CANNON BEACH — A state grant will help the city build sites that can turn into emergency village shelters after a disaster.

The city was awarded $360,000 from the state’s coronavirus fiscal recovery fund to add resources to its safety and survival cache sites. The City Council accepted the grant in January.

Rick Hudson, the city’s emergency manager, said the grant will help the city add electricity, sanitation, heat, lighting, generators and security to the cache sites.

He said investing in and maintaining the sites will help ensure people have a safe place to temporarily harbor if the city cannot be reoccupied after a disaster.

“It means there is a safe place off grid that creates a lot of resiliency to the community,” Hudson told the City Council. “And there are other residents around our area that would end up migrating to our location anyway due to the geographic island nature of where we are. So it does create a safe harbor for many, many people in this area.”

Hudson said the sites are on safe ground, outside of the tsunami inundation zone for a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. Developing the sites is costly, so the grant is a serious benefit, he said.

Since the stand-alone utility infrastructure is usually placed underground, Hudson does not expect the additional resources to substantially change the way the sites look.

Clatsop County and the state can also use the sites to store resources, he said.

The deadline to complete the work is 2024.