Eugene Neighborhood Associations and Emergency Preparedness

Good afternoon.

As Alyssa said, my name is Sandra Bishop.

I'm a longtime member of City Club, and I've been a neighborhood leader for many years.

Currently, I'm on the board of the Jefferson Westside Neighbors, the JWN, which is a neighborhood directly to the west of us here.

And I'm also on three neighborhood related preparedness committees.

Thank you all for being here today.

It's a very special day.

25 years ago, tragedy struck in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC on September 11th, 2001.

Many of us remember where we were that morning, and many of us remember the people that were lost that day.

For me, It was a day that awakened something in me that after all these years, I credit with fueling my enthusiasm and willingness to try to be better prepared for the unexpected and to help others be prepared for the unexpected.

I was on a United Airlines flight on November 11th.

I was flying from Paris to Washington, D.C., US airspace was closed.

I didn't make it to DC.

The planes were diverted.

The plane I was on landed in Nova Scotia and I was registered as a refugee.

I didn't make it back to the United States for five days.

For four of those days, I had no idea how long I'd be kept out of the country, no idea when I'd get home, and I couldn't imagine what the people at home were going through.

It was a shocking, eye-opening, and yet enlightening experience.

It revealed to me the incredible value of resiliency.

and showed me the inevitability of relying on the people that you're with when something of that magnitude happens.

When something tragic or unexpected happens, people pull together.

That experience is probably one of the reasons I'm here today helping to host this program on Eugene neighborhood awareness and on Eugene neighborhood associations and emergency preparedness.

In Eugene, it's unlikely that we'll have a human-caused 9-11 type disaster, but we are ripe for natural disasters of staggering magnitude.

I'm referring to the possibility of a catastrophic seismic event like a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake.

We've also had a lot of experience with fire and to a lesser extent with flooding.

Good afternoon.

As Alyssa said, my name is Sandra Bishop.

I'm a longtime member of City Club, and I've been a neighborhood leader for many years.

Currently, I'm on the board of the Jefferson Westside Neighbors, the JWN, which is a neighborhood directly to the west of us here.

And I'm also on three neighborhood related preparedness committees.

Thank you all for being here today.

It's a very special day.

25 years ago, tragedy struck in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC on September 11th, 2001.

Many of us remember where we were that morning, and many of us remember the people that were lost that day.

For me, It was a day that awakened something in me that after all these years, I credit with fueling my enthusiasm and willingness to try to be better prepared for the unexpected and to help others be prepared for the unexpected.

I was on a United Airlines flight on November 11th.

I was flying from Paris to Washington, D.C., US airspace was closed.

I didn't make it to DC.

The planes were diverted.

The plane I was on landed in Nova Scotia and I was registered as a refugee.

I didn't make it back to the United States for five days.

For four of those days, I had no idea how long I'd be kept out of the country, no idea when I'd get home, and I couldn't imagine what the people at home were going through.

It was a shocking, eye-opening, and yet enlightening experience.

It revealed to me the incredible value of resiliency.

and showed me the inevitability of relying on the people that you're with when something of that magnitude happens.

When something tragic or unexpected happens, people pull together.

That experience is probably one of the reasons I'm here today helping to host this program on Eugene neighborhood awareness and on Eugene neighborhood associations and emergency preparedness.

In Eugene, it's unlikely that we'll have a human-caused 9-11 type disaster, but we are ripe for natural disasters of staggering magnitude.

I'm referring to the possibility of a catastrophic seismic event like a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake.

We've also had a lot of experience with fire and to a lesser extent with flooding.