Emails Show State Struggling To Respond After Large Earthquakes

Emails obtained by News On 6 and our partner, The Frontier, show conversations between state agencies moments after the first of two earthquakes that shook Oklahoma.

Pawnee and Cushing felt the brunt of the quakes on September 3rd and November 6th, all the while, the state seemed to struggle to respond.

At 7:44 p.m. on November 6th, Debbie Coopers Cushing home was destroyed. A 5.0 earthquake hit, and her home sits at its epicenter.

Appliances were pulled from the wall, cabinets emptied and cracks appeared in almost every corner.

Next door, her son Jarrod was at home in the kitchen with his daughter.

"Just boom, boom, boom, one after another, stuff started coming off the wall," he said.

The Cushing earthquake came just two months after what is now Oklahoma's largest earthquake on record - a 5.8 in Pawnee.

Emails show state agencies, including the Governor’s Office and emergency management, immediately communicated about Pawnee. One email shows crews heading there to assess the damage.

"I was pretty frantic through most of the day," said Jefferson Change. He works with the Oklahoma Geological Survey and is on the front lines whenever a quake hits.

While emails show the initial response was swift, issues quickly began to pop up.

They show confusion over the actual epicenter, a downed server made up-to-the-minute data unavailable, and there was an immediate lack of staff to investigate.

Chang said, "There are frustrating parts - like me being out in Lawton, so far away, that is pretty frustrating. Also, it happened on a weekend so a lot of people were off."

At one point, an email shows an apology for disrupting everyone's weekend.

Meagan: “Does the office need more resources?
Chang: “We definitely need more resources, and we need more people."

There was also another snag with the modems that broadcast earthquake data in real time - 60 of them had been hacked.

Chang said OGS doesn't have a devoted IT person, so that rests on him.

“I have to grow into these positions that need to happen and it is really very tiring,” he said. "Oklahoma as a state, and organizations within it, kind of got blindsided by this…we have had earthquakes before, but not to this scale, so we need to recognize that and devote more resources into state agencies and to educating people as well."

People like Jarrod, and others in Cushing or Pawnee, live with daily uncertainty about what might come next.

"More damage is going to come out of my pocket,” he said. “So, you think about those things and the impact it has on your dreams you're trying to build in life."

We reached out to the Governor's Office for comment on any extra funding set to be earmarked for future earthquake research.

You can read more on this story by our partner, The Frontier, here.