensuring they meet safety standards.
The earthquake commission endorsed the bill’s approach, despite previously extracting a carefully worded admission from the Oregon Building Code Division’s former director, Mark Long, that the agency lacks adequate resources to support rural communities and often looks the other way even when it believes local building officials are in over their heads.
“We have situations that concern us right now, where’s there’s a project going on, and we’re not sure of the ability of those individuals to carry out that program,” Long said during an earthquake commission meeting in 2017. “But they do. And if there’s a complaint, well, we’ll take a look.”
Earthquake commission member Nagele asked Long about rumors of lax enforcement he had heard from engineers across the state, and what the implications might be if essential facilities started popping up in rural areas vulnerable to disasters.
“I wouldn’t want your takeaway to be that we’re suggesting, or I’m suggesting, there’s direct evidence that we have those problems,” Long replied.
In the four years since that conversation, the Building Code Division’s budget narratives to lawmakers identified multiple elements contributing to “ongoing challenges for the division to provide timely and efficient building permit services.”
Among the issues: an aging and rapidly diminishing inspection workforce, the inability to find qualified staff members, and legal issues with local communities outsourcing building code programs.
In 2018, an ongoing shortage of qualified electricians became so bad that Long took the controversial step of proposing drastically reduced training requirements for inspectors.
The agency implemented those changes in January 2019, ignoring warnings from industry veterans and local building officials, who said the move would “dumb down” the state’s inspector workforce and carried “the potential to cause irreparable harm to property and loss of life.”
Reached over email, Nagele declined to answer questions about his support for H.B. 3309 in 2019, and whether his recent testimony in favor of H.B. 2605 this session, on behalf of the earthquake commission, meant his previously voiced concerns had been adequately addressed.
For unclear reasons, after inundation zone development restrictions had been abolished, the Building Codes Division declined to mandate the adoption of tsunami-resistant construction standards developed by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
H.B. 2605 is the second attempt to pass legislation forcing the agency to do so.
“This would bring us in line with the same standards being used in California, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii,” Gomberg said during a May 11 meeting of the Senate Committee on Housing and Development.
Those states have incorporated American Society of Civil Engineers’ enhanced construction and design standards for buildings into their building codes.
But after West Coast scientists started echoing concerns first raised in Oregon years ago, those same states have taken a closer look at where the American Society of Civil Engineers says tsunami-hardened structures should be required.
In a presentation to Washington State’s Building Code Council , the state’s Geological Survey and Emergency Management Division expressed several concerns about using tsunami zone maps created during a process that was “not well documented, publicly available or reproducible.”
In response, the Building Code Council immediately formed a panel to assess the potential risks and identify a path forward.
For several complicated reasons, American Society of Civil Engineers’ tsunami hazard maps tend to both overestimate and underestimate risks in certain areas compared to maps developed by local state science agencies with different methodologies.
One consequence of one of those mismatches manifested in Long Beach, Washington, when work on a vertical evacuation structure funded with a federal grant had to be abandoned because of wave modeling that experts said made no sense.
According to Tim Walsh, a retired geologist from Washington State’s Department of Natural Resources who worked on the project, American Society of Civil Engineers’ tsunami prediction model resulted in a requirement that the building be roughly 20 feet higher than necessary.
But because the American Society of Civil Engineers process is not subject to the same review and public disclosures common for scientific research, it has been next to impossible for Washington to figure out what went wrong and proceed with any future projects in the area.
“I don’t know how many different ways we can ask and request and be told no,” said Washington State Emergency Management Division Earthquake Program Manager Maximilian Dixon during a meeting last year .
Dixon went on to describe the lack of transparency from the engineers group as “a huge problem” and “unethical.”
When the Long Beach project died, roughly a million dollars had already been spent on design work and site investigations, according to Walsh.
The only people who seem aware of these flaws in Oregon are the same people who first noticed them — the scientists.
Chris Goldfinger, a world-renowned seismic expert and vocal critic of coastal development projects like Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, said that the engineers at the American Society of Civil Engineers ignored extensive critiques provided by himself and scientists with Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries back in 2015.
“We gave them a long list of things they needed to fix, but they were already finished,” Goldfinger said. “They expended their budget and didn’t have any time or money or interest in fixing anything.”
Goldfinger said that officials in places like the Building Codes Division and state Legislature are much more likely to take what the American Society of Civil Engineers does as something akin to the “word of God.”
“They assume there’s a lot backing it up — peer review and things like that. And in this case, that just didn’t happen, for whatever reason.”
Gomberg, whose bill would require American Society of Civil Engineers’ tsunami models to be adopted in all coastal areas without their own tsunami-related land use plans, said he had not heard of any concerns with the models.
He also said he didn’t have an immediate answer for why Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries’ tsunami hazard maps should not be used instead.
“Oregon has gone from being a leader in this area to attacking their own agency,” Goldfinger said. “They should have pinned a medal on them instead of undermining them.”
•••
T o Wilson, the former chair of the state’s earthquake commission, the successful repeal of protections for coastal communities in tsunami hazard zones represented a perfect storm of failed accountability, justified by a misrepresentation of the truth.
“A lie, to say it bluntly, by the Coastal Caucus to say that these tsunami maps were causing economic hardship on local communities and that their hands were tied in terms of having fire stations and police stations where they need to be,” he said.
With the help of federal grants, three coastal counties and seven towns have adopted their own tsunami-related land use plans, which include Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries’ tsunami maps and varying restrictions on the development of essential facilities in inundation zones.
Asked if he could point to tanking real estate markets, disinvestment or other negative economic consequences in these communities as a result of their land use decisions, Gomberg said he was not aware of jurisdictions prohibiting construction within the tsunami zone.
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