Help Is Not Coming: Cascadia, Continuity, and the Marine Exchange Watch Floor

In this episode of The Tactics Meeting, Dan sits down with Patrick Gallagher, Executive Director of the Marine Exchange of Puget Sound, for a practical conversation about what “response readiness” actually looks like in the Pacific Northwest—when the weather’s bad, systems fail, and you still have to keep the region moving.

They dig into the Marine Exchange’s behind-the-scenes role supporting WSMC’s 24/7 watch, the value of resilient AIS coverage, and how the Marine Exchange has even backed up the Coast Guard’s Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) when federal systems stumble. Along the way, they talk continuity planning (generators, fuel, cloud redundancy), the reality that help may not arrive quickly in a Cascadia-scale event, and what preparedness looks like when you’re building it with limited resources.

Topics include:

• Continuity of operations for maritime response and vessel traffic oversight

• AIS as an operational backbone (and why redundancy matters)

• Coordinating notifications, early incident intelligence, and on-call incident command

• Shipboard fire readiness, Unified Command, and hard lessons learned

• Communications resilience (including radio) and emerging hazards like lithium-ion battery fires