20 Years After: What Oregon Can Learn
We need to be much more active in investing what happens after major disasters. Wishing they will not happen is not an option.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, my phone rang just a bit before 6:00 a.m. It was the news director at KXL radio. A plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York and the station wanted me to watch and comment as the story developed. Within a few minutes (actual time was 6:03 PDT), we watched the second plane explode into the other tower.
This was not an accident. There was a terrorist attack on New York.
The rest of the morning we watched and heard about the attack on the Pentagon and the mystery about why another jet had crashed into some woods in Pennsylvania. I was on the air throughout the morning explaining what we knew and analyzing potential causes of the attacks.
The 9/11 commemorations will focus on the dead and their families, they will focus on the targeted buildings, and they will focus on the survivors. But 9/11 had a huge impact on all of us, in fact a huge impact on people across the world.
Oregon was impacted in different ways.
By early October 2001, plane loads of Oregonians flew across the country to celebrate solidarity with New Yorkers and make the case that the big city was open for visitors. The Flight for Freedom sent a strong message that the terrorists were not going to change our lives.
Our lives did change, though. Just perhaps in unexpected ways and at unanticipated times.
Soon after the attacks, the dot com bubble pushed an economy that had been teetering fully into a recession. Oregon’s economic players that were part of the world economy took the biggest hits. As the recession began to end, it was the high-tech businesses in the Silicon Forest that were the slowest to recover. Had Oregon overcompensated in the 1980s and 1990s as the timber industry changed? Had we, in effect, traded an economy too tied to trees for one that was too tied to silicon chips?
The actual conflict hit home as well. The Portland Six were arrested in October 2002 on charges of trying to join al Qaeda forces. Another arrest the next year turned the group into the Portland Seven. Most of this group is still in prison. Oregon’s U.S. Senator Gordon Smith made some cryptic remarks about other possible terror cells in Oregon.
Brandon Mayfield was arrested in 2004 because a fingerprint at the site of the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombing supposedly matched his. This time the U.S. government eventually had to apologize for making a horrendous mistake.
The biggest impact on Oregon, however, was and is also the biggest impact on much of the world. Terrorism cannot really be predicted with the precision that can save lives. It, like earthquakes and weather events, can only be prepared for.
However, it was not until this year that the Oregon Legislature really began to systematically think about disaster response—and it was because of the horrific wildfires of 2020. The feeling in Oregon, and in many other places, is that climate change and pandemic are events that will happen, not events that might happen. We ought to prepare as best we can and realize that we cannot know when these events are going to occur.
That clear September day brought home the lesson that we cannot control what happens in big parts of our lives and communities. Now, as some of that same uncertainty becomes more common—and the ‘big one’ earthquake still looms out there somewhere—we need to be much more active in investing what happens after major disasters. Wishing they will not happen is not an option.
Longtime observer of Oregon and west coast politics. Political analyst for various media outlets, professor at Pacific University.
"World Trade Center 9/11/01 attack memorial photo" by cattias.photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0