Imagine an earthquake large enough to devastate the West Coast of the United States. The shaking alone—to say nothing of the tsunami that might follow—could collapse bridges and render roads impassable. It would shut down water, wastewater, electricity, and internet service. Utilities could take weeks or months to return in some areas. Economic and civic life could be disrupted for years.

Complicating matters, “Earthquakes operate on a time scale that’s both inevitable and inscrutable,” writes Seattle Times science journalist Sandy Doughton in her 2013 book, Full Rip 9.0. ¹ That a major earthquake will eventually strike is a given, but as Doughton observes, “It could be ten minutes from now, or it could hold off until today’s toddlers are great-grandparents.”

The uncertainty and risk around seismic events pose wicked challenges for local governments. The aging infrastructure that exists in most American cities will complicate response, longer-term recovery, and system resilience. The potential impacts are so complex that cities, counties, and special districts often struggle to develop a shared understanding to prioritize investments and guide pre-planning.

One through-line, however, is that in the aftermath of any earthquake, public works professionals will be critical first responders. Their skills, equipment, and knowledge of the systems that make daily life possible are essential for earthquake preparedness and response. But this can seem like a tall order amid the dual challenge of keeping aging infrastructure running while preparing for disaster response and recovery with limited time, funding, and training.

From a planning perspective, earthquakes’ uncertainty and catastrophically destructive potential are a one-two punch for local governments. The unknowns can lead to competing interests, delayed investments, and siloed activities. The unique nature of seismic threats, however, also offers lessons and insights. As the rest of the country braces for tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, West Coast jurisdictions that are planning for “the big one” offer learning opportunities for local governments around the country, including those for whom earthquakes don’t register as a major risk.

One Small City, Shaken and then Stirred to Action

On February 28, 2001, at 10:54 a.m. Pacific Time, Public Works Director Kirk Holmes had just wrapped up an all-staff meeting of his 65 employees in the city of Snoqualmie, Washington, then population 1,859. ² Snoqualmie’s public works department had just initiated operations out of a new building. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” says Holmes. “I had just walked back into the building and the earthquake hit.”

The magnitude 6.8 quake rocked Snoqualmie—perched atop 25 to 30 feet of liquefiable soils—and caused over $2 billion in damage across the Puget Sound region. When the shaking ceased, Holmes tried to bring his staff back together, only to find that many had left to check on their families. Twenty minutes later, a water operator noticed reservoir levels dropping. There were water main breaks everywhere, and the city was on the verge of running out of water—a major risk, given that fires tend to follow earthquakes. Holmes headed for the field. His administrative assistant took charge of getting resources to families so that staff could return to work. It took 24 hours to get Holmes’ staff back and working 12-hour shifts.

The Nisqually earthquake (as it came to be known) could have been much worse. Fortunately for the impacted jurisdictions, its depth—the epicenter was 33 miles deep—mitigated its destructive power. ³ For Holmes, now director of Central Washington services and preparedness programs for infrastructure consulting firm Perteet, the event was career-defining. “We demonstrated to our community at the time the value of a skilled public works practitioner,” says Holmes.

More accustomed to floods, Snoqualmie’s public works department hewed as closely as possible to the city’s emergency management plan, and treated the response as a learning opportunity by conducting thorough after-action reviews. The earthquake ended up strengthening the connections between Snoqualmie’s public works and emergency response teams. “We understood that we needed more training, and we had a great scenario to train to,” Holmes recalls.

Snoqualmie also focused on identifying projects that could be eligible for federal funding as part of disaster mitigation efforts. “We were wildly successful…at obtaining federal money,” Holmes recalls. Post-earthquake, Snoqualmie won funds to elevate six sanitary sewer lift stations—something that was unheard of in the Pacific Northwest at the time. The biggest takeaway, however, was that “emergency managers and public works professionals…need to be more connected. And ironically, it doesn’t take millions of dollars to do that.”

Functional Recovery as a Paradigm for Earthquake Preparedness and Response

“My question is really ‘how long can a jurisdiction afford to be down?’ [Seismic resilience is] being able to bring back our communities in a way that reduces our downtime,” says Elenka Jarolimek, an emergency manager embedded with Seattle’s Department of Construction and Inspections. She assists with internal planning, training, and exercises with staff that are responsible for building safety evaluations both pre- and post-earthquake. This is particularly relevant for cities like Seattle, where over 1,000 unreinforced masonry buildings do not meet current seismic codes.

Functional recovery offers a framework for planning and prioritizing resilience investments, and improving connections between emergency management and public works. Outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Federal Emergency Management Agency in a 2021 report, functional recovery emphasizes protecting lifeline infrastructure systems and reducing the time it takes to recover and reoccupy buildings so that communities have shelter, protection, and a basic ability to operate in the wake of disaster. ^4,5

Planning for functional recovery requires understanding complex interdependencies. For example, road damage interrupts fuel transportation, and the backup generators that keep water pumps running, and the availability of water to fight fires. And because refineries need water to produce fuel, fuel availability can further impact water supplies. “There’s this huge, nebulous body of work around interdependencies for critical infrastructures that’s going to take years to unpack and identify priorities,” says Chad Buechler, an emergency manager at Seattle Public Utilities. “We have great relationships among the infrastructure folks, but are we assessing and training and analyzing and responding together around those?”

Interdependencies also relate to staff. Ronnie Mompellier, an emergency manager for wastewater embedded in Portland, Oregon’s Bureau of Environmental Services, notes that Portland is a city built on two rivers and served by multiple bridges, which first responders rely on to reach critical infrastructure. The conditions of roads and bridges post-earthquake could have serious implications for staffing. Says Mompellier, “We are lucky to have a very large campus…so we have a way to house staff, and we’ve invested in cots and emergency food.” During a January 2024 snow and ice event, those facilities allowed staffers to avoid commuting in dangerous conditions, making it easier for them to focus on response. Such an arrangement may not be optional following a major earthquake.

Despite the lack of clear answers, understanding what interdependencies could potentially exist is an important step forward. Artificial intelligence may eventually help unravel these relationships, but for now, there is no substitute for conversation.

Along with untangling interdependencies, functional recovery emphasizes avoiding siloed approaches to disaster preparedness. This is particularly important as climate impacts continue to intensify, which may make seismic preparedness seem like a competing priority. From a functional recovery perspective, for example, Jarolimek advocates that “instead of thinking only about investing in climate resilience, we should be encompassing seismic resilience in that conversation.” A focus on functional recovery may very well push local governments to explore expanded, creative approaches and perspectives to emergency preparedness and response.

Staffing, Training, and Communicating

In larger jurisdictions like Portland and Seattle, public works, buildings departments and utilities have their own emergency managers. Elenka Jarolimek, Chad Buechler, and Ronnie Mompellier are examples. “The emergency managers work really well and really closely together, especially because our Bureau of Emergency Management is very small, so they’re not always able to meet our needs,” says Mompellier. These embedded cross-disciplinary arrangements build networks of emergency managers throughout public works departments, who understand vulnerability from their engineering colleagues’ perspectives.

While they may not be able to staff similarly, smaller jurisdictions can also take deliberate steps to enhance connections between public works and emergency management. And with generally larger budgets, public works can play a leading role. Kirk Holmes uses the example of rural Chelan County in central Washington: “The person leading [public works] has been through a bunch of events, and has prioritized preparedness in his department in a variety of little, different ways. And they have a relationship—they know their emergency managers, they are engaged when there are planning processes going on, and they’re committed to making that happen.” Holmes stresses that the up-front costs of improving connections between public works and emergency management pale in comparison to the costs of disaster recovery.

That’s especially true if those investments improve a local government’s ability to navigate federal disaster assistance. “Public assistance programs are the one thing that public works departments count on to stabilize their budget in response to disasters,” Holmes asserts. Federal requirements for cost recovery, however, change the rules of accounting after a disaster, which changes how local government does business. Holmes urges public works and emergency management professionals to make the investments to develop subject matter expertise on federal disaster funding now. “You cannot afford to wait for the disaster to understand this,” he says.

That focus on proactive learning is key, since as Chad Buechler observes, “We don’t get a nice little shake very often around here to remind us” about seismic risk. ⁶ He advocates for public works departments and their emergency management colleagues to get creative in seeking out training opportunities: “If it’s not happening in your neighborhood right now and you’re an emergency manager or a public works professional, be supportive of sending your folks to go find it,” he says. Buechler has personally supported response efforts to Hurricane Sandy, tornadoes in Alabama, and a major landslide in a neighboring county. He counts that cross-training as critical “to learn what it’s like to operate in an overwhelmed incident management environment.”

Alternatively, jurisdictions can make their own training opportunities, in part by making every event, no matter how small, into a learning opportunity. Asks Mompellier, “If you can’t really think about how you’re going to do something on a blue sky day, then how are you going to do it on a gray sky day?”

David Briggs, who is both director of operations and maintenance and the emergency operations director at East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) in Oakland, California, agrees. EBMUD is a special district that provides drinking water for 1.4 million people across 17 cities and wastewater treatment for 740,000.

While faults like California’s San Andreas or the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California are famous, lesser-known faults like the Seattle Fault or the Hayward Fault in Hayward, California, are also capable of devastation. Notes Briggs, “In this business you typically design for a maximum credible earthquake. But that’s a theoretical number. We don’t design to a magnitude 9. We don’t, no one does.”

Instead, EBMUD plans for the more likely scenario of the maximum credible earthquake on the Hayward Fault. The Hayward Fault will slip right (anyone standing on the other side would move to the observer’s right), and “we have done a lot of work with our fault crossings so that…we can quickly isolate [broken] pipes and then connect a flexible pipe essentially to jump the fault,” reports Briggs. While EBMUD anticipates that the smallest pipes in its distribution system will sustain damage, by keeping backbone infrastructure protected, the district has prioritized a lifeline that can promote functional recovery and get people back into their homes. For example, “It may be the case that you don’t have water at your house for many, many days, if not a couple weeks, but you can walk 1,000 feet or 2,000 feet to a hydrant that we might have online,” says Briggs.

Both Briggs and Buechler emphasize the importance of communicating plans and likely risks to all stakeholders, both internal and external. “The science allows us to engage with people in a realistic manner,” says Buechler. “Our stuff is invisible, but that doesn’t mean we get to be invisible about the impacts these disasters could have on our services.”

For EBMUD, that means frequent level-setting of capabilities and needs, especially with city managers. In the event of a major earthquake, says Briggs, “We tell them, look, we can’t guarantee that all of your water is (a) going to be pressurized and (b) going to be potable.” He makes it a point to speak regularly with city managers and their public works and emergency management personnel to identify alignment between a city’s emergency plans and EBMUD’s capabilities. Detailed coordination with the cities they serve helps Briggs and his team assess existing soil and infrastructure conditions, identify potential synergies and barriers, and adjust plans accordingly.

Getting real about partner agencies’ capabilities is also a focus for the Regional Water Providers Consortium, which represents most of the water providers in the Portland, Oregon metro region. The Consortium has conducted studies to help its members understand what support they could expect in the wake of a catastrophe. As managing director Rebecca Geisen describes, “We really honed in on what the roles and responsibilities are of public water providers, emergency managers…and federal agencies. We really wanted to drill down and make sure that everyone understands each other’s responsibilities.”

The Consortium has also developed a regional interconnectioned geodatabase to examine how members’ water systems are physically connected to each other, and how water might move around the region following a disaster. It has also invested in mobile water treatment and distribution equipment, on which members train regularly. “Every few years we do a big equipment rodeo,” says Geisen. “Everyone brings that equipment out and trains new staff on how to use it…and we always invite our county and state emergency managers so that they can be familiar with that equipment.”

Learning from Seismic Preparedness, Extending Lessons to Other Disasters

While videos of seismic destruction are readily available online, a major earthquake is nevertheless one of the most difficult disasters to imagine. More than any specific technical action, the most important thing local leaders can do to support disaster preparedness of any kind is to establish a culture of preparedness.

Rebecca Geisen stresses that city managers can emphasize preparedness as “a core value and an expectation, not just a nice-to-have.” Critically, that posture creates a permission structure for investing in earthquake preparedness, since the uncertainty surrounding earthquakes can create challenges for generating political support for seismic resilience. And, says Geisen, “If you are prepared, make sure the people who come behind you know what work you did and empower them to continue it.”

Perhaps one of the most important lessons in preparedness is that local government staff are people first. Reflecting on his experience responding to the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, David Briggs recalls, “After I got back I realized that there were people that were absolutely, positively in the middle of post-traumatic stress.” He continues, “In a regional disaster…there will be many people on a city manager’s staff who might look okay, might be there at the meeting with you, but they’re not okay, and you need to understand that and manage to it.” Planning to meet basic psychological needs may be as critical for keeping an emergency response functioning as locating fuel supplies and stopping water main breaks.

Enhancing connections between public works and emergency management is a constant undertaking. Doing it in preparation for a potentially catastrophic earthquake that may or may not happen in our lifetimes adds complexity. But deliberate, steady investments in emergency preparedness can help move the needle. Planning and response function better when emergency managers understand the resources a public works department can bring to bear, and when public works professionals help shape, analyze, and rehearse emergency response plans. A resilient tide eventually lifts all boats.

SARAH SIELOFF is an urban planner and funding strategist at Haley and Aldrich.
DANIELE SPIRANDELLI, PhD, is a resilience specialist and environmental planner at Haley and Aldrich.

Endnotes and Resources

¹ Doughton, Sandi. (2013.) Full Rip 9.0. Sasquatch Books: Seattle.

² In 2023, Snoqualmie was home to 13,465 residents, per the Census.

³ In comparison, California’s 1994 Northridge quake was smaller at magnitude 6.7, but more destructive in part because it originated just 11 miles deep. Northridge ultimately caused $20 billion in property damage and $40 billion in economic losses—the most expensive earthquake disaster in U.S. history. https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/24/news/economy/earthquakes-10-most-expensive/index.html

⁴ https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_p-2090_nist_sp-1254_functional-recovery_01-01-2021.pdf

⁵ A 2014 bill, HB2273, in Washington state was introduced to study statewide building code and construction standards related to earthquake and tsunami resilience and develop recommendations for functional recovery of buildings and infrastructure post-earthquake. The bill died in committee.

⁶ Buechler knows first-hand what a major earthquake can do: Following the 2001 Nisqually quake, “I looked at our backyard and asked ‘Mom, where’s our shed?’” The structure—along with a significant piece of the family’s backyard—had sloughed off into the Cedar River below.

⁷ The Regional Water Providers’ Consortium completed a regional emergency drinking water project and has developed social vulnerability assessment tools (https://rdpo.net/emergencydrinkingwaterproject).