I'm sitting here in Washington State watching all the news about the 7.0 earthquake in Anchorage. I'm hoping all of our peers in AK came through the shaking in one piece and that no serious damage was done to any of your planes. What a doozy this was! The ring-of-fire has been really active this year.

We're waiting for the overdue Cascadia Subduction Zone magnitude 9 shaker that has historically arrives about every 350 years. It's been 318 years since the last one. They know when the last one happened because the earthquake here sent a tsunami all the way to Japan. The Japanese written record shows a large number of ships sunk in Tokyo harbor by a "Ghost Wave". They called it a ghost because the tsunami came, but there was no shaking beforehand. That shaking was all the way across the Pacific on the NW coast of British Columbia and Washington. Anyway, if there is anything our northern neighbors need to help cope with the impacts of today's quake, let us know.

One thing that might be worth looking into is Disaster Airlift Response Teams, DART. When a major disaster strikes, it can take the feds 2-3 weeks to mobilize a response. There is a lot of emergency work that has to be done before the feds show up. The idea of using GA to help in the initial weeks after the disaster started in California but the idea has been spreading. I live in Jefferson County in Washington State and our local pilots organization worked with the county's Department of Emergency Management to incorporate DART support into our emergency management plan. If GA is not part of the local plan, then GA pilots will be barred from flying by the TFR the feds will set up immediately. If GA is part of the county's formal response plan, the covered GA pilots and their planes can be used for emergency evacuations and for bringing in emergency supplies to isolated communities.

We live on a peninsula that will likely be cut off when the big one comes. The bridges connecting us to the outside world will all fail and there are no large, commercial airports (no CAT B or C airspace) in the county. Many of the harbor facilities are also likely to be affected by a big quake and subsequent wave action. Bush planes that can land on turf or gravel may be our best link to the outside world for quite a while. I encourage pilots in other communities to check out the DART resources online and start having discussions with your own county's emergency management organization. Here's a couple of links to good information about DART:
https://calpilots.org/dart/
https://seaplanemagazine.com/2018/04/04/disaster-airlift-response-plan-exercise-information/
http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/clallam-county-disaster-airlift-plan-first-in-state-neighbors-in-development/

Here's a picture of my Maule being used in one of the regional (5 county) DART training exercises.