Examining Oregon's Intergovernmental Structures for Natural Disaster Planning: Their Influence on Tsunami Response and Recovery

A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: SCA Archiv Storage Lenzser 2006vi, 84 pages. A THESIS Presented to the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Arts, Spring 2006.Natural disaster events have the potential to cause damage to people, property, and resources in communities around the world, and in the State of Oregon. The ways that people and communities can plan for natural disasters can be described by the four-phase disaster cycle as: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. In the United States, most of the resources, such as technical expertise and funding, for natural disaster planning are held by governments. These resources, however, are held by different levels of government including federal, state, county, and city levels of government. State laws and statutes create an intergovernmental structure for how levels of government interact for natural disaster planning. However, overlapping jurisdictional boundaries, responsibilities, and resources for natural disaster planning often create issues of â shared governanceâ which also influence how governments interact. How the relationships within the intergovernmental structure work affects how natural disaster planning occurs. This thesis describes the intergovernmental structure within the State of Oregon for natural disaster response and recovery, and describes the roles of local jurisdictions in responding to, and recovering from a large-scale catastrophic event, such as a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and resulting tsunami. To describe the intergovernmental structure itself, a document review was conducted of applicable state laws and administrative rules, and local plans and policies that shape how the intergovernmental structure is formed and operates. To describe the roles from the perspective of local jurisdictions for large-scale natural disaster response and recovery, interviews were conducted. Telephone interviews were conducted with two counties, and a city within each county, that are representative of the county and city jurisdictions that must plan for tsunami response and recovery along the Oregon coast