“The reality is that there are two ways to look at responding” to a natural disaster, says Linda Kozlowski, a city councillor in Manzanita, Oregon. “One is that I'm in it for me, and everybody else can take care of themselves. We have chosen to go the opposite direction. Our community has chosen to say, let's work together.”
Small towns dot the remote, often harsh beauty of the Oregon coast. Storms regularly lash the region, and its inhabitants are sometimes left to their own devices for days. Many who call the area home could be described as “preppers”—preparing for the power going out, a tornado, or a tsunami triggered by the massive fault that looms just offshore. But when journalist Britta Lokting wrote about her cousin’s family in the tiny coastal hamlet of Cape Mears this spring, she found that preppers aren’t always the rugged, bunker-building individualists you may expect. Manzanita and Kozlowski, it turns out, have inspired towns up and down the coast to take a community-first approach to disaster preparedness. As Lokting found, it’s given them a unique perspective on what it means to be ready for anything—including a pandemic.
