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My 1949 Cape Cod–style house, with its dark shutters and trimmed shrubs, blends in well: a small house on a quiet street in the slow-paced capital city of Salem, Oregon. Unless, of course,
you go snooping under the sofa, where cans of water—carefully placed on their sides in foil trays—hide.
My hallways look ordinary, but open the linen closet and only one shelf holds sheets. The other three stock canned goods:
hearty soups, baked beans, tuna, beef stew. Pull out the drawers below to reveal N95 masks, six bottles of hand sanitizer, batteries of all sizes, two first-aid manuals for backcountry hikers, extralarge bottles of various pain pills, and packages of heavy-duty contractor garbage bags for lining buckets improvised into toilets.
Elsewhere in the house, shelves, cupboards, boxes, and bins are filled with freeze-dried food, first-aid supplies, charcoal briquets,
and a camp stove.
What you’ve found are not the dark secrets of a paranoid doomsday fearer or the stockpile of an agoraphobic homebody,
but the preparations of an expert who wants to be ready for the very real threat of a 9.0 Cascadia subduction zone earthquake.
The Cascadia earthquake is the “Really Big One,” the earthquake that locals have whispered about, the one that the New
Yorker freaked out the whole region about, the one that inspired this book. If the full 620-mile-long fault unlocks, we’ll see what scientists call a “full-rip” event (see page 4 for what this means),
causing severe shaking from west of I-5 to the coast and farther east in some areas. When the shaking starts, we’ll be living in the twenty-first century; when it stops, we’ll be living in the
1850s: no power, water, plumbing, phones, or internet. Few basic public services and limited medical assistance. But our ancestors survived back then, and we can too—if we’re prepared.
Emergency officials estimate that getting help to everyone will take two weeks or more. That’s why I am “two-weeksready”—
I’m able to meet the needs of my family for fourteen days without outside help. That’s why you should be too.
Preparation is hard to weave into modern life. Like so many before me, I failed time and again to put aside the hours to make the perfect emergency kit, to remember to rotate my food on the perfect schedule, and to make new plans every time anyone in the family changed jobs or schools.
I could tell you that getting ready for a catastrophic earthquake is easy, a “just do it” proposition. I could tell you that the tips and tricks I’ve included here will help you avoid every obstacle along the way. I’d love to say I have a magic wand that can get you ready to survive for two weeks in a snap. It would feel good to tell you that. But it wouldn’t be true.
There isn’t a convenient empty space in your budget, your schedule, or your house just waiting to be filled with “getting ready.” You’ll have to find time, money, and space in a life where all those things are probably already 100 percent (or more) spoken for. I can help you with creative solutions to maximize your time,
money, and storage space, but it would be silly to say that adding one more thing to an already busy life is easy. It won’t be.
Instead, you’ll have to consider why it is important to you to prepare, why being prepared is more important than whatever else is competing for your time, money, or space. Everyone’s answer will be different.
I’ve only been involved professionally in emergency management since 2016, when I became the public-private partnerships manager at the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.
When I left that job, I started a community-based earthquake preparedness organization called Cascadia Calling, to help people outside the tsunami zone get ready for a 9.0 earthquake. But my decades working in education and social service programs,
coupled with my master’s degree in applied behavioral science,
shape the advice in this book. Those experiences taught me that preparedness, like any big endeavor, is best achieved by starting small, doing a little on a consistent basis rather than a lot once in a while, staying focused, expecting setbacks, having a plan,
learning from mistakes, and celebrating progress.
I’ve been personally dedicated to being more prepared for the
“unimaginable” since 2001, after the unthinkable happened on my birthday—September 11. It has taken me years to be really prepared for the Cascadia earthquake, and I’ve made tons of mistakes.
I want to save others from making those same mistakes. I
needed a book that covered not just all the “must-haves,” but was a full guide to getting ready for a devastating natural disaster:
a how-to, when-to, and where-to-store-all-these-supplies road map to preparedness. In writing this book, I created the book that I wish I’d had: how to be as prepared as possible, in a way that fits my life—to not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
This book is designed to help a busy, distracted person—someone just like me—get ready for the Cascadia earthquake. With quick tasks, checklists, and useful tips, this book gives you ways to fit getting prepared into your life—in the kinds of small chunks of time you can carve out. It covers everything you need to know to get ready to be on your own for two weeks after a full-rip 9.0
Cascadia earthquake, and gives you the skills and supplies to help in many other types of natural disasters. It also explains just why this is so important: the first two chapters cover the science and statistics driving the recommendations. If you already know enough about the Really Big One to want to be two-weeks-ready,
you can jump right to Chapter Three (page 26) and start preparing.
WHY SHOULD I GET READY?
Write down the answers to the following questions and post them in a place where you’ll see them every day. If you don’t remind yourself often of why being prepared is important to you, you’re likely to stall in your progress before you get very far.
• Who depends on you to take care of them?
• What losses or suffering will you prevent by being prepared?
• What worries or fears will you ease by being ready?
• What regrets will you avoid by acting now?
• Why is it important to you to survive an earthquake?
• Why is it important to you that you help others survive an earthquake?
PREPARING FOR OTHER EARTHQUAKES
This book is about preparing for a catastrophic, full-rip 9.0
Cascadia subduction zone earthquake and the aftershocks to follow. But if you are prepared for the Really Big One, you will also be well equipped to deal with more-localized earthquakes.
Even so, what you should expect from a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake is not the same as what a different fault might produce. For example, a large earthquake generated by either the Seattle Fault or the Portland Hills Fault will cause severe damage to those cities, possibly even greater than a
9.0 Cascadia earthquake. But because there will be minimal impact outside the respective metropolitan areas, help will come within hours or days after such an earthquake. The reason focusing on the Cascadia earthquake is so important is because, unlike some of the more intense earthquakes that are possible, the 620-mile length of the fault, coupled with the 9.0
magnitude of a Cascadia earthquake, will leave a massive area without the infrastructure for help to arrive quickly. (See pages
5–6 for further discussion on intensity versus magnitude.) You can’t prepare for every possibility, but being two-weeks-ready gives you the best chance to weather whatever seismic activity comes your way.
People in any community facing a major earthquake can adapt this preparedness advice to their situation. Those who live in Alaska or near the San Andreas (California), New Madrid
(Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas), or
Wasatch (Utah) Faults are especially at risk. An earthquake of a much lower magnitude but higher intensity can cause pervasive destruction across a heavily populated area. Being two-weeks-ready is prudent if your city or county is at risk for such an event.
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