Resilience Institute

And on the day– someday– when this giant pile of rocks stacked 10,741 feet tall does eventually fail– the now empty Emergency Operation Center will be filled with hundreds of people coping with a massive crisis. One that’s expected to make Whatcom County the bulls…

Western Washington University students are launching Whatcom County’s first-ever disaster awareness and preparedness survey this spring.

The workshop was facilitated by David Roberts of Kulshan Services LLC and was funded by the U.S. EPA through the Puget Sound Partnership. It was also sponsored by the Northwest Straits Initiative. Students from the Resilience Institute at Western Washington…

The next time the Cascadia fault along the West Coast unleashes a magnitude-9 earthquake, the dams in east Skagit County could fail, dozens of bridges and overpasses could collapse on major roadways, and utilities could shut down.

The region's earthquake risks have been known for…

Rebekah Paci-Green, an earthquake-damage expert at Western Washington University, says emergency-response experts in the U.S. have worried most about two scenarios.

One was a major hurricane hitting New Orleans. Check that one off the list, although it could happen again.

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Much of Oregon’s population would face extended fuel shortages, natural gas outages and blackouts after a catastrophic earthquake. That according to a seismic risk study re-released by the state.

But there’s pushback from the energy companies put under the spotlight.

Two years after Japan was rocked by the same type of monster quake and tsunami that will strike the Pacific Northwest someday, the world’s most seismically fortified nation faces another five to 10 years of rebuilding. Nearly 320,000 people are still in temporary housing. Mountains of debris…