On the Road:
from Charter Member James Dalessandro

As you may recall, I began touring with ProtectingAmerica.org last summer to raise earthquake awareness along the New Madrid Fault Line in the Central Mississippi Valley. During that time, I spread messages of mitigation and preparation in the cities of Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Louisville, and Evansville (Indiana).

On September 12, I hit the road again for ProtectingAmerica.org, this time to visit at-risk cities along the Pacific Northwest. A Town Hall meeting and several media appearances in Seattle, Washington, officially kicked off the West Coast leg of our ongoing awareness efforts.

According to the USGS, Washington is second only to California in vulnerability to a major earthquake. Since 1946, the Seattle-Tacoma area has experienced four major earthquakes, luckily, none have been the "Big One" that the Seattle Fault Line is capable of churning. The Seattle Fault Line runs directly beneath the city, and the area has multiple earthquake faults. Additionally, the Cascadia subduction zone, located barely offshore, is capable of producing a tsunami equal in size to that which struck Indonesia in 2004.

Upon arrival in Seattle, I was welcomed as a guest on the Northwest Cable News Network (KING-TV) and KOMO-TV’s News at 4:00. News reporters and producers were full of questions and concerns about the earthquake risk in Seattle, and were shocked by my film, The Damnedest, Finest Ruins, a documentary about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Footage of San Francisco's destruction and the reports of the chaos generated by the unprepared city administration very obviously struck a chord in Seattle. We have learned an interesting lesson: if you can engage a person’s imagination and give him tangible, physical awareness of the human cost of failure to prepare, you create enthusiasm for the message that mitigation and preparation are keys to survival.

On the evening of September 13, we assembled an impressive group of experts at the University of Washington for a Town Hall Meeting. The panel included Seattle's Fire Chief Gregory Dean, widely recognized among other departments as one of the most dedicated and proactive fire fighters on the West Coast; Barb Graff, Director of the Seattle Office of Emergency Management; Stephen Charvat, Emergency Management Director at the University of Washington; Joan Gomberg, US Geological Survey; and Laurel Nelson, Community Mitigation and Outreach Coordinator for the Seattle Office of Emergency Management.

The crowd was an important one: representatives from the city's ambulances services, hospitals, and CERT programs - to name a few - were eager to ask questions and share their opinions.

Fire Chief Gregory Dean explained that Seattle's mayor mandated that Seattle be the "most prepared city" in the nation. From everything I could glean, it appears they are already headed in that direction.

Most importantly, my travels have brought to light that 60% of the U.S. population lives in an area prone to catastrophe. The time has come to realize that we are all in this together, and must work together to protect ourselves.

James Dalessandro, San Francisco