Oregon hospital rushes to build tsunami shelter as FEMA fights to cut its funding

Oregon hospital rushes to build tsunami shelter as FEMA fights to cut its funding

Residents of this small Pacific Northwest coastal town know what to do in the event of a tsunami warning: flee to higher ground.

For those at or near Columbia Memorial, the city's only hospital, there will soon be a different plan: shelter in place. The hospital is building a new facility next door with an on-site tsunami shelter - an elevated refuge on pillars anchored deep in the ground where nearly 2,000 people can safely wait out a flood.

Oregon needs more emergency shelters like the one Columbia Memorial is building, emergency managers say. Hospitals in the region are likely to suffer severe damage, if not ruin, and could take more than three years to fully recover in the event of a major earthquake or tsunami, according to a government report.

Columbia Memorial's current facility is a one-story building built of wood half a century ago and would likely collapse and sink into the ground or be swallowed by a landslide after a major earthquake or tsunami, said Erik Thorsen, the hospital's executive director.

“It’s just not built to survive one of these natural disasters,” Thorsen said.

Oregon Hospital rushes to build a tsunami shelter as FEMA fights to cut its fundingPlay

At least 10 other hospitals along the Oregon coast are also at risk. So Columbia Memorial officials proposed building a hospital that could withstand earthquakes and landslides and have a tsunami shelter, rather than moving the facility to higher ground. Residents and state officials supported the plans, and the federal government awarded a $14 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help fund the tsunami shelter.

The project broke ground in October 2024. Within six months, the Trump administration had canceled the grant program known as Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC), calling it "another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program ... more concerned with political goals than with helping Americans affected by natural disasters."

Molly Wing, expansion project manager, said losing the BRIC grant felt like “a punch in the gut.”

“We really didn’t expect that,” she said.

This summer, Oregon and 19 other states filed a lawsuit seeking to restore FEMA grants. On December 11, a judge ruled that the Trump administration had unlawfully ended the program without congressional approval.

The administration did not immediately say it would appeal the decision, but Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said via email: "DHS has not terminated BRIC. Any claim to the contrary is a lie. The Biden administration has abandoned real remedies and used BRIC as a dark money fund for green new deals. It is unfortunate that an activist judge either didn't understand that or didn't care." FEMA is a division of DHS.

Columbia Memorial was one of the few hospitals set to receive grants from the BRIC program, which had announced more than $4.5 billion for nearly 2,000 construction projects since 2022.

Hospital leaders have decided to keep building - with uncertain funding - because they say waiting is too dangerous. As the Trump administration changes course on BRIC, fewer communities will receive assistance from FEMA to reduce their disaster risk, even in places where disasters are likely.

More than three centuries have passed since a major earthquake caused the Pacific Northwest coast to drop several feet and triggered a tsunami that crashed across the country in January 1700, according to scientists studying the evolution of Oregon's coast.

The greatest threat comes from an underwater fault line known as the Cascadia subduction zone, located 70 to 100 miles offshore from Northern California to British Columbia.

According to the US Geological Survey, the Cascadia zone can trigger a megathrust earthquake of magnitude 9 or higher every 500 years - the kind that can trigger a catastrophic tsunami. Scientists predict the chance of such an earthquake along the fault zone in the next 50 years is 10 to 15 percent.

“We can’t wait any longer,” Thorsen said. “The risk is high.”

Building for the future

The BRIC program was launched in 2020, during the first Trump administration, to provide communities and institutions with financing and technical assistance to protect their structures against natural disasters.

Joel Scata, a senior attorney at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, said the program has helped communities better prepare so they can reduce the costs of rebuilding after a flood, tornado, wildfire or extreme weather event.

To qualify for a grant, a hospital had to demonstrate that the benefits of the project outweighed the future risks and costs. In some cases, this benefit may not be readily apparent.

“It prevents bad disasters from happening, and so you don’t necessarily see it in action,” Scata said.

Scata noted that the Trump administration has also stopped providing grants under FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which predated BRIC.

“There really is no money from the federal government to help communities reduce their disaster risk,” he said.

A recent KFF Health News investigation using proprietary data from Fathom, a global leader in flood modeling, found that at least 170 U.S. hospitals are at risk of significant and potentially dangerous flooding from stronger and more frequent storms. This count did not include the Columbia Memorial because Fathom's data did not take tsunamis into account. It models river flooding, sea level rise and extreme rainfall.

In recent days, an atmospheric river — a narrow band of storms that carries significant amounts of moisture — has dumped more than 15 inches of rain across parts of Oregon and Washington, causing catastrophic flooding along the rivers and coast. In the Skagit River town of Sedro-Woolley, Washington, PeaceHealth United General Medical Center evacuated non-emergency patients.

According to news reports, Astoria was hit by strong winds and left some minor landslides in the city. But flooding on the road to the nearby beach town of Seaside made the driveway nearly impassable.

The Trump administration is pushing for states to take more responsibility for natural disaster recovery, Scata said, but most states are not financially ready to do so.

“The disasters will continue to increase,” he said, “and the federal government will continue to have to intervene.”

A hospital in danger

The Columbia Memorial is located just blocks from the south bank of the Columbia River, near the Washington border, where natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides and floods can occur in the area. A 25-bed critical access hospital, it opened in 1977 - before state building codes addressed tsunami protection.

Thorsen said the new facility and accommodation would be a “model design” for other hospitals. Design plans show a five-story hospital built on a rock-anchored foundation and surrounded by concrete columns to protect it from tsunami debris.

The shelter will be located on the roof of the second floor above the projected maximum tsunami inundation. It will be accessible via an external staircase as well as internal stairs and elevators and will have enough space for up to 1,900 people as well as food, water, tents and other supplies to sustain them for five days.

With the majority of patient care occurring on the second and third levels, generators on the fourth level, and utility lines underground, the hospital is expected to remain operational even after a natural disaster.

Thorsen said an earthquake and tsunami threaten not only massive flooding, but also liquefaction, in which the ground loosens and causes overlying structures to collapse. Deep foundations, thick slabs and other structural supports are designed to protect the new hospital and tsunami structure from such failure.

Over the years, hospital administrators and civic leaders in Astoria have sought other locations for the Columbia Memorial. But moving wasn't economical. Columbia Memorial committed to investing in a new hospital and tsunami shelter to protect not only patients and staff, but also nearby residents.

“Your community should trust that your hospital is a safe haven in the event of a natural disaster,” Thorsen said.

Fight to restore funds

The estimated construction budget for the Columbia Memorial expansion is $300 million, funded largely by new debt from the hospital. The budget for the tsunami shelter is approximately $20 million. FEMA's BRIC program has provided nearly $14 million for this, with a matching grant of $6 million from the state, which has maintained its support.

The building's shelter and structural protection — consisting of reinforced steel, deeper foundations and thicker slabs — are integral to the design and cannot be removed without compromising the rest of the structure, said Michelle Checkis, the project architect.

"We can't pull the TVERS [tsunami vertical evacuation refuge structure] "It's like if I wanted to stack it with Legos, I would have to take all those Legos apart and stack it completely differently," she said.

Columbia Memorial has reached out to Oregon's congressional delegation for help. In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson, the lawmakers demanded that the agencies recover the hospital's grants.

Hospital management is seeking additional grants and charitable donations to offset the loss. As a last resort, Thorsen said the board will consider removing "non-essential elements" from the building, although he added there is little fat to trim from the project.

The lawsuit filed by the states in July claimed that FEMA had no authority to cancel the BRIC program or redirect its funding for other purposes.

The states argued that canceling the program went against Congress' intent and undermined ongoing projects.

In its response to the lawsuit, the Trump administration repeatedly said that the defendants “deny that the BRIC program has been terminated.”

The lawsuit cites examples of projects in jeopardy in each state due to the termination of FEMA grants. Oregon's first example is the Columbia Memorial Tsunami Shelter. “Neither the county nor the state can afford to continue the project without federal funding,” the lawsuit states.

In response to questions about the impact of eliminating the grant on Astoria and the surrounding community, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said BRIC "deviated from its statutory intent."

“BRIC focused more on climate initiatives like bike lanes, shaded bus stops and tree planting than on disaster relief or mitigation,” McLaughlin said. DHS and FEMA had no further comment on BRIC or the Astoria hospital.

Preparing for a tsunami disaster

Astoria sits at the end of the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail on a peninsula jutting into the Columbia River near the Pacific Ocean.

Much of the city is not in the tsunami flood zone. But Astoria's downtown business district — where gift shops, hotels and seafood restaurants line the streets — is almost entirely an evacuation zone.

Two hospitals — Ocean Beach Health in nearby Washington and Providence Seaside Hospital in Oregon — are about 20 miles from Columbia Memorial. Both are 25-bed hospitals, and neither is designed to withstand a tsunami.

“Ocean Beach Health regularly conducts mass casualty and natural disaster drills,” said Brenda Sharkey, chief nursing officer.

“We focus our planning and investments on areas where we can make a real difference to our community before, during and after an event – ​​such as maintaining continuity of care, ensuring rapid triage and coordinating with regional emergency response partners,” Sharkey said in an email.

Gary Walker, a spokesman for Providence Seaside, said in a statement that the hospital has a "comprehensive earthquake and tsunami emergency response plan, including alternate sites and mobile resources."

Walker added that Providence Seaside has engaged “a team of consultants and experts to conduct a conceptual resilience study” to assess the hospital’s vulnerabilities and recommend ways to address them.

Oregon emergency managers are advising residents and visitors in coastal communities to immediately seek higher ground after a major earthquake — and not rely on tsunami sirens, social media or most technology.

“After an event like this, even cell towers may not be operational,” said Jonathan Allan, coastal geomorphologist with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. “The earthquake shaking, its intensity and especially the duration for which the shaking lasts is the warning message.”

The stronger the earthquake and the longer the shaking, the more likely it is that a tsunami will head towards the coast.

A tsunami triggered by an earthquake in the Cascadia zone could hit land in less than 30 minutes, according to government estimates.

Many of Oregon's coastal communities are near high enough elevation to be protected from a tsunami in a relatively short period of time, Allan said. But he estimated that to save lives, Oregon would need about a dozen vertical tsunami evacuation shelters along the coast, including in coastal towns that attract tourists and where the nearest high ground is a mile or more away.

Willis Van Dusen's family has lived in Astoria since the mid-19th century. Van Dusen, a former mayor of Astoria, emphasized that tsunamis are not a hypothetical threat. He remembered seeing one in Seaside in 1964. The wave was only about 18 inches high, he said, but it flooded a street and destroyed a bridge and some homes. The memory stayed with him.

“It’s not like … ‘Oh, that’s never going to happen,’” he said. “We have to be prepared for this.”

KFF Health News correspondent Brett Kelman contributed to this report.

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