The Scenario:
At 1:13 p.m. on Monday, June 22, 2026, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck Albany, Oregon. The quake had damaged bridges across the area. Liquefaction had broken Interstate 5. There was no power and no running water, radios were the only reliable link to the outside, and no one would be leaving for about five days.
None of it was real.
The earthquake was the opening line of a scenario read to about 130 high school students who had just arrived at the Knife River Training Center, a construction company’s training campus outside Albany. For the next five days they lived inside that story. They slept in a tent city they raised themselves, ate from a field kitchen their classmates ran, staffed a medical tent and a public information desk, and built sheds and shelters that left on trailers at the end of the week for Oregon communities that needed them.
That week was the first Ready2Respond. Jim Taylor, who rebuilds homes for wildfire survivors at Oregon Housing and Community Services, conceived it, and a coalition no single agency could have assembled alone built it. The Oregon National Guard supplied the incident commander. The Oregon Department of Forestry and the Oregon Department of Emergency Management staffed planning, preparedness training and volunteer coordination. The Oregon Department of Human Services’ Office of Resilience and Emergency Management set up the camp the way it would for a real disaster. Lane Education Service District registered the students and hired their teachers. Knife River opened its training center. And Team Oregon Build, a statewide coalition of education, industry and agency partners whose students build shelters for communities in need, gave the camp its name and its mission.
This collection explains what Ready2Respond is, how the model works, why it exists, how it started and what year one looked like.