Just after noon on June 22, the first all-camp briefing began in a crowded tent at the training center.
It was already hot, and by afternoon it would reach about 90 degrees. Jim Taylor, who had spent the previous five months organizing the camp, started by teaching the room a call and response. He shouted “Team Oregon Build.” The students shouted back, “Ready to respond.” He made them do it again. “We are going to change this state,” he said.
Then he asked who in the room had lived through a wildfire. Hands went up. Taylor told them his team at Oregon Housing and Community Services had rebuilt 387 homes for wildfire survivors in the past two and a half years, with 400 more to go.
“So some of you have gotten home,” he said. “Some people still aren’t home yet. What we’re learning how to do is survive.” - Jim Taylor | Ready2Respond Director
There would be two things going on all week, he said: their education, and “the presence of the National Guard and the emergency management teams from across the state.” Then he set the scene. “Our imagining is that we had an earthquake, right? You all were on a list, you got a call, and you showed up here to help us survive,” he said. “First thing you do is you get your tent set up, you find out your water source, your food source, your sanitation source. […] You got to survive the first night. Then you got to start building.”
The written scenario, which Kayla Thompson of the Department of Emergency Management co-wrote, supplied the details. The quake was on a local fault, not the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The quake had damaged bridges and closed the interstate, so no one could leave and no supplies could arrive for about five days. Aid was going first to the most populated, hardest-hit areas. Fortunately, the scenario said, these students had come prepared to stay a week and knew how to live without modern conveniences.
Taylor called the roll by village. About 75 hands went up for the builders. The safety team, students headed for EMS and firefighting, wore bandanas. The culinary students learned that the first meal of the week would not be one they cooked; lunch was military field rations. He introduced the 20 or so communications students as “our storytellers,” who would spend the week asking everyone else for interviews. Then he called the roll by region: southern Oregon, eastern Oregon, Lane County, the Willamette Valley, central Oregon. He asked the room to applaud itself for coming from across the state.
One by one, the adults who would run the week came to the front. Eric Wright, the Lane Education Service District administrator on site, went over the code of conduct, beginning with what would get a student sent home and why it mattered on a site full of machinery. Smokey Bear came through for photos. Taylor introduced the village leaders: Bren Bovee of Thurston High School for communications; Chef Scott Daffron, with a culinary team of 17; the counselor leads, who explained that every village had its own counselor; Jennifer Stanislaw and her co-lead, both EMTs and firefighters, whose first safety message was to drink water; and the three builder leads, John Stearns, Justin Eagar and Seth O’Hare.
Last came Col. Mike Moffit of the Oregon National Guard. “In a real life situation, National Guard, emergency management are going to take over zones and lead the work,” Taylor told the students by way of introduction. Moffit, the camp’s incident commander, said the Guard’s job was to support Oregonians in emergencies, and that he had one major rule. “Be safe,” he said. “I don’t want anybody hurt.”
The adults left to meet the colonel and his command staff. The students filed out with a bottle of water and a field ration each. Before they went, Taylor had them repeat the phrase they would hear all week. “Listen to learn,” he said, and they said it back. “Learn to teach.” Then he explained it: “You listen to learn something. You learn it well enough to teach somebody else. That’s how we survive.”
By midafternoon the students had raised the tent city where they would sleep for four nights. Ashley Brown of the Department of Forestry, the camp’s activity and volunteer coordinator, said the job would have taken a professional crew a full day. The students did it in about four hours, in 90-degree heat. By Friday, crews were loading finished units onto trailers.
Some of the confusion of that first afternoon was deliberate. In the first incident command session, Lt. Col. Adam Lulay of the National Guard asked how many students had known what to expect when they arrived. Few had. “Believe it or not, that was actually by design,” he told them. “So you’re going to be confused for the next few days because you’re learning.” The leadership review later recommended one change to the first hour: read the scenario before check-in rather than after, so students hear the story before anyone hands them a badge.