Do We Have Hurricanes In the Pacific Northwest? Yes We Do!

By the time people in the Pacific Northwest woke up on Friday, October 12, 1962, “Freda” had been on the move for some time.  She formed as a typhoon 500 miles west of Wake Island in the central Pacific Ocean a week earlier.  As she moved north into colder waters  and interacted with the jet stream, Freda became an extratropical cyclone.  Freda arrived in Northern California as winds pushed her ashore, delaying some games in the 1962 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the New York Yankees.

Freda officially became “Hurricane Freda” when she touched landfall in the United States.  Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are basically the same types of storms, often labelled differently by their windspeed .  Storms in the Atlantic Ocean are usually identified as hurricanes with the storms in the Pacific Ocean called typhoons or cyclones

Now on land, Hurricane Freda hooked straight north as she moved into southwest Oregon, bringing a pressure which would be equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.  As Friday, October 12th dawned, few in the Pacific Northwest were aware of what the day would bring.  Oregon’s Cape Blanco soon measured wind gusts at 145 miles per hour while the Naselle Radar Station in the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington logged winds of 160 miles per hour.  Wind gusts in Portland, Oregon reached 116 mph, while Olympia officially measured 88mph.

Those living in eastern Washington experienced damaging high winds as well.  When the roof blew off a neighbor’s house where I lived in the town of Sunnyside in the Yakima Valley, my mother hustled me into a basement room with no windows for the next few hour.  Damaging winds reached as far inland as Spokane.

At lease 46 fatalities were attributed to Freda, more than for any other Pacific Northwest weather event.  Injuries went into the hundreds.  In less than 12 hours, more than 11 billion board feet of timber was blown down in northern California, Oregon and Washington.  Estimates put the dollar damage at over $2 Billion in today’s dollars.  The Metropolitan Life Insurance company named the Columbus Day Storm the nation’s worst natural disaster of 1962 as Hurricane Freda was labelled as the “most powerful extratropical cyclone recorded in the U.S in the 20th century.”

Few places in the United States are immune to natural disasters and the Pacific Northwest is no exception.  While wildfires, floods and earthquakes occur more often, we manage to get a volcanic eruption and even the occasional hurricane from time to time.  The next time someone tells you we don’t get hurricanes in the Pacific Northwest, relate the story of Hurricane Freda.  For a little kid hustled into the basement after witnessing the neighbor’s roof blown off their house, it was an experience never to be forgotten.

Nighttime Helicopter Landing Zone Exercise

Skip, K1HEK, conducting a radio test with Central Dispatch

It is dark tonight and cold.  The stars sparkle in the late winter sky and the temperatures hover around 23 degrees.  The snow is finally gone and it is a great evening to practice nighttime landing zone setups so out into the night we go.  This evening we’re not using one of the designated team LZ’s.  Nope, we found a flat, gravel lot surrounded with 360 degrees of LZ issues.  The lot is just barely big enough for a 100 x 100 foot LZ.  To the south is an eight story apartment building.  To the east is a four story church.  To the west is a three story structure and there are light poles and electric wires aplenty.

Once our ARES Communications van is set up on the east side of the potential landing zone, Skip, K1HEK, brings up all the communications systems and makes sure they are operating as they should.  As part of tonight’s exercise, we do a communications test with the Lewis County Central Dispatch on the fire department’s REDNET frequency – the channel used for normal medical helicopter comms in our area.  All is well and we have a strong signal into dispatch.

Meanwhile, four other other team members are busy setting out the 100 x 100 foot landing zone with an orange traffic cone at each corner.  Tonight, the winds are negligible so no cones showing wind direction are put out.  Once the cones are in place FRED (flashing roadside emergency discs) lights are placed atop each corner traffic cone.  Don, KI7ZNG, is busy determining the GPS coordinates for our temporary landing zone.  Finally, each member of the landing zone team works together to prepare a pilot briefing.  The briefing must include the GPS coordinates, warnings about overhead wires, light standards, flag poles and of course those multi-story buildings.  The pilot will need a physical description (downtown parking lot – flat with gravel surface) with the LZ set out using orange traffic cones with flashing red lights on them.  Surface winds are negligible but we will keep an eye on the flag atop a nearby building just in case.  Even though our medivac helicopter is only 15 minutes away, the team has managed to set up the LZ and prepare a pilot briefing before the sound of an approaching helicopter would be heard.  Maybe it is the cold but the team worked well

Paul, KE7PCB, aligning the LZ cones

together with only a few disagreements about directions.

With no real helicopter coming tonight and with the temperature dropping, we picked up and repacked everything and headed back the the Emergency Operations Center where it was warm to debrief and go over our pilot briefing notes. The team finishes the evening’s training with a discussion about safety issues.  An interesting question comes up.  Could one team member, with one of our communications vans, set up and run the entire landing zone?  We decide it could be done if manpower levels required it but communications with the pilot would need to be done outside where the landing zone officer could have a 360 degree view.  This would also require the use of the van’s HT using 5 watts instead of the normal 50 watt radios permanently attached inside the van.  As long as we had an obstruction free signal to the helicopter, the job could be done safely.

Why do we practice setting up a helicopter landing zone in the dark and in the cold?  Because bad things happen and if the fire department or the police department needed a landing zone set up in a hurry, there simply would not be enough time to ask questions.  The job would need to be done quickly and safely in under 15 minutes.  Besides, it beats sitting around watching old movies on the TV.  Thanks to the team members willing to brave the cold last evening.  In two hours, you have made our community a safer place to work and live.

Lessons Learned From Training Exercises

Our Centralia Amateur Radio Emergency Service team conducts field exercises about five or six times each year.  It is always interesting to see where we do well and to discover those areas where more training is required.  We would probably do more field exercises but each one we do seems to lead to lots of indoor training trying to perfect our skills.  No exercise is 100% successful but they are never a complete failure either, and I like that.

Our most recent field exercise, held the last weekend in December, was designed around an “almost” real disaster.  On a winter Saturday morning, a two inch gas pipe ruptured.  In our exercise, it also caused an explosion knocking out communications systems and the power grid.  It also damaged our city Emergency Operations Center. Only two weeks before, a real gas pipe ruptured in the downtown area causing evacuations before the system was shut down.  No fire or explosion but the threat was very real. This is one busy scenario.  The ARES deployment notification went out, a net control was established and command & control was set up inside the main Riverside Fire Authority building.  We deployed one of our two ARES comm vans as well and requested they attempt to set up HF communications with the Washington State EOC.

Over the next couple of hours, the team was asked to perform windshield surveys to determine the scope of the power and communications outages.  We also began the process of setting up our church emergency evacuation shelter and one medivac helicopter landing zone near the disaster site.  After about three hours, we stopped the exercise and held a short debrief.

One valuable lesson all first responders learn is to determine priorities in any major event.  Find the most serious problem facing you and deal with it first.  Everything else is also prioritized and manpower is assigned as available.  In a major disaster, there are never enough people to go around and some assignments must be handled later if at all.  This bothers first responders and volunteers.  We want to help.  We want to do it all.

At our next regular training date, the team received a PowerPoint presentation about setting priorities.  As I looked across the room, I realized this was the first time many of our ARES volunteers had been asked to set priorities during a disaster, and I also realized I had failed to correctly train them how to set these same priorities.  In the weeks to come, we will fix the problem as best we can and move on.  As I said earlier, I like training exercises that show where we need improvement.  We will be better prepared for the next exercise… or the next real disaster.