After officials from the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Office of Emergency Management spent months bulking up on health resources, and creating a communications network with rural hospitals and clinics, the event carried on with few if any problems, according to an article on The Lund Report website.
Planners at OEM and OHA anticipated a million visitors to crowd into the state for the event. There’s no real way to tell if that many people actually came. Oregon’s beach communities saw far fewer visitors than anticipated, but many towns and parks were packed.
OHA and OEM officials set up a website with health information, created brochures with safety and other tips and built a communications network between the agencies, rural hospitals and other emergency services.
And the plans and communications networks created for the event will continue to be useful in the future, both for disaster planning for the big Cascadia earthquake and for future events.