Op-Ed: Shut Down the Viaduct Now

by Michael van Baker on March 11, 2011

In October 2009, WSDOT uploaded this visualization of the Viaduct collapsing in an earthquake.

Beginning March 19, 2011, testing will begin of an automated Viaduct closure gates system, designed to be triggered by an earthquake. Within two minutes of an earthquake, the Viaduct will in theory be closed to traffic. The system will be installed by April, thanks to a $5.5-million federal grant.

There are two problems I have with this. First, if you watch the video above, you will notice that the Viaduct collapses after 35 seconds, so it doesn’t seem as if WSDOT has watched their own video.

Secondly, the gates merely prevent people from continuing to drive onto the Viaduct in an earthquake. If an earthquake hit during the commute, when traffic is bumper-to-bumper, the system would accomplish next to nothing. The Viaduct would become a mass burial.

If I have a problem with anything in our modern life, it’s this tendency to obscure risk, or make a pretense at mitigating what is unmitigatable. A 2007 study gave Seattle a ten percent chance of a major quake in the next ten years. I know we like to quantify to aid in prioritization, but can I ask you to do one thing for me? Can you call someone in Sendai, Japan, and ask them what the chances were of an 8.9 earthquake yesterday?

I have had a growing feeling that we are on the wrong side of the odds. The final removal of the downtown section of the Viaduct isn’t scheduled until 2016, and that is assuming that all goes as planned. I don’t want to understate the disruption that a closure of the Viaduct would bring. It’s a terrible idea on its face–it’s just that it’s a better alternative to a closure by earthquake, when the city would be able to do nothing in particular to mitigate the loss of its subsidiary north-south corridor.

As the City Council moved forward with its agreements with WSDOT on the Viaduct replacement, Richard Conlin showed pictures of the Loma Prieta quake, and the pancaking of the Cypress Street Viaduct. It’s a pertinent example–and what we should also learn from it is that you can’t schedule earthquakes. If a structure is unsafe in an earthquake, it’s unsafe at each and every minute. For any given quake, there’s simply no reliable way to know when it will happen.

The only prudent thing to do, given what we know, is to shut down the Viaduct first, and work speedily on its replacement. I suspect that, without the Viaduct in place, the logjam of conflicting public sentiment on replacement options would fast resolve itself. We have been betting people’s lives on the Viaduct for the past ten years, which means nothing except that we’ve been lucky. The reality is that, in effect, we’re staging a potential mass execution each day, and waiting to see if there’s a reprieve.

Filed under News, Politics, Transportation
  • bilco

    You may have a key to resolving this mess here, MvB. I think tearing the sucker down would enable us to think a bit more freely. Of course, even tearing it down will take quite a while.

    As a side note, I was the subject of a particularly disingenuous push poll by the McGinn forces yesterday eve.

    Started with the basic ‘do you have time to contribute to a poll of citizens on a vital public issue?’ – or words to that effect. ‘As long as it’s not a push poll’ was my response.

    ‘What’s a push poll? Really, I have no idea.’ Okay……

    After 10 minutes, when it got the question ‘knowing everything I just told you about how evil the tunnel is, would you support a public vote?’ (or words to that effect), my only response could be – ‘This is what a push poll is. Hope I wasted your time’. Click.

    Oh, and BTW – many of the ‘building’ questions were about getting me to acknowledge how great a job McGinn is doing fighting the forces of evil.

  • Erik

    If you live in a house, and the floorboards are weak, do you wait until your 5-year old falls through, or do you put up with the months of construction and contractors trudging through your house?
    Seems obvious, right?
    Thanks for the article and the simulation link. It’s sheer fucking terror, is what it is.

  • Michael van Baker

    Ugh, push polls. It’s disheartening how discussion over the Viaduct has degenerated into the usual political handicapping, as if the real issue is the political “winners” and “losers.” I don’t care about McGinn being able to say “I told you so”–you gotta see the Seattlepi.com for that analysis. Let’s just address the huge public safety issue we all know needs to be addressed, and then take next steps.

  • josh

    I see where you’re coming from, but every facet of daily life involves some inherent risk-benefit tradeoff. I’m not convinced that extreme harm reduction efforts are especially workable or worthwhile. You call the eventual earthquake collapsed viaduct a mass grave, but there must be real consequences of abruptly closing it that you need to account for in your calculations?

    Are there more traffic fatalities caused over the multi-year construction time period resulting from increased congestions? Economic or environmental consequences? Quality of life tradeoffs for motorists or residents?

    It’s not easy or nice to accept that we are risking lives by leaving the viaduct open, but I’m not sure that the decision to leave it open is entirely irrational either.

  • Michael van Baker

    Yes, risk/benefit abounds. But I’ve been persuaded by Taleb and his black swans that it’s best to avoid *catastrophic* risks where possible. In the case of the Viaduct, catastrophe abounds.

    First, there is the likelihood of collapse, and not just in the event of the Big One (I sometimes wonder if it would stand up to a determined guy with a sledgehammer). Certainly there would be a monetizable loss with a fairly “abrupt” closure (abrupt in gov’t time, say 3-6 months). I suspect it would take traffic a month or so to unsnarl and redistribute, and there’s no getting around that things would be worse, congested-commute-wise, for some time. So there are real costs associated with business and mobility, but these can be borne while improvements are made.

    On the other hand, the risk of the Viaduct collapsing during a quake is catastrophic not just because of the visceral “mass burial” you can all too easily imagine. The question is, given the risk of a quake happening tomorrow, or next week, from our multitude of local faults: Do you want to be in the position of losing SR 99 at the exact moment that the city will most need a second north-south route through Seattle? From an emergency response perspective, it’s terrible to think of that infrastructure being gone, let alone taking hundreds or thousands of drivers with it. The Viaduct is not the only aging piece of infrastructure we’re likely to lose in a major quake, but it is a strategically vital route in that scenario.

    The second catastrophic risk is liability. The state, King County, and Seattle have all owned up to the fragility of the Viaduct, and the Governor has gone on record previously saying the Viaduct was so dangerous she was going to have it closed in 2012, no if, ands, or buts. If anything happens, given the weight of hindsight, when it will be clear that *of course* the quake was coming, we may as well just hand the keys of the state to the bereaved because they will own us. There is no way, given the dithering and stalling over the past decade, that you could mount a credible defense. Pre-quake, no one wants to deal with the disruption, but post-quake, when the disruption is a fact of life, it’ll seem incredible to everyone that the state gambled with lives as it did.

  • http://sunbreakmagazine.com/2011/03/15/mayor-mcginn-calls-for-2012-viaduct-closure/ Mayor McGinn Calls for 2012 Viaduct Closure | The SunBreak

    [...] my earlier argument for closing the Viaduct in 2012, I mentioned that the move is neither pro- nor anti-tunnel. Nothing about the tunnel construction, [...]

  • http://sunbreakmagazine.com/2011/03/15/mayor-mcginn-calls-for-viaduct-closure-in-2012/ Mayor McGinn Calls for Viaduct Closure in 2012 | The SunBreak

    [...] my earlier argument for closing the Viaduct in 2012, I mentioned that the move is neither pro- nor anti-tunnel. Nothing about the tunnel construction, [...]

  • http://sunbreakmagazine.com/2011/03/15/mayor-mcginn-calls-for-viaduct-closure-in-2012/ Mayor McGinn Calls for Viaduct Closure in 2012 | The SunBreak

    [...] my earlier argument for closing the Viaduct in 2012, I mentioned that the move is neither pro- nor anti-tunnel. Nothing about the tunnel construction, [...]

  • http://seattlebikeblog.com/2011/03/16/viaduct-shutdown-idea-gaining-momentum/ Viaduct shutdown idea gaining momentum | Seattle Bike Blog

    [...] is Michael van Baker at the SunBreak (which has a wonderful new site design, by the [...]

  • John Vidale

    The gates would be of use in several cases, although not all cases.

    An event such as struck Japan would have several minutes between the onset of shaking and the strongest shaking, and these gates might well allow the traffic to clear on the vulnerable part.

    Closer events would provide less warning of strong shaking, but still sometimes liquefaction takes some time to develop, and viaduct issues might be delayed for a few to tens of seconds. Every second of warning might save a few cars.

    Finally, the time right after a big earthquake is by far the most dangerous time for having an even bigger earthquake – the event triggering the gates might just be a foreshock. Then closer the viaduct for a time, (and inspecting it) might be very prudent.

    The system can improve once we have earthquake early warning from the regional seismic network. Then warning times can probably be multiplied by a factor of two or three, but that is at least several years and ten of millions of dollars away.

  • http://sunbreakmagazine.com Michael van Baker

    Hi John,

    Thanks for the comment. It’s good to consider all the ways this might “shake” (sorry) out. I don’t mean to foreclose the gates’ usefulness, just to emphasize that they’re not psychic gates, so their utility may be in preventing things from getting worse, rather than making sure the Viaduct is empty when a quake is going on. It certainly *is* important that people are kept from driving onto the structure during an earthquake, even it it hasn’t collapsed in front of them. Part of my argument is with the video, which does present the Viaduct taking a header 35 seconds in. That’s not necessarily the timeline, as you point out.

  • http://blog.bitratchet.com/2011/03/28/viaduct-earthquake-simulation-the-sunbreak/ Viaduct Earthquake Simulation (The SunBreak) « Bitratchet

    [...] Op-Ed: Shut Down the Viaduct Now | The SunBreak. [...]