Earthquake drill: The Great WA ShakeOut happening Thursday

Welcome back. We are less than two hours away from the Great Washington Shakeout, the largest earthquake drill in the U.S. Today at 10:15, people will practice earthquake safety drills at work, school, and home. And here to show us what to do during an earthquake drill is the Earthquake Program Manager at Washington Emergency Management Division, Brian Trubisch. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. No problem at all. Okay, so we've been talking about this, we've been preparing, we've been thinking about earthquakes for quite a long time. why don't you go ahead and just walk us through this what we should be aware of what we should be doing at 10:15 absolutely so this is our practice every year annually on the third Thursday we practice drop cover and hold on we recommend registering at shakeout.org it's free we just want you to know that you are practicing with millions of people but what we do is we practice drop cover and hold on which is the recommendation here in the United States and that's because of our building codes. Buildings are not as likely to collapse as you might see in other videos from around the world. But what that means is going to depend on a situation. Like right here, we have this convenient table that can help protect us from things that are falling from above, but you're not always going to have one nearby. So I like to think of these three steps as very situational, drop, cover, and hold on. And what they mean depends on where you are. Drop is always about getting low to the ground. You can see some footage from the Venezuela earthquake we had recently, where that first wave from the earthquake actually knocks people right over. And if you get low to the ground, you don't fall as far when the ground is shaking. So that's really important. You're doing that to protect yourself. I mean, you're also not moving as much when you're down low. So you're also a smaller target for flying things. So drop is about getting small. Cover, cover your head and neck. These are important parts of your body. You don't want things to fall on you and take cover under something if possible. This isn't the sturdiest table, but it's better than anything else we have. And if we get near the legs, that's going to make it a lot sturdier. Okay. So literally you're going to drop down and you're going to get right underneath and just kind of hang out here and hold on? And then hold on as long as the shaking lasts. Okay. Now, what if you don't have a table to get underneath? Yeah, so then I can get out from under here. So, yeah, those situations will apply other places. Drop, cover, and hold on. You want to think again about getting low, what you can take cover with. If you have your arms, you can use those. If you have a sturdy textbook or anything like that, just make sure you're covering yourself with something nearby. And we have folks in wheelchairs that use mobility assistance, walkers. Lock your wheels. You're trying to prevent yourself from being moved around by the earthquake itself. Okay, now we talk about this a lot. We often forget. We prepare, we prepare, we prepare. We think we're going to be prepared. Then time happens and we get a little bit of a moment where you think, what do we do? Oh my gosh, what if we have pets? If we have pets. So we like to think of this as put your own oxygen mask on first. Same thing if you have children. Your first instinct might be to try to protect them first. If you have children that are old enough to do this on their own, think about how you can teach them. A lot of kids practice this in school. That's our biggest participant in the ShakeOut. But if you have children that are young enough, think about how you can cover them under this table or something like that, or near an interior wall, one that doesn't have windows, one that doesn't have picture frames. I wouldn't want to go near a wall over here that has maybe these vases that can fall on you. These are things we want to think about. So also with the Great ShakeOut, when you drop, cover, and hold on, think about things you can do to make those spaces where you spend your most time safer. It's actually safer to stay in bed if the earthquake is shaking. You don't get up in the middle of the night and run to a table or something. Just stay where you are, you're low. You're not gonna fly out of bed in the shaking. Cover your head and neck with your pillow. But the caveat to that is, are there things above your bed that could fall on you? What can you do now to move those things around to make your space safer? Okay, so what about, I've always thought about this, if we're driving. I think about this, I think I've talked to Adam about this before. What if we're driving over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge or somewhere, I mean, anywhere really, the ground can open up, but what should we do? Yeah, it's really good that you're thinking about things you could do anywhere. That's what we really want for the shakeout. It's like, this happens at 1015, what are you doing at 1015? What would you do in the event of an emergency? So we get a lot of people that talk about our 2001 Nisqually quake, and they felt like they got a flat tire while they were driving. And what do you do when you get a flat tire? Do you just keep driving like normal? No, you're gonna pull over to the side of the road slowly, put your hazard lights on, other people know you're doing that of course and just kind of stop where you are ideally you don't want to be under an overpass or something but we've all been stuck in traffic we know and just being stopped not trying to drive really fast during that earthquake while the ground is accelerating rapidly side to side it's better to be in that situation i mean inevitably there are going to be situations where we might be in those places that you talk about i used to commute a lot on the viaduct here and you know coming back home um open air but underneath on the way there it's It's just something you need to be more aware of. Okay, so a lot of people are gonna be doing this at 10, 15. When they do it, especially the kids at 10, 15, how long are they gonna do it for? How long are they gonna be dropping and covering under the table? So we recommend doing this for about a minute. We have a recording on our website. And you can also find that at shakeout.org slash resources when you go to register for the drill. But yeah, all we recommend is about a minute. So the Nisqually earthquake for reference that lasted 30 to 40 seconds of shaking, a lot of people felt like it felt a lot longer than that. During the earthquake. It's a long time. gonna feel longer okay and then our like magnitude 9 earthquake we could get that might last five to six minutes of shaking so and that's an extremely amount of so practicing for a minute not very bad and while you're down there just think about those things you could change like how you can make that space safer how you can secure things how you can just make your space safer during the next earthquake all right gosh thanks for being here with there you're hanging out with us all morning long to give us some tips and we'll finally get to the 1015 hour but Brian here wish thank you so much emergency management division We'll have more in just a bit.