TACOMA, Wash. – You might be taking a boat to get to work following a big earthquake that knocks some or most of our bridges out of commission.
As the recent magnitude 8.8 magnitude quake in Chile points out, bridges, even well built ones, can collapse or become unusable. To get around that, Bill Lokey is planning detour routes on land and on the water.
"We've inventoried what vessels might be available. We've worked with the Coast Guard about what rules they will have to follow. We've looked at the places where they can be docked," said Lokey, project manager for the Regional Transportation Recovery Planning Project.
Think of the old Mosquito fleet that connected small isolated Puget Sound communities to Seattle by water. We have some of those kinds of passenger vessels now. After a disaster, you could end up taking a tourist boat from Edmonds to Downtown Seattle instead of a car or bus.
"If all the bridges are out, in the short term, you're probably not going to work for a while. And we've determined short term to be those things that happen within 72 hours," said Lokey.
Tugs pulling barges may bring utility and construction trucks to help put your neighborhood back together and begin rebuilding. Emergency planners are also looking at docks and landing facilities because a lot of land around water is particularly vulnerable in an earthquake.
Temporary solutions may evolve. And what we're looking at, is how many of these can we pre-plan," said Lokey.
Water transportation has been looked at before, but not to this extent. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the federal government targeted ten areas in the country, including eight counties surrounding Seattle, to beef up their ability to deal with a true catastrophe.
Lokey is former chief of Pierce County Emergency Management. He's also a consultant with James Lee Witt Associates, headed by the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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