COPE: EAGER Coastal Hazard Planning in Time, in COPE: EAGER Coastal Hazard Planning in Time

The University of Washington (UW) has partnered with the town of Westport, Washington, to
co-create “geo-narratives” to enhance the community’s hazard mitigation and adaptation
planning. When complete, the digital platform will include maps, scientific information, and
explanatory materials about Westport's risk from coastal hazards including tsunamis, co-seismic
subsidence, sea level rise, and increased storminess, flooding, and coastal erosion. A 3D digital
model of the town and its coastline, using imagery collected by RAPID Staff in 2020, forms the
basis for much of the geo-narrative visualization.

The project is part of an ongoing collaborative partnership between the town and UW faculty
and students to inform both local emergency preparedness and long-term investments and
policies. Activities have ranged from updating the town’s comprehensive plan; using the model
to locate and design new tsunami vertical evacuation structures; using Minecraft and designing
new video games with local junior high school students to envision hazards impacts and
mitigating strategies; and helping the students video the town from the perspective of a
tsunami surging inland for an evacuation practice demonstration.

The RAPID-produced elements of the project are unusual in that reconnaissance was conducted
in the community prior to an expected disaster, as a way of providing baseline information about
the environment. This information can then be manipulated for photorealistic simulations of
hazard impacts such as tsunami wave inundation, “bathtub” visualizations of coastal flooding
due to sea level rise or subsidence, and long-term erosion and sediment transport impacts to
coastlines. The setting for this project is itself unique as it is the first community in North
America to build a tsunami vertical evacuation structure (VES). The local Ocosta School District
accomplished this as part of an elementary school rebuild in 2016, which has provided the
community with a unique point of pride and students at the school with a point of reference for
thinking about coastal hazards over the long term (Cascadia Subduction earthquakes and
tsunamis recur only once in an interval of approximately 300-500 years; the last such event
occurred in 1700).

The 3D point cloud model and imagery have so far assisted UW undergraduate and professional
masters students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design & Planning to
envision how additional VES’s and other adaptive strategies including flood-resilient housing
and recreational spaces may fit within the townscape, and thus, like the school, serve everyday
functions as well as emergency ones. The model was unexpectedly useful for one class of these
UW students who were unable to visit the community in person due to COVID-19 travel
restrictions in Winter Quarter 2021; the studio course had to be mounted entirely online, and
students were able to engage with the environment digitally from remote locations. In a
synergistic Cascadia CoPes Hub-funded project for “Inclusive Community-based STEAM
Identity-building in Coastal Hazards Research: Pilot Activities for Cascadia TEACH with the
Ocosta School District, WA,” the model has also enabled local youth through an extracurricular
drone club to map out places in the community that are important to them, and to document
them with drone-flown photography and video that they take themselves. The youth are also
working with the model to design a video game that depicts the interactions between hazard
impacts and possible mitigation strategies. Both these sets of activities are informing the
masters theses of two graduate students in Urban Planning and Public Health. Ancillary to this
CoPes-funded data-gathering and processing, RAPID staff have helped train UW students and
local youth to operate drones, which has been essential to the activities described above as
well as other synergistic projects. Ocosta students have visited the RAPID facility at the UW
campus, and are expected gradually to be introduced to the technology of creating point cloud
models with drone-collected data.