WA responders prepare for 'The Big One' emergency response

If concerns about the big one keep you up at night, listen to this. State health officials are testing how they would respond to a Cascadia earthquake and tsunami this week. Fox 13's Lauren Donovan shows us what that means for you. Worst case scenario, the big one hits. There's an earthquake, a tsunami follows with walls of water washing over coastal communities across Washington. Is our state ready for a disaster like that? So we deal with disasters every year. Washington is a rather disaster-prone state, like we saw during the flooding earlier this year, the fires this summer. But a Cascadia subduction zone event, one that hasn't happened since 1700. So a big 9.0 earthquake off the coast that caused the tsunami and really did a lot of damage to a lot of communities, especially up and down the coast, but even through the I-5 corridor. Roads would be impassable. Cell towers would be down. Nate Weed from the State Department of Health and dozens of other first responders spent the day in Lacey practicing how to get help through. Part of the test today is to see if we can mobilize some of those resources and actually deliver them on the ground to local jurisdictions, tribal jurisdictions. They've gathered at the Medical Logistics Center, this nearly 200,000 square foot warehouse which holds emergency stockpiles. If this happens, how will we respond to this thing together? One of the tools at their disposal is this mobile command unit, which they put to the test this past summer responding to wildfires. And these are really ultimately kind of like large hotspots that can provide a lot of internet connectivity, satellite connectivity. They can provide power generation. Hopefully, we don't have to use them. But when we do have to use them, they often provide a really critical component. Reporting in Lacey, Lauren Donovan, Fox 13 News.