The building may cost about $4 milliontwice the cost of a conventional solution, Raskin says. Hopes for a congressional appropriation are dead for now, but the town is applying to get funding as a disaster mitigation project through FEMA. Raskin believes mitigation funding would be a good solution and set a precedent that could benefit towns all along the coast.

Meanwhile, Yu has been hired to do a comprehensive study of Cannon Beach's resilience to disasters. I was asked to look at the effect of the earthquake and/or tsunami on their community and to look at government resilience, because we don't want to become another Haiti, incapacitated by disaster, he says.

We need to look at the bridges, wastewater, hospitals and schools and get a general idea of what's going to happen, Yu says, referring to a major seismic and tusnamic event as an inevitability, as many planning officials in the region now do. We need to look at it from an economic perspective: What will be the effects of a disaster on recovery? Also, we need to look at the civic infrastructurethe social networks, the non-governmental, community-based and faith-based organizations. These organizations provide very critical services to the community.

Yu admits that such a study may seem a broad portfolio for a structural engineer, but he says, as a member of a state seismic safety policy advisory commission, he is interested in promoting a safety policy to make the state more resilient to seismic events. He says, When I do engineering projects, I can only solve one thing at a time. When I look at the policy level, I can bring more impact to society.