Memories of devastating tornado spurn Aumsville to prepare for future disasters
Bill Poehler
Reminders of the most significant natural disaster ever to hit Aumsville linger nearly a decade later.
When someone drives through the city of 4,165, echos of the tornado that ripped a swath of the city on Dec. 14, 2010 are easy to find: Tornado Fitness on Main Street now occupies the space where a building was toppled; dozens of homes and buildings were remodeled out of necessity.
Aumsville — like many communities — was unprepared for such an event.
In the past two years, Aumsville has formed a board and developed plans to receive and alert the public about hazardous weather and how to deal with the aftermath. The city recently became the first in Marion County to earn the StormReady Certification from the National Weather Service.
“It’s kind of just a whole hub of everybody looking at information and sharing it quickly with everybody when we see an emergency or a potential emergency coming up,” said Aumsville Chief of Police Richard Schmitz, the emergency management coordinator for the city.
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As part of the plan, Aumsville established a 24-hour monitoring system for severe weather forecasts, developed ways to alert the public of such events and established an emergency operations center.
Those were things it lacked in 2010.
“This is something that in all honesty, Aumsville was deficient, and we are now meeting the standards in my mind,” Aumsville Mayor Derek Clevenger said.
“Yes, we’re the first ones in Marion County to have this rating, and that’s cool, but that should be the standard from what they’re talking about with every city in the county.”
What happened in Aumsville?
Late on the already gray and cloudy Tuesday morning of Dec. 14, 2010, the sky around Aumsville – a bedroom community surrounded by farms 10 miles east of Salem – turned nearly pitch black.
At 11:46 a.m., National Weather Service radar detected a small weather cell north of Stayton and at 11:53 a.m. issued a Severe Thunderstorm Warning.
At 11:59 a.m., an EF2 tornado with wind speeds over 110 miles per hour ripped its way through Aumsville and along a five-mile path to the northeast approximately 150 yards wide.
The devastation it wreaked was unlike anything the city was prepared for.
The tornado damaged 50 structures, including destroying TG Nichol Plumbing on Main Street and making 10 homes uninhabitable, uprooting 30 large trees and causing two minor injuries.
In all, there was $1.1 million in damage from the storm and the county declared it a local emergency.
After the tornado, the police department was relegated to setting up its command center in the intersection of public streets since the buildings housing the police and fire departments were damaged.
“We were not prepared to deal with stuff like that. Tornados in Oregon?” Schmitz said.
“What do we do? We eventually moved it into the fire department once we found that the building was fine. But we had to go through buildings and decide if people were trapped.”
There were precious few minutes from when the storm appeared on weather radar and when it began ripping through Aumsville.
Even if the StormReady system had been in place, it likely wouldn’t have made much difference in alerting the public.
“It was one of the stronger tornados in Oregon,” NOAA Warning Coordination Meteorologist Tyree Wilde said.
Getting cities prepared for disasters
Wilde said the StormReady program started in the Tornado Alley city of Tulsa, Okla., in the late 1990s and has expanded nationwide to communities in vulnerable areas.
Though Aumsville is the first city in the Willamette Valley to receive the certification, most cities on the Oregon Coast have it as they are in tsunami areas.
In order to receive the certification, the cities must establish a 24-hour warning post and emergency operations center – Aumsville’s police department – have more than one way to receive the warnings and alert the public, promote the importance through community seminars and develop a formal plan, including training spotters and holding emergency exercises.
“And you want redundant ways to receive and disseminate. In case one fails, you have three or four different methods,” Wilde said.
Technology has helped Aumsville in some areas, such as METCOM 911. Schmitz said the city has access to the Everbridge Mass Notification system to be able to alert citizens among other communication tools.
“We work with the fire department ... because we want to be able to identify our vulnerable populations,” Schmitz said.
“So somebody who might not be able to get out of a nursing home or adult care facility, we know to go and get those people if we have to do evacuation.”
The first of 20 cities in Marion County
Marion County is embarking on getting all 20 cities in the county prepared with similar systems.
Aumsville is the first of the cities alphabetically, but it also is the one most looked at because of the tornado.
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“I did some research and in the last, I think it was 50 years … that of all of the counties in Oregon, Marion County has had the most tornados in the last 50 years,” said Marion County Emergency Management Program Coordinator Krista Carter said.
The chances of a tornado ripping through another of Marion County’s 20 cities isn’t large, but other cities could face other natural disasters such as an earthquake or flooding.
“It’s for any type of weather event,” said Kathleen Silva, Emergency Manager for Marion County. “It could be for flooding..”
Silva said getting the StormReady certification for Aumsville was the start.
“The thought of going to 19 other cities to get our communities ready has my attention,” Marion County Commissioner Sam Brentano said.
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bpoehler@StatesmanJournal.com or Twitter.com/bpoehler