Socioeconomic Lessons Learned from the Response to the Federally‐Declared West Coast Groundfish Disaster

Abstract

AbstractCongress responded to the 2000 West Coast groundfish disaster by allocating $5 million in disaster relief for Oregon, Washington, and California. Each state designed and executed its own disaster response program to help impacted members of the fishing industry and coastal communities to cope with the downturn. While the federal goals for the funding were identical, each state created different relief programs. Oregon focused on helping individual members of the fishing community to access social services. Washington focused on economic development of coastal towns. California focused on payments to impacted individuals and cooperative fisheries research. While federal responses to fisheries disasters cost the government millions of dollars each year, they are rarely researched and poorly understood. The goal of this project was to document responses to the disaster (focusing on Oregon), explore useful comparisons, and extract possible lessons learned. Results indicate that people working in the fishing industry face many obstacles to leaving the fishery, and that aggressive, well‐planned outreach programs are necessary for efforts to directly help members of the fishing community through fishery disasters. It is hoped that the lessons learned in this project will help both decision makers and those impacted by future fishery disaster responses.