• .@BarackObama signs a bill backed by Maria helping the Quileute move to higher ground to protect against tsunamis:

Indian Country – Risk of tsunami is something that has always been top-of-mind for residents of this Quileute village on the Pacific Ocean.

The ancestors told of a flood that carried the Chimakum, a Quileute band, away in their canoes through a passageway in the Olympic Mountains and deposited them near Hood Canal some 100 miles east.

Today, Tony Foster vividly remembers as a child when the storm tides would come and the lower village would be evacuated. Relatives would board up his grandmother’s home and the family would leave until the storm subsided.

And now, debris washing up on Quileute’s shores from the March 11, 2011 quake and tsunami in Japan is a reminder that what happened on the other side of the Pacific could happen here.

Indeed. On the Senate floor February 13, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told of how 80 children go to a school that is just one foot above sea level. “And every day they look directly out the window at the roaring waves of the powerful ocean and wonder when they can move to safer, higher ground,” she said. “… And the river that runs through the reservation has been moving constantly over the last century, causing more erosion and flooding problems. The one road that connects the lower village to higher ground is often flooded, making it even more challenging to deal with this particular area in the case of a tsunami.”

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