When the Eagle Creek fire roared through the Columbia River Gorge in 2017, it was during the salmon commercial fishing season. Tribal fishers along the river were out in boats as the sky turned a dark red and the air filled with smoke.
Buck Jones was working at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), the fisheries technical and advisory organization of the four Columbia River treaty fishing Tribes: the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Nez Perce. As the fire burned, blocking Interstate 84 that borders the river in Oregon, Jones drove up to the Washington state side and along the river to distribute high quality masks to the Tribal fishers and staff working there. The air quality was so bad, he couldn’t see across the river to the Oregon shore.
“The fire really made me aware of how vulnerable we can be in the Gorge,” said Jones, who is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and salmon marketing specialist at CRITFC.
Jones remembers this as the beginning of his work in emergency preparedness and response. As he facilitates communication between state and Tribal communities, he’s experienced how important it is that Tribes have an equal voice in decision making during emergencies.
Jones is sharing his emergency and disaster-related experiences with fellow Pacific Northwest communities through the Northwest Center for Evidence-Based Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (NWPHEPR). Led by faculty from the University of Washington School of Public Health, the Center is one of 10 in the country funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that is tasked with supporting implementation of evidenced-based interventions for disaster preparedness alongside communities.
A critical part of this work is its collaborative effort between community partners across the Pacific Northwest in FEMA’s Region 10: Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and 272 Tribal nations. It includes Tribal partners, state and local health departments, health care coalitions, and academic researchers. Through this shared learning, the Pacific Northwest will be better prepared to face the disasters that impact our region, especially as changing weather increases threats of wildfires, smoke, flooding, and heat waves.
“All disasters start and end locally,” said Resham Patel, deputy director for NWPHEPR and assistant teaching professor in the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS). “For us there is a practice and research gap we are trying to bridge and it has to be informed with what our practice-based partners experience with boots on the ground.”
A national call to save local lives
Having evidenced-based approaches to keep communities safe during disasters is critical for population health. Yet, a 2021 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine concluded that “the science underlying the nation’s system of response to public health emergencies is seriously deficient, hampering the nation’s ability to respond to emergencies most effectively to save lives and preserve well-being.”
“Lack of coordination between those who work on public health emergencies and those who study them has resulted in research that is not always directly relevant to public health practice,” said Nicole Errett, NWPHEPR director and associate professor in DEOHS. “There is so much opportunity to develop and apply a practice-relevant evidence base, together.”
To fill this gap, the CDC began funding these Centers for Evidence-Based Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response around the country. These regionally focused hubs are meant to partner with state and local health departments, Tribal organizations and others to support preparedness for everything from fires to pandemics.
The UW Center’s task is preparing the Northwest before disaster strikes. By building relationships in advance and sharing knowledge, disaster responses can be better coordinated. Over the past few years, the Center has convened Tribal partners, leaders from local health jurisdictions, state agencies, health care organizations and coalitions, among others, to create a shared agenda for the Northwest Region 10 Center. These conversations led to the development of three primary focus areas for the Center: communication, workforce capacity and leadership, and assessing and addressing current capabilities and future hazards.
In its first year of operation, the Center launched an inaugural Crisis Leadership Institute in response to regional partners’ needs. The Center also gathered over 100 preparedness practitioners and experts from across the region for a two-day conference to discuss problems and solutions for Pacific Northwest disasters, like floods, landslides, volcanoes, earthquakes, and wildfires.
“There is so much that we need to be prepared for: in the last few months of 2025 alone the remnant of Typhoon Halong struck Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and a powerful atmospheric river dumped more than nine-million acre-feet of water on western Washington,” Errett said. “There are so many unique hazards and communities in the Northwest and ways we address those need to be informed by the unique and local knowledge held here.”
Excerpted from the full post on the UW School on Public Health blog.
