At 11 o’clock Friday morning, Florence residents on the Oregon coast will hear sirens. The drill will test the state’s new Tsunami Blue Line Project on the 5th anniversary of the Tsunami and Earthquake that hit Japan.
Three Oregon coastal towns are participating in the drill. The Blue Line refers to a community’s tsunami evacuation route. When Japan’s earthquake hit in 2011, the U.S. west coast was under a tsunami warning. Megan Messner is spokeswoman for the City of Florence.
Messner: “It didn’t actually hit us but we did have a live drill, I guess you could say, and that brought a lot of awareness to the tsunami danger in Florence.”
Messner says during Friday’s drill, participants will walk to higher ground indicated by the blue lines. She says even those who don’t take part should take a moment to think about their evacuation route in the likely event of an earthquake and tsunami in Oregon.
