This past week, I had the opportunity to attend the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association’s (OAPA) Annual Conference at the Portland Convention Center and present two posters I created that discuss the work I have been doing here at OEM.  Pictures of the posters can be seen here:

PDFs of the posters can be found on the OEM website.

At the OAPA Conference, I also had the opportunity to listen to Kent Yu and Jay Wilson, Chair and Vice-Chair of OSSPAC, talk about the new Oregon Resilience Plan.  For me, the big take-away was that we shouldn’t just think about natural disasters as a one time emergency; instead, we should perceive them as the obvious results of our everyday planning.  Natural disasters offer us an opportunity to think about how we organize our communities and to maybe make some really important and beneficial changes.  As Jay Wilson says, “You constantly need to ask yourself, ‘How prepared am I at this very moment?'” How prepared are you for a magnitude 9 earthquake?