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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
LESSONS LEARNED AT THE NORTHBRIDGE EARTHQUAKE BY GLENN CLINTON
DAVID JOHNSON: Our next speaker is Glenn Clinton. He is with FHWA as the Program Delivery team leader in the California Division. He graduated from Fresno State College. He's got a BS in civil engineering. He's a professional engineer in California. He's been involved with several freeway projects, toll roads. He was involved in the recovery efforts in Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes. He's currently assigned to manage the northern portion of California, including the San Francisco Bay Area. He's got 38 years of service with the Federal Highway Administration, 26 years in the California Division.
Thank you. As someone asked during the earlier sessions here, if you had to do something over again, what would you do differently? Steve kindly stood and tried figuring it out. Well, then someone said to me, out of all the lessons learned in the Northridge earthquake, what is the greatest lesson? The greatest lesson that I learned is not standing under a bridge during an earthquake because it can be rather devastating and you can have your own personal disaster.
Again, looking at the Northridge earthquake and there it is. It's a quake, 6.8, in Los Angeles on January 17. That was on a Monday, which I think is rather important. If you can schedule a disaster, schedule it on a holiday. There are less people out there. You don't always have that choice, but it makes a big difference.
The Loma Prieta happened during the World Series. That probably saved a lot of lives, especially since that was Oakland and San Francisco, and the Loma Prieta happened in that area. So the time that these happen make a big difference. There again, 4:30 in the morning, Northridge earthquake. The epicenter was right in this area and most of the damage was in here and then it was down on I-10. There´s a range of mountains that runs right through here, the Santa Monica Mountains. This is a range of mountains that is kind of a continuation of the Sierra Nevada´s and the coast range that comes down.
So when Steve was saying that this cuts off the lifeline in California, you can see why. This is the San Joaquin Valley up to the north.
I think earlier today, you heard a gentleman saying that if an earthquake hit in the St. Louis area, Missouri area, or Illinois area, is that you would just devastate the economy. Remember, California's economy is ranked worldwide. And so when we cut off our lifelines, it affects many areas. If a container gets dumped at the LA Port, it can affect deliveries in Chicago. California may be on the edge, but we're on the edge of the world where we're trading with the Far East.
Okay. As I said, two major areas of damage. Now, we had freeways that were closed in the San Fernando Valley. Freeways that were damaged, again I-5 was damaged in multiple places. I-10 was damaged. The I-210, the I-405, and that Antelope Freeway, State Route 14 and State Route 118.
We recorded something like 480 sites that we visited and wrote up reports on. 171 of these were on the state highway system. 124 of them were bridges on the state highway. Local agencies had about 185. When we are working with local agencies on emergency relief, they are really tough to get information from and have prepared when the inspection teams to show up. Generally speaking, they're fighting the home fires, and these are not generally on state highways so they're not the lifelines that we're all concerned about. So we've got to give these local agencies a little bit of time to get a hold of their boot straps, get their shoes on, and get working. Because they have fire, they have water, and they've got their own transit systems. All these infrastructure items, they have to respond to.
As Steve pointed out earlier in his presentation, we've obligated roughly $350 in Northridge. In the Loma Prieta, it was about 1.3 billion. There, we had one freeway that was completely knocked down that you seen numerous pictures of.
On April 11, 1994, which was roughly three months after the Northridge earthquake, in Los Angeles in a U.S. House of Representatives committee on public works and transportation, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pena said that this rapid recovery process offers crucial lessons that may enable us not only to better serve the people of California and the nation in future emergencies, but even invent or reinvent, if you will, the procedures and to speed along normal public construction work.
He asked then Administrator Slater to set up a task force. The task force was established in June of 1994. On that task force from CALTRANS was Richard Weaver, the chief deputy director; Kay Griffin, chief of the office engineer. You'll be hearing from Roy Mode tomorrow, he works out of her office; from the industry was Ralph Richey, vice-chairman of the board of Daily Corporation. From the Federal Highway Administration we had Peter Markel, the acting division administrator; Dave Densmore, then a deputy regional administrator in San Francisco; and Ron Carmichael out of the Washington office.
This task force went to work and they interviewed some 80 people. These were from CALTRANS, Industry, and Federal Highways. They also sent out 140 questionnaires to contractors. Some of the contractors had questionable bids or did not submit them. Others put in bids but were not awarded. The ones that performed the work were included.
As an overview, what did they come up with? First thing is everyone wanted to be part of the recovery effort. I think you heard earlier in some of the talks is that trucks showed up with loads of timbers. Equipment showed up on the backs of trucks saying we're ready to go to work. Everyone took pride in showing that they could whip things back together again. The focus was on getting the job done without all the normal red tape. And lastly is response to emergencies and disasters must be evolutionary and not revolutionary.
Out of this task force came about 20 recommendations. They had the future emergency work, the non-emergency reconstruction work, and changes to the emergency relief program.
What I'd like to do is use the 20 or so recommendations and put a spin on it as to my experience. I got assigned to the California division office in 1974. And low and behold, I was assigned to the Los Angeles area as the area engineer. They were still in the process of recovery after the San Fernando earthquake that happened in 1971. I point this out because that's a marked difference. You'll hear later, and you've heard from others, is that the major freeways were up and all the structures were in operation in ten months after the Northridge. Now, that's quite a difference. We're talking one instance in years, the other in months.
The Loma Prieta is kind of a little different animal. There, we did have to build a complete freeway on new alignment and that did take some time, but the efforts were very quick.
Let's go talking about the future emergency work and the recommendations. We need to establish a single point of contact in Federal Highways or in CALTRANS, so that the right information is getting out and getting out properly and that everyone is not chasing their best friend and saying, what's going on, tell me. Because when you're asked for information, you've got to respond. You can hardly say, I'm too busy, because everybody is busy. This is one thing that needs to be done.
Jerry Baxter was the district director. He was the single point of contact for CALTRANS in the Northridge earthquake recovery. You know, he was asked these things. What's the total damage cost estimate and the status of the damage reviews? He got questions on specific activities or sites. Information so the media could put together. We were being asked the same thing inside Federal Highways. Of course, we were trying to coordinate that because we had people on site. So we were coming up with, hopefully, the same information.
Public relations. This, I think, was a session just earlier today, and Jim Drago with CALTRANS was part of that. You've got to deal with the public, whether it's through the media or one on one. Jerry Baxter brought up and talked about outreach into the neighborhoods because the recovery effort was taking place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You had to get out and work with the people so they knew what was going on. You had to outreach to other agencies because you may be asking for some waivers and they need to understand what you're doing.
Communications, this has been talked about too. Steve mentioned if he had anything to do over again is that maybe better communications. Here the communications are not only inside of the agencies such as CALTRANS, inside of Federal Highways, but it's also in responding to the media. The emergency plan needs to be implemented. Communications with the contractors, trying to get them to bid, to show up, or whatever it is. You've got to have those kind of communications.
Here again, as we talked before, we used cell phones, pagers. Fax machines were used because when you had to have a solid record, especially dealing with contractors. In the future, maybe we should be looking at shared databases, internet postings, and satellite links.
You know, when you bought a house, they said there are three things that you need to look at before you buy. That's location, location, and location. The same thing about disaster recovery applies. The three things you look for is a plan, a plan, and a plan. Then of course you've got to implement it. Here again is that we've learned from the experiences in California and was better prepared. And the Northridge earthquake recovery effort, they already had detours that had been previously designed for disasters such as spills or for just normal activities for ball games or whatever. So these were on the records. They knew what they had. They knew what facilities were available to them. This was preplanning.
They also had and set up very quickly is the response agencies that coordinated activities. This was the emergency transportation relief task force. This is the one that Jerry Baxter talked about. There again, Federal Highways, CALTRANS, Los Angeles City, Los Angeles County, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Ventura County, and the Highway Patrol all met on a regular basis; at one time, every morning. Then they had subcommittees. They were really the ones that rolled up their sleeves and worked on things such as transit being an alternate. Those things don't just happen; people have to push them.
Environmental. I'm sorry to tell you as Mr. Baxter said, it was an engineer's dream that the environmental regulations were relieved. Well, that didn't really happen. Maybe they did it at the state and they did. But for the feds, they're still there; you've got to embrace them. You've got to have a plan. How are you going to approach this?
Design. How much design? How are you going to cost the design that will be necessary?
Contracting options. Federal Highways and CALTRANS entered into an MOU, into an agreement as to what traffic -- the operations -- contracting operations would take place. The criteria for selections, whether to use an invitation for bid, an open bid, design build, A-plus B-bidding. Also your plan needs to be looking at such things as your educational activities. If you exceed what the given knowledge is, you've got to bring people up to speed. So what type of education is going to be necessary? Whether it's innovative contracting or any other item.
One other thing is that you need to have reference to your as-built plans. This is very important because this is your easiest way to make quick responses as using your as-built plans. You know what you have in the field. Maybe you can figure out how to fix it or use those plans and modify them.
Getting back to the environment again. This is one thing that needs to be done, is to set up a memorandum of agreement between the agencies, the resource agencies, CALTRANS, Federal Highways. You need to develop these around the kind of resources are we talking about; wetlands, rare endangered species, habitat, historic or whatever. But they need to figure out who does what to whom and when. All that needs to be laid out in an MOA.
What is going to be required when you're in a truly emergency operation? You need to talk to the agencies; what do they consider is an emergency. Then during the reconstruction, what's going to have to be done and agreed to by the other agencies. Then there's the follow on and that is what actions are required after the disaster recovery is well underway or is completed.
One of the items that helped out CALTRANS and helped out in doing the recovery and making it very quick is that they knew their contractors. So this is one area that needs to be done and that is to develop and maintain a list of contractors´ capabilities, what kind of special equipment they have, where that equipment is stored, and also their contacts. So they can be contacted any time day or night. This is how you get your force account jobs on the street and underway very quickly.
We commonly push the envelope during the Northridge earthquake. We used expedited unique and innovative methods. They use time and materials contracts or commonly called force accounts. They used invitation for bids and that was to make sure they're contractors that knew how to build the structures in California, California's times.
They have cookie-cutter-type structures and they can build them with their eyes closed. They know the specifications and know what is required of them. That is why they used the invitation for bids in the early contracts.
The A-plus B-bidding and large incentives-disincentives, design build, and also the plans that came out of it. They used the updated as-builts for purposes of bidding, followed on by full plans. If they started out with partial plans, and full plans were added later. The special provisions need to be prepared ahead of time.
One area that you don't think about and that is equipment rental rates. How are you going to treat this? Normally speaking, you have one equipment rental rate for eight hours or the first shift, then it reduces the rate for the other. So if you're working 24 hours a day, does that mean you run two 12-hour shifts so you run 8 straight, then the reduced rate for the other 4, or do you just do 8? All I'm saying is you just need to address this and have your specifications ready so the contractor knows what's going to happen.
You also need to have spelled out really what information you're going to be sharing with the contractor when and how.
The advertisement period is another area that CALTRANS and Federal Highways agree to is to shorten the advertisement period and to streamline the award. In California they have a governor's proclamation that also then relieves CALTRANS of some of the stringent contracting statutes. It relieves them of some of the more stringent details.
The recovery effort for the Northridge earthquake, there was 110 contracts that were let. 58 were time and materials. These were the ones that got out there immediately. 52 were by bid. 10 were A-plus B-bidding. 8 were by invitation only. 2 were open. They only let one design-build contract that was by invitation only. 41 normal contracts were let, 40 of them were open bidding, one by invitation only.
Now, turning looking at the A-plus B-bidding, I think this is rather striking. CALTRANS did a good job of estimating the time. I'm talking about the total and not about one individual contract. We're talking about the 10 total contracts. They estimated the time it would take as 1,112 calendar days. The Contractors bid that job looking at the A-plus B-bidding and incentive/disincentive, they bid it for 887 days. That's the total ten contracts. When it was all said and done, they completed the work in 710. This was a 40 percent reduction in time. But there's a price for that. Steve pointed out and showed you some of the incentives that were paid. $28 million was spent on incentives; money well spent. I think that everyone that was involved agrees that was money well spent. Steve and I have two different numbers here, but sometimes one of us put construction change orders (CCO) in and one of us didn´ t. But I had an amount, the original contract amount was $90 million worth of work. So almost a third more was spent just on the incentives. But, again, money well spent.
As I pointed out earlier, all the freeways were open in ten months. We had the last opening in November. Northridge happened in January. On the incentive/disincentive per day was eight and a half thousand dollars per day, up to two hundred thousand dollars per day. The I-10 was the one with four hundred thousand vehicles per day was two hundred thousand dollars a day. These were justified, and, roughly, they were 50 percent of the user's cost.
Now, turning to some of the things that really happened and happened quickly was the advertisement period. Normally in California, they use from three to ten weeks for their advertisement period. When they go through informal contracts that were established after the governor has signed his proclamation, it takes from four to fourteen days. They were advertising the contracts for two to three days. This is how long the contractors had to respond. Then, on the other hand, CALTRANS stepped up to the plate. Federal Highways had to step up with them because we concurred in most of the awards. Normal in California is from two to four weeks to award a contract. Under the informal contracts that are again under the governor's proclamation, it is five to ten days.
On these contracts, they were awarding the same day as bid opening. The contractor was required to have a representative there to receive the bid. They would look at the DBE information. If there's a hearing, they hold a hearing, and their decision was final. They award the contract, give the contractor notice of receipt, his time started at midnight to get to work.
All this was at a CALTRANS' site. They met at the location in Los Angeles and carried on these activities. Federal Highways was there so we concurred in the awards.
Progress pay estimates. Here, the contractors are incurring a lot of costs and incurring them very quickly. CALTRANS put into operation that they could pay in two-week increments because they're double shifting and have to pay premiums for materials and getting concrete plants or asphalt plants and others to deliver materials when a contractor needed them. They couldn't call up and say, well, when can you get a load of concrete over, and they say two weeks from tomorrow. You know, two hundred thousand dollars a day, you wouldn't take that answer. You'll pay to open up a plant to furnish the concrete. You want to facilitate the cash flow.
Now, turning to DBEs. There were provisions of DBEs. Requirements can be waived or curtailed. At the Northridge they were fully embraced. You need to set realistic goals. What can the contracting community actually do? On larger projects, raise the amount of DBE participation because there are more opportunities. On smaller or specialized contracts is to reduce it.
The high DBE goals caused some problems with non-DBE contractors being shut out because the contractors were out there and they were making the goals because they knew the contracts were going to be opened and awarded the same day. That's quite an incentive to have your DBEs lined up and ready to go. Then you didn't get into how much is good faith effort.
Some of the contractors actually had to subcontract some of the work that they normally carry on themselves. On the Northridge earthquake recovery, there was a DBE goal of 40 percent set. Achievement over 39 percent was rather remarkable.
Because there's the high volume of money that's happening, you've got to be careful, a DBE doesn´ t lose their status. You need to look at some way to average the work out over a time line so payments don´ t exceed the qualifying DBE thresholds.
You need to build on your past experiences. As I said before, some of the comments were this is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. What I observed and participated in during the Loma Prieta, is that the action plan, the MPO took the lead. In Northridge, CALTRANS took the lead. But the action plan was how to handle traffic coordination.
We had ferry service that was initiated. One of the local politicians wanted to hire any boat that floated that had a life preserver in it. We dubbed it the mosquito fleet. Needless to say, we got the Coast Guard in very quickly and got that stopped. We did not want all these boats running all over the bay uncoordinated. We did establish a ferry system on the bay. We built some docks. We built the first design-build contract with a local agency because none of us knew how to build a docking facility for the ferries. So the local agency stepped forward and said, "We can get a design builder in." I said, "Yes, let's do it." Then I caught a little bit of heck. I went in with the thought that you can ask and get forgiveness faster than you can ask for permission.
What else we did we do during Loma Prieta that was carried on into the Northridge? The bid opening in the field was another one. Taking the contractors out saying, "This is what we want you to do," handing them a set of spec books telling them to come back tomorrow, we´re opening bids with same day awards. You saw the pictures of the trailers set up for a command center. We had a Federal Highway´s person there concurring with the awards. The design build, again, is one of them.
One thing you need to watch out for is exceeding your capabilities whether you´re the highway department or city or county. Also, don't exceed the capabilities of the contracting community. You´ve got to work in order to bring this to a coordinated effort. If it's education that needs to be done, you need to do it and calling others to help out.What you most need to do is to show the public that the public and private sectors can work together.
One thing is that some of you may have experienced dealing with FEMA and Federal Highway Programs -- two separate programs, two separate eligibilities. Generally speaking, Federal Highways can step forward and get the cash flowing very quickly.
FEMA, it takes a little bit. If I´ve heard that once, I´ve heard it a hundred times. So one of the recommendations of this report is maybe we can get a transfer of funds and make the payment through the normal FHWA state concurrent building. That is one area that needs to be looked at.
Now, let´s look over the non-emergency reconstruction work. These are also items that were done on the emergency contracts. Here again, is that we performed almost all functions. We didn't waive hardly any functions.
All parties must be committed. They need to make decisions. They need to make these decisions in a very timely fashion. There was an agreement that if there was a dispute or if a decision couldn´t be made on a construction job, it got alleviated in two hours. CCOs were prepared with time extensions with hours.
When you´re talking $200,000 a day as an incentive, it would be nice to say, give us about 60 days. That would be nice to have that on our side of the ledger. CCO were given with time extension in hours.
Be responsive to the contractors. This is one thing the contractors said; they need answers, they need them quickly. They don't want to bid in the dark. They can't give you good bid prices if they don't know what you want. So maybe we could set up a hotline. In fact, that´s what CALTRANS did. Another one would be posting the questions and the answers on the internet.
Minimize the paperwork. This is one that the contractors always talk about. A lot of work was done on the Northridge earthquake and also Loma Prieta with a handshake, saying, we will catch up with the documentation. But this has got to be based upon teamwork, partnering, good communications, good decision making. And you've got to build upon your mutual respect, trust, pride, and just being fair.
On the incentive/disincentive with the A-plus B, these are okay for large contracts. In fact, it's a good method for the large contracts because you have a lot of room to develop your incentives. You can set up internal completion dates, such as, open to traffic. That would be when you would actually give the incentive or at the final acceptance of the contract, whichever is necessary. Innovative approaches to it.
Incentives, they´ve got to be large enough to make them motivational to the contractor, financially worthwhile, and to expedite completion. When you use the incentive-disincentive A-plus B, you also want to leave more activities up to the contractor; such as, what kind of shifts he's going to use.
CALTRANS did indicate to the contractors in the A-plus B, is that they would be expected to work 24 hours a day. Let the shifts be set up by the contractor. He´s the one that controls the deliveries and the cost controls. I see I'm getting a sign here.
However, the state needs to set a maximum time for the bid to be responsive.
Now, turning to the emergency relief program and just a couple items is that, as you all know, there's a hundred million dollar cap per disaster, per state. And one of the things that generally happens, especially with Loma Prieta or with a Northridge, is that you get supplemental appropriations. You've got to be ready for that. You´ve got to have estimates ready, but caution everyone those estimates are rushed and they may increase; they may decrease. On the Loma Prieta, we had to go back for supplementals. But for the Northridge, basically, there was probably more money set up than we actually needed. But that was what happened.
Here´s a window of opportunity and you´ve got to strike this window of opportunity. It only lasts for about ten days. There, you have to have your political people respond to establish the supplemental legislation.
The hundred million per state per disaster and also the hundred million authorized, we need to take a look at that and get both of those raised or have some type of contingency that maybe the Secretary of the Transportation Department could do the additional authorization.
Now, for the last item here, and that is the emergency relief program is one of the recommendations and that actually the supplemental legislation took care of us for both Loma Prieta and Northridge. There is a hundred percent reimbursable for the first 180 days of work identified as emergency work. You're aware, there are normal regulations that we operate under in the Federal Highway Administration is that it´s only a hundred percent federally reimbursed for emergency repairs to restore central traffic, minimize the extent of damage and protect the remaining facility.
And after 180 days, of course, if those activities are not completed, they go back to the normal pro rata share. The recommendation is to change that to a hundred percent for all work accomplished in the first 180 days.
The recommendation for this is because you can expedite the reconstruction activities, develop innovative methods, reduce administrative costs. However, you've got to establish somehow to start that 180 days. An earthquake is generally pretty easy. Flooding is a little harder. Here´s my final comment. Not many different things were done, but many things were done differently. Thank you.
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