Astoria adopted its 2026 emergency operations plan on July 20, finishing a three-year process with other communities across Clatsop County. The new plan updates Astoria’s earlier plan, adopted in 2010.
“The plan is a foundational document that essentially sets the structure for how we’re going to operate during any natural disaster or man-made disaster,” said City Manager Scott Spence.
The 80-page “base plan” does not go into detail about combating specific hazards; rather it establishes how the city could coordinate at a high level across multiple departments.
“When something bad is happening, you don’t want to be making things up on the fly,” said Astoria Fire Chief Dan Crutchfield. “We’ll know what our problem is and (when) we refer to that plan it will provide us direction.”
The document also identifies several areas where the city could be vulnerable. “The City of Astoria faces a broad range of natural, technological, and human-caused hazards due to its coastal location, complex terrain, aging infrastructure, and role as a regional center for maritime activity, transportation, and tourism.”
Primary hazards include natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and extreme storms, infrastructure failures like power outages and cybersecurity threats.
How the city will react to these specific scenarios is outlined in a set of separate documents, called annexes. The annexes are “mission specific” to emergencies such as earthquakes, pandemics and terrorism.
Crutchfield said the annexes won’t be made public as the information contained in them could present a security vulnerability for the city. Officials don’t want the information to fall into the wrong hands or “bad actors.”
“If they have our plan, they may be able to do things that make it difficult to put our specific plans in place,” Crutchfield said.
In his seven years with the department, Crutchfield said the only time the city declared a “state of emergency” was during 2020’s COVID pandemic. However, he said periodically the city has had to consult areas of the plan in case one part of it would need to be invoked. To be prepared, Crutchfield said the city performs regular trainings to make sure they’re ready in case they’re ever called upon to use them.
Though the base plan is complete — and available to the public — and the annexes are slated to be complete by the end of the year, the plan is a living document, said Crutchfield. The city will be required to keep the plan updated and to conduct regular training around its tenets it so that if and when disaster strikes, the city can be ready for anything.
The bigger picture
Astoria didn’t update its plan in a vacuum — the cities of Cannon Beach and Seaside plus Clatsop County all updated their Emergency Preparedness plans at the same time. Crutchfield said the structure of the plans would all be the same, but the information is community — or county — specific.
The updated plans put all the emergency plans in sync with each other.
“When plans are created in a silo, they are created for one intended user, not for those surrounding them,” said Mike Neelon, the county’s emergency readiness coordinator. “If we’re all speaking the same language, it’s easier to address the emergencies.”
Jennifer Bedford, the county’s emergency management coordinator, said the new plans make communities stronger together.
“Updating these plans strengthens cities and the county’s common operating picture to plan for, respond to, and recover from disasters,” she said, “this gives us the playbook so we can all operate together.”
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