Eugene's natural disaster plans: preventative, permaculture perspectives
  • Eugene's Multi-Hazard Mitigation program
  • floods: don’t build hospitals in floodplains
  • storms: plant fruit trees, not firs, around homes
  • landslides: ban clearcuts and new road cuts
  • wildfires: fireworks and clearcuts increase risk
  • earthquakes and coastal tsunami: seismic retrofit bridges & buildings
  • volcanoes: plan to do without Calif. products if Mt. Shasta erupts
  • dam collapse:
    the Willamette Valley tsunami, we must strengthen -- or remove -- the dams
  • critical infrastructure: redundancy, relocalization and renewables needed
  • hazardous material: ban toxics, monitor train & truck shipments through region
  • terrorism: community cohesion is solution
  • Disaster Mitigation and Land Use:
    Eugene needs intelligent (urban) design
    Hospitals, Earthquakes, Floods, and Lahars
    Troubled Bridges Over Water: the I-5 bridge crisis
    West Eugene sprawl in floodplains: WEP, Target megastore, Royal Node subdivision
  • The Long Emergency: Peak Oil and Climate Collapse require paradigm shift
  • Katrina disaster shows the Federal government response: we are on our own

 

Flood Hazards

Peace Health at “Riverbend”
www.pacinfo.com/~osprey/No-at-Rvrbnd.ppt.zip
David Rodriguez

www.lanecounty.org/PW_LMD/images/two.gif
Lane County Land Management Division website has a great photo of the 1964 flood on the McKenzie River near the Willamette River confluence

 

West Eugene sprawl: WEP, Target and Royal Node

www.ci.eugene.or.us/HRRS/EmerPlan/mapsprfloodhaz.pdf
Largest flood plain in CIty of Springfield is the proposed location for Peace Health
Largest flood plain in City of Eugene is proposed location for Royal Nodal Development

The “Target” store at 11th and Beltline was built in the 100 year floodplain (source: FEIS, p. 50)

WEP / BL interchange would be largely in the floodplain
avoid Peace health - Springfield
avoid WEP and Royal Node (and west 11th UGB) in Eugene
keep north of Gateway from being in UGB
www.ci.eugene.or.us/HRRS/EmerPlan/mapeugfloodhaz.pdf

 

The next Missoula Flood will be radioactive if Hanford is not detoxified

The most toxic site in the northwest is the Department of Energy’s Hanford Reservation in eastern Washington. (It is likely that the only nuclear sites on Earth more contaminated than Hanford are in the former Soviet Union.) Hanford was built make plutonium for the “Manhattan Project,” and at its peak, had nine nuclear production reactors in operation (the earliest discharged reactor coolant into the Columbia River). The last nuclear weapons material production reactor was shut down shortly after the 1986 Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine (the N-reactor at Hanford was the only US reactor that had graphite “moderators” like the Chernobyl design). Hanford is no longer making nuclear materials, and the government is trying to figure out how to deal with the mess made from four decades of bomb production, including radioactive groundwater under the region.

Currently, a civilian nuclear power reactor is in operation at Hanford -- and a small fraction of electricity consumed in western Oregon comes from this facility, sold to utilities like EWEB along with the hydropower from the Columbia River dams.

Hanford is already a de facto national nuclear repository, although none of the waste in the “tank farm” nor in any other form is stabilized for multigenerational storage. Some of Hanford’s waste will only be dangerous for a few centuries, but other components will be toxic for periods longer than the human race has walked on the Earth. Plutonium-239, which was made by the ton at Hanford, has a “half life” of about 24 thousand years, and since it takes 20 half lives for a radioactive isotope to decay to one-millionth its original amount, plutonium will be dangerous for about a half million years.

The Hanford nuke dump was built on the gravels deposited by the Missoula floods -- the Ice Age floods that are the largest known to have happened on Earth. (The existence of the Missoula Floods were not yet accepted as fact by the geological community when the Hanford site was selected for bomb making.) We need to detoxify or somehow convert the very long lived wastes to shorter lived wastes while we still have the energy, money and technical talent to address the problems. Otherwise, the next Ice Age, whenever that happens, will result in a Missoula Flood that will break open the waste tanks and cover the Columbia Gorge and the Willamette Valley with high level nuclear waste.