The state of Oregon has set an ambitious goal to prepare more families in earthquake country to be "two weeks ready" after a disaster. Washington's emergency management agency is also seeking more funding to prepare people in a similar way.





In a newly released earthquake resilience plan, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown's office set a goal to have a 250,000 households prepared to be self-sufficient for two weeks. The task of reaching that goal by the year 2021 falls to Oregon's Office of Emergency Management, where Andrew Phelps is the director.

"We're really calling it almost our preparedness moonshot," Phelps said. "We don't know exactly how we're going to reach this goal of 250,000 households, but we know there is a benefit to doing this."

Phelps says incentives may come into play. Oregon, like Washington, will need to rally private and nonprofit partners, as well as local government, to help.

The standard advice for how much food, water, medicine and supplies to stash away in case of a Cascadia megaquake was raised a couple of years ago from 72 hours to two weeks’ worth. A multistate earthquake response exercise called Cascadia Rising indicated it could take up to two weeks for help to reach some areas.

Phelps said the first task for the “two-week ready” project is to figure how many households are currently prepared to ride out a catastrophic earthquake and the immediate aftermath.