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MISSOURI DIVISION |
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
PLANNING FOR DISASTERS BY JAMES ROBERTS
MR. MASUDA: Our next speaker is Jim Roberts. He's the Chief Deputy Director for CALTRANS. He has 47 years of experience, and with CALTRANS, a B.S. degree in civil engineering from UC Berkeley, a master's in structural engineering. His prime background is bridges and structures, and he's been involved as the chairman of the AASHTO subcommittee on bridges and structures. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 and he's been in a lot of disasters, a lot of earthquakes. So welcome, thank you for helping us here.
MR. ROBERTS: Last Sunday morning at 1:30 roughly, there was an earthquake which caused a great disaster in California. It was a 5.2 but it ruined a lot of good wine in the Napa Valley, which is one of our prime products, but it happened at 1:30 in the morning and there was a lot of damage due mostly from things falling off the shelves in the stores, and a couple wineries had some minor damage.
Everything had been seismically retrofitted on our highway system. We had minor damage to some keeper plates on one bridge, some keeper counterweight on the lift end from moving too much. They were sheared off and dropped onto the roadway so they will be replaced. I guess if there is a lesson to be learned there, we're going to put chains on those new keeper plates. Because it was 1:30 in the morning, there wasn't anybody out there.
The reason I bring that up is you read in the papers the next day that the earthquake occurred on a fault that was previously unknown. When we had the earthquake in 1971, which really was the genesis of all our modern seismic design code and retrofit program, it was about a 7.2 and caused a lot of damage. There were only two fatalities. At that time we had begun mapping and digitally recording all the known faults. In 1973 when we produced our first map of the faults, we had 225 known faults at that time in California. Since then we've recorded, by the time we had the Northridge earthquake in 1994, 275 faults. It seems like every year the seismologists and geologists find more. So it's a growing list and Napa was a surprise.
We're going to talk about the preparedness and the importance of preplanning and preparedness.
You have a lot of water borne disasters here in the Midwest, both wind and water born, and there is a big difference between those and an earthquake. It takes some time for those to build up. You know it's raining hard before the floods finally hit and usually wind blown storms you have some warning that they're coming.
An earthquake will last from 15 to 30 seconds. When you talk about magnitude 8, they may shake for a minute. But most of the earthquakes we respond to are somewhere around 7. For the 1971 earthquake, the 1989 Loma Prieta, and the 1994 Northridge, the period of intense shaking was only about 15 seconds. So you have no time to plan. You're lucky if you remember to jump under a desk or stand in a doorway or corner. Everything has to happen automatically because you've been trained. I want to talk about preplanning, preparation for disasters of any kind but primarily earthquakes in California.
Then Jerry Baxter is going to talk about the reaction and recovery from the major earthquakes of 1994, in Northridge.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, definitely the most disastrous we've had in California, we had somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion worth of damage in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area. Two billion of that was under transportation, combined state, city and county destruction. Five years later in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the damage was around $18 billion. A lot of major damage occurred to hospitals and buildings. Although buildings didn't come down, all the equipment in them was rendered useless. And out of that $18 billion, only half a billion was damage to the transportation system. That's a credit to the seismic retrofit program in action before the '89 earthquake. The legislature gave us a lot of help for funding and by 1994 we had had a large number of structures either retrofitted or new ones designed to allay damage.
You can see the value of retrofit and Mr. Hungerbeeler already talked about what's going on here in the state of Missouri, and I know other states in the region have programs.
The problems you'll face and are facing right now are the same problems we faced after the 1971 earthquake. We knew what had to be done. We knew what caused the problems, but there were only two fatalities. We average about 5,000 fatalities a year on our transportation system and when you compare the two trying to get budget money to retrofit structures was a difficult task. But when we had a major disaster in 1989, 49 people were killed most of them inside the space of a viaduct. The legislature jumped into action and we've had funding of about four to 500 million ever since. The program is almost completed and will cost about four and a half billion. Ninety nine percent of the work is completed. I think Northridge really shows the value of having a program like this. This, of course, is the most economical mitigation measure is seismically retrofitting existing structures.
It's hard to do much to roadways because you have a problem of soft soils and liquefaction. It's hard and very expensive to try to retrofit that, but those are fairly easy to repair. We have had a lot of liquefaction after these earthquakes and those are things that can be taken care of within a few days. So the primary goal of our program has been to retrofit structures. These take a long time to repair, even with accelerated processes. From our experience, you can retrofit a typical freeway structure from anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the replacement cost. Retrofitting larger structures such as the Poplar Street Bridge and some of the more major Mississippi River structures can be very expensive. I know there is a major one in Memphis, they're talking $100 to $105 million to retrofit. Most of our long toll bridges in the Bay Area are in deep water and on soft foundations. In most cases we've had to spend as much as 50 percent of replacement cost to retrofit. Sometimes it becomes more economical to replace than retrofit. That's a management decision that has to be made.
All of this is kind of background to show the importance of planning. The number one goal we have in responding to a disaster is protecting the public safety. Our performance in retrofit designs is no collapse and no major damage on any structure in any circumstance. Some may have to be closed for repair, others will only require minor repair. But the primary goal is to protect public safety.
Second is to protect and preserve facilities. And the third is to reopen the system as quickly as possible. After the 1971 earthquake it took us many months to rebuild the interchanges that collapsed. We got a lot better in 1989. It only took us 30 days to reopen the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. That was working around the clock with a lot of people out there, and a cost of about $4 million. Actually it was only a 50-foot span that collapsed on both ends.
Thirty days is too long to split a major community like that. It would be like losing the Poplar Street area here for 30 days. It would be a disaster to the economy. So we have to design certain "life line" structures to a much higher performance standard and expect them to remain in service, but that's a very expensive decision to make.
Those are the goals, protect public safety, preserve the facilities, and reopen the system as quickly as possible. Of course, by the time we got to the '94 earthquake we learned a lot about accelerated contracting and so forth. I leave it to the follow-up speakers to get into great detail on that, but there is a lot that can be done with imagination.
I think most importantly you have to have an organization in place ahead of time. You have to have high caliber and well-trained staff. You need people that are dedicated and willing to sacrifice. People were awakened somewhere around 1:30 Sunday morning to go out and inspect the highway systems. We have benchmarks. We know if we have a 5.5 magnitude, we will have landslides. Somewhere between 5.5 to 6.0, we expect some kind of structure damage. When we get over 6.0 to 6.5, we expect major structure damage.
We do have computer program that helps us predict damage. By inputting the magnitude, we can calculate a kind of an egg shaped area in which we would expect damage. We have everything computerized and digitized so we can print out a list of all the structures within that zone that have to be inspected first. And that's usually available in a couple of hours....by the time our inspectors have their bags packed and are ready to go.
Again, we are fortunate to have people that are willing to get up in the middle of the night. Most of these earthquakes have occurred very early in the morning. A couple of them have been late in the evening. Our people just drop everything to respond.
You have to be able to make decisions rapidly in an emergency, on the spot. You don't have time to come back to the designers and say we need to figure something out. A lot of times these structures, if they haven't collapsed, are damaged. They could collapse so they have to be supported. That was true on the Cypress Expressway. People were afraid to let rescue workers go in. We had a structural engineer available with each group of rescuers to tell them where they could cut holes in the deck and go in and bring out people.
You have to have people that are knowledgeable of their assigned areas of responsibility. There is no time for planning, as I mentioned and I'm going to keep saying that over and over. But we have a large structure maintenance force. They all have assigned routes so they know where to go and start looking. When we publish this list, these are the structures that are inspected first. So it's important that everybody, especially on the, structure maintenance side of the highway maintenance know their jobs. These are the people that have been inspecting this stuff every day and they're the first ones that can spot something unusual, a crack somewhere, whatever. So they're the first line of defense. They have to know their jobs and know their areas and get out there and check it out right away.
I mentioned this earlier; our maintenance crews have assigned areas. Of CALTRAN'S 23,000 employees, 6,000 almost seven now are maintenance workers; including maintenance engineers. We have bridge crews in each district and a large staff in Sacramento who we dispense out. And they're the first line of defense. We also augment them with our construction resident engineers in the area, so we can inspect faster.
After both the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Northridge earthquake, in two days we had done the initial inspection on about 2,000 bridges within the region where the damage occurred. That's because we augmented our bridge inspection force with resident engineers who also help look for damage. After this initial pass, they come back, because a lot of damage is internal so you can't see it readily from just visual inspection. They took about two or three weeks to do the detailed in-depth inspections of every structure. Early in our process we can tag the bridges that should be closed to traffic.
Even though these people in the first line of defense are not structural engineers, except for the bridge inspectors that go out, they need decisive and instantaneous direction in the field. There is no time during a crisis to plan. Reactions and good, competent decisions must be fairly spontaneous. That's just based on experience and training.
Next thing we did in both of these major earthquakes, we move engineers to the trouble spots. Even though we do our design at headquarters in Sacramento, we move people out to these disaster sites so they're right there to help if there are any calculations that need to be done.
I mentioned already we use our field inspectors and resident engineers to help on inspections. There is a lot of shoring up of structures to prevent collapses and those people know more about shoring than anybody in the department because they live with it daily.
In the Loma Prieta earthquake, we flew some additional assistance down to the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge toll plaza. They worked around the clock. Again, I want to emphasize, people sacrifice to respond and make that personal commitment to get the job done. When I say we, it's not just CALTRANS, it's the whole earthquake engineering community. We try to bring people in from outside the area. As Jerry can tell you in the Northridge earthquake a lot of his primary staff had damage to their own homes. As earthquake victims, they had enough headaches at home to take care of so we augmented his staff and the maintenance forces with people from other maintenance stations and other districts. We did the same thing in San Francisco, with the Loma Prieta earthquake. The industry does the same thing. They bring people in from outside of the affected area who are not victims themselves so they can focus on recovery.
This is one of those guys checking the bolts on the new reconstruction for those 50-foot spans. The Cypress viaduct at one time was double deck. After the earthquake, the top deck collapsed on the lower deck and that's what caused the 42 fatalities. We set up emergency operations centers at the site. We have a trailer in there, the California Highway Patrol has one, the Oakland Police, there's even one that's for the news media.
But there was an operation center in the field right next to the Cypress viaduct because it took a couple weeks to remove all of that structure. The upper deck collapsed on the lower. We had a lot of shoring and a lot of structure removal work to do. Very little collapsed all the way to the ground.
It's important to have prepared emergency plans. We have statewide emergency plans that cover earthquakes, floods, fires; all the different disasters that could occur. We have very few wind borne disasters in California other than fires. Most of our damage is from floods and earthquakes. We have emergency plans, we have emergency operation center, and headquarters set up in most of the district offices. Each functional area develops its own emergency plan. Structures people have their own and so forth. Most of us carry the emergency phone roster in our wallet. I have mine here with me. All the key people in the department are listed with their home phones, their business phones, and their cell phones so we can get hold of people in the middle of the night.
One thing that's important is to pre-select alternative routes. A lot of cities have emergency routes already planned and in Northridge that worked really well. In San Francisco we did quite a bit of work to take care of the traffic that would have been on the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge.
In California, the Structural Engineers Association and ASCE have set up a system of volunteer engineers. We have about four or five hundred structural engineers and probably that many civil engineers who have signed up. They have identification cards and have been trained by the office of emergency services on what to look for. Because there is so much building damage, they primarily help building officials. ASCE people also help small cities and counties with small engineering staff. For example, in the Oroville earthquake in California some years ago, there were about 300 buildings damaged and so the structural engineers, who were managed by the office of Emergency Services, come in and helped out a lot. I think most states have something similar to this. They are basically deputized as building officials. They can't be sued for red tagging someone's building. They're covered by workmen's comp. They go out and typically spend three days each after that they are replaced by another crew. They were extremely helpful after the Loma Prieta earthquake where there was so much damage.
We have had neighboring states offer to send equipment and people in. Generally with a large state as California, we have enough help within our borders, however, there may be some value in having arrangements with neighboring states.
Some of the kinds of planning happened accidentally after the Loma Prieta earthquake. We had worked out a lot of arrangements because we were afraid the traffic would just clog all the freeways and bring the city to a standstill. We did things like having truckers deliver produce during the night so they weren't on the freeways during the day. We brought an individual who worked on traffic management operation plan during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. He set up some emergency routes utilizing other existing freeways. He was very valuable to the San Francisco district.
The damage was on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, some freeways in San Francisco, and the Cypress Freeway in Oakland. There were already some ferries running from Sausalito to the terminal. We set up additional ferries. Some were used to haul tourists around the bay. In setting them up, we built some temporary piers. We rented a ferry from the State of Washington. They have big ferry fleets up there because of the all the islands around Seattle. Those ferries brought a lot of people across that would have been using the bridge. And we also came down and used the San Mateo Bridge. It was a longer way around, but it got people through. The Richmond Bridge was okay, but the freeway was under construction so we used temporary grading. We were actually able to open up that freeway to traffic before it was completed so people could get into San Francisco and not have to come around across the Golden Gate Bridge.
There were a lot of things that were done that we learned from that in the S.F. Bay area. Now you have emergency routes. As I mentioned earlier, Los Angeles did have some set up, so we had detours and service within hours after the earthquake.
There was some talk earlier by your director about training and exercises. That's the one thing that California lucked out on in a way. We had a governor, Jerry Brown, who most of you have heard of. A very strange guy but the one thing he did when he was governor is set up a couple of these exercises. When we had one in Los Angeles and one in Sacramento and brought in personnel from the Office of Emergency Services, highway patrol, and the construction industry. We actually went through a simulated earthquake exercise. We got acquainted with each other. Even though people in their jobs change over the years, the access, phone numbers, and addresses usually stayed the same so emergency response people were able to keep in contact with each other and any newly assigned people. We haven't had a simulated exercise since because we have had enough real events to keep us working closely together. Simulated exercises are very valuable to go through to get people acquainted and talking so when there is a real disaster, people know each other and automatically start calling. It's interesting, contractors call in and say that they have cranes, shoring, etc, and I just tell them where to take it. I know this because of the preplanned exercises...you learn to communicate with each other.
The one thing we learned in the San Fernando earthquake in 1971 was the difficulty in communicating with one another. We didn't have cellular phones in those days and getting three or four people on the same radio frequency at the same time made it very difficult to communicate. We couldn't get information back to the headquarters or the district offices even. In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the Bay Area, Cellular One issued about 2,000 cell phones. They gave a thousand to our department and other agencies. The cell phone doesn't rely on the power source of the local telephones. They're getting even better because they work off satellites. Now all our emergency response people go out with cell phones when they go on the road. They are a lot better tool for communicating although I've heard recently if you get too many people trying to use them at one time, you run into system overload problems but it's still probably the best system we have today for communicating. And that's a key, a minor detail but it turned out to be very valuable in the Loma Prieta and the Northridge earthquakes.
Working with local agencies is the Office of Emergency Services responsibility. I mentioned they do provide training for volunteers and there are a lot of volunteers available in California. They have been utilizing them in most large earthquakes. They are assigned to teams and used throughout the city, wherever they need them.
They also try to work with the local agencies to work on planning for emergency response. Anyway, I think the value of these exercises is making the contacts. These are very important.
Communications. You need to get information out. The press will drive you crazy. I think you all know. I personally held a news conference every day for two weeks after Loma Prieta. We tried to give them the status every day on S80 and a couple other structures that were damaged. A lot of them were not closed but we got them repaired fairly rapidly and ended up with about ten or so that had permanent damage that took some years actually to repair.
Northridge is another story. We learned a lot but nearly the entire system was back in service within three or four months and the final structures were reopened nine months after the earthquake. That's a matter of practice and learning what works and what doesn't.
You need alternative communications even with cellular phones. When you can get out of the disaster areas, you use the phones that work. The telephone company did restore the systems fairly fast, but those first few hours are critical. And it seems a lot of times it's during the night that we need to communicate quickly to activate our plan.
We had daily and monthly status reports that went to the director's office and the governor's office and also to keep the press informed. We had a lot of stuff on computers. We had all our structures and earthquake faults digitized and they were structured for our own updating information. All these little dots on this slide represent bridges. These are major freeways, Interstates 80,580, 680, and 280. Those little dots represent around 4,000 bridges in the Loma Prieta earthquake area. These little purple dots in here represent the damaged structures. We can update that instantaneously. It gave us the status of how many bridges were and were not damaged.
This is the same slide only these were structures that were all designed after 1971 under the new code. There was only one structure that had any damage at all. That was on the side over here. It was an outrigger bed that had some cracking but it was never closed. Every earthquake fault and every structure location is digitized in the computer. These are the kinds of information that can be used otherwise we couldn't do this.
You must remain calm even if you're in a crisis....don't panic. If you panic, you might as well go home because you're not going to be thinking clearly. And it's no fun, I can tell you. The press wants to know who in the hell is responsible; who screwed up; and you do have a lot of pressure. But if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen and let someone else, who can take the pressure, handle it.
You've got to remain calm and knowledgeable. Know your job, your mission, and your organization so you know who to go to. Some people are better than others at reacting and sometimes you find out during disaster who can handle it and who can't. If you know what you're doing, things will likely go much smoother than if you don't.
I'm sure in your state as well as ours, when damage exceeds a certain level, the governor can declare a disaster. When it reaches even higher levels, a federal disaster is declared. But in our state, when the governor declares a disaster, we have emergency powers. Most of it has to do with contract procedures. Normally you have to advertise the job a minimum of so many weeks and you have to advertise it in a certain number of publications. All those requirements go away in an emergency. We definitely short cut procedures and we did both in Loma Prieta, but much more so in Northridge. Others will cover our emergency contracting procedures.
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