You may have heard about the tiny bit of I-5 bridge that’s fallen into the Skagit River. Anticipating increased demand while the bridge is being repaired — a temporary replacement may come sometime in June, while a better fix could take until September — the state has talked Amtrak into adding a roundtrip train daily between Seattle and Bellingham.
It will leave Seattle at 8:15 a.m. and return from Bellingham at 5:15 p.m. The trip will take two hours and forty minutes, with stops at Mount Vernon, Stanwood, Everett, and Edmonds. Reservations are required; visit Amtrak Cascades to view ticket prices and availability. Lowest fares for a Seattle-Bellingham trip should range from $17 and $23 one-way, Seattle-Edmonds, $7 one-way.
For you early-birds, the regular morning train leaves Seattle at 7:40 a.m., and gets to Bellingham about a half an hour sooner, for the same price.
Washington Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson thanked Amtrak, Sound Transit, and rail-freight giant BNSF for helping make the train a reality: “We are so fortunate that we have the relationships to make this urgent service a reality so quickly.” Amtrak will operate the train, but the actual cars are on loan from Sound Transit (because Sound Transit is a commuter system, there will be no diner car), while BNSF, of course, provides the rails.
The exact schedule for the bridge repair remains in flux, but the train may continue to operate until a permanent bridge is in place (that’s an illustration of a temporary fix, above) — it depends upon passenger demand. This doesn’t help trucked freight, of course. Sen. Maria Cantwell highlighted the impact when she visited the collapsed bridge, pointing out that, “Every day, trucks carry around $38 million of U.S.-Canada trade cargo across the Skagit River on the I-5 corridor.”
The Pacific Northwest continues to live up to its reputation for tricksy weather, as even with La Niña conditions, our December has been as dry as the proverbial bone. KIRO meteorologist Morgan Palmer has the record-setting numbers for you: Seattle has had just one-quarter of an inch of rain in December, compared to almost seven inches last year, and an average of over three inches. Our snowpack is below normal, too.
One beneficiary of this unexpected aridity is the Amtrak Cascades line, which is routinely plagued by mudslides when we get steady rain. This spring and November’s on-time percentages suffered because of rainfall-driven slides, but December’s fair weather has Amtrak Cascades on track to surpass its target of 828,000 (2010 ridership totaled 840,000 passengers, up seven percent from 2009–or 850,000, up ten percent, depending upon whose figures you believe).
Right now, the U.S. conducts agriculture and immigration inspections in the Vancouver station, and then stops trains on the trackway near Blaine — causing a delay of 12 minutes to 20 minutes to check baggage and Customs declarations. Evening inspections often make passengers interrupt dinner to file forms while dogs sniff items in the train.
Lindblom also notes that August ridership between the two cities was up significantly, “a 26.5 percent increase from a year earlier.” Having access to free WiFi makes delays a little easier to bear.
Meanwhile, here in Seattle, $16.7 million in federal high-speed-rail money is driving the next phase of the King Street Station restoration project, due to be finished in two years. King Street Station is the busiest train station in the Northwest. Renovations to come will:
…strengthen King Street Station and its clock tower to better withstand earthquakes, as well as restore the historical features of the station’s main hall and upgrade electrical, mechanical and plumbing systems to modern standards. To restore the main hall to its original grandeur, the building’s white marble walls, decorative lighting and other features removed during “modernization” of the station more than 50 years ago will be rehabilitated or replaced, where possible. Also, improvements to both the Jackson Street and King Street entrances will significantly improve the public’s access to the station.
WSDOT's Don Becker caught this marmot observing the clearing of the North Cascades Highway, which reopened May 25, 2011. (Photo: WSDOT)
University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass has some debating words for authors of a recent study (“The Unusual Nature of Recent Snowpack Declines in the North American Cordillera“) suggesting the Western snowpack is dramatically shrinking due to climate change.
If you really check out the Science paper and look at the data, the loss of snowpack during the past few decades have not been serious. There is no clear smoking gun of anthropogenic global warming.
That is in stark contrast to the paper’s summary, which claims:
Over the past millennium, late-20th century snowpack reductions are almost unprecedented in magnitude across the northern Rocky Mountains, and in their north-south synchrony across the cordillera. Both the snowpack declines and their synchrony result from unparalleled springtime warming due to positive reinforcement of the anthropogenic warming by decadal variability.
To be clear–as Mass responded to one blog commenter thanking him for exposing the climate change “hoax”–this is not an argument over whether we’re changing the earth’s climate. Mass, along with the vast majority of climate researchers, has concluded that we are. His objection seems to be to statements like “almost unprecedented in magnitude.”
Says Mass, “Folks, we are in the early days of the warming and most of the action is yet to come. We need to be very careful on jumping to conclusions too early, since that only aids the deniers and skeptics who are just looking to pounce on excessive claims.”
A Seattle Times story alludes to the squabbling over how to frame the study’s finding: “The precise amount of those declines, particularly in the Cascades, has been the subject of fierce debate even within UW climate circles. But no more than half of the declines can be explained by natural shifts, the study shows.” In the New York Times, Greenwire’s Laura Petersen says, “The latest findings support conclusions from other studies suggesting that 30 to 60 percent of recent snowpack decline is due to human-induced warming.”
From Mass’s point of view, looking at 30 years of Cascades snowpack increase since the mid-1970s (based on snowpack measurements, not tree rings), the question of climate change effects is less predictable than that. Also, there’s the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which does to graphs exactly what its name suggests.
His other criticism is that the study’s own data seems to show a trend of snowpack decline beginning around 1900, which is much earlier than you’d expect climate change to have begun messing with our heads–so the question becomes, If some other, unexplained factor was thinning the snowpack, how is it possible to back out those inputs from what we’re observing more recently?
For those of you curious as to whether trees are really that accurate as snow gauges, the study’s authors didn’t include just any tree. First, they focused on collecting samples from areas in which snowfall (and thus snowpack) is known to be the primary source of water for trees, and then, to isolate the “snowpack signal” further, they concentrated on trees whose “seasonal biology (i.e., timing of tree-ring growth) ties them closely to snow.”
Nor do the authors just bleep over the Pacific Decadal Oscillation: In fact, their argument uses long-term PDO observation to single out those unusual moments when, instead of the storm-track shifting from north to south (and vice versa) due to PDO, the whole range of the cordillera either increases or decreases in snowpack. This is rare; the authors say the the last time this occurred was the mid-1300s to early 1400s, a “time of anomalous warmth at regional and hemispheric scales.”
That warmth, says lead author Greg Pederson, is the crux of the “unprecedented magnitude” the paper references. The major declines from 1900 on were not associated with a temperature signal (so Mass is half-right), but with a change in the storm track that left the Northern Rockies “robbed of moisture.” Even so, Pederson emphasizes, that previous instance of decline beginning in the mid-14th century was due to a “period of warming not as high as the last few decades.”
Pederson argues that the change in average temperature due to warming has made the snowpack more temperature sensitive. You may not think half a degree matters that much, but it does when the half-degree is the difference between frozen and melting. Proportionally, things shift: the amount of precipitation that falls as rain vs. snow, the chance that a brief warm front in winter will bring massive melt and floods, and the chance that the snowpack will endure into summer.
Pace Mass, I can’t blame Pederson, et al, for the spin that different media have put on the study’s findings, though I’m sympathetic with his concern about “Sky is falling” messaging that doesn’t hold…um…water. But I do take issue with Mass’s definition of what’s serious. If Pederson’s tree-ring-to-snowpack record is correct, asynchronous declines tied to a global warming trend are simply not a frequent (on the human time scale) occurrence.
If you consider that it’s not unusual to have snowpack averages that diverge substantially for decades–over and over throughout the 800-year survey, you see peaks and valleys that endure for what would have been a lifetime–adding heat “quickly” to that system is foolhardy, and exactly what we’re doing.
Because your water tap doesn’t care about climate change debate, just the snowpack, water managers, their eyes opened to “unthinkable” effects of major droughts following years and years of Rockies-fueled abundance, must absolutely consider the proportionate change that warming could provide. Purely as a precautionary scenario–though I think the trees are in fact telling us something–the study’s red flag is creditable. There are too many lives at stake in the best of times. As National Geographic summarizes:
Each spring, melted snow and ice from the Rocky Mountains recharge up to 80 percent of the Columbia, Missouri, and Colorado River Basins. Together, these basins form the primary water source for nearly 70 million people in an area plagued by droughts….
Our infrastructure has trouble handling the huge ranges that, over the longer-term, nature is capable of surprising us with. Ironically, as many have noted, this study has appeared during a peak snowpack season. But we can be overwhelmed there, too.
At the moment, reports the AP, our hydropower dams would generate more electricity than demand, but it’s not as easy as simply spilling excess melt-water. Too-high dissolved oxygen levels in spill water could hurt salmon. So the Bonneville Power Administration has been telling wind farms to shut down at night, and stop delivering unmarketable electricity. Wind farm owners, naturally, are upset–they need to sell all the electricity possible to recoup their investment. So we fluctuate, one year raising electricity rates because the snowpack is low; the next, curtailing production because there’s too much of it. The trees aren’t the only ones feeling the stress.
By 2017, Amtrak Cascades should be making six round trips between Seattle and Portland per day, up from four trips daily now. That’s possible in part because of an extra $15 million the federal government is disbursing for a Port of Vancouver project–from a pot of high-speed rail money that Florida refused.
“The $15 million, along with $18.3 million in matching funds from the Port of Vancouver,” reports The Columbian, “will pay for a separate track for freight rail cars carrying shipments into and out of the port.”
Anyone who’s taken the train to and from Portland has waited for a slow-moving freight train to clear the track–this spur line is supposed to reduce delays by 40 percent while tripling the Vancouver port’s rail volume. Without work to reduce that congestion, you can imagine new Cascades trains simply piling up behind delayed trains in front, like buses caught in gridlock.
Amtrak had also asked for $10 million for preparatory studies to deal with its mudslide problem–this winter, more than 100 mudslides affected passenger and freight rail service. (To extrapolate, in December 2010 sixteen mudslides affected 90 train trips.) Even with Amtrak’s generous on-time window (trains can be from ten to thirty minutes late and qualify as “on-time”), only about 62 percent of its trains arrive on time.
The mudslides aren’t helping at all, but Amtrak has no money to fund the environmental assessment needed before any work could actually being. Funds disbursed from the Florida allocation, however, went primarily to “shovel-ready” projects. So, Catch-22.
“While disappointing, our total share of ‘HSR’ funding ($781 million) remains impressive relative to our population size,” says Seattle Transit Blog, “and it speaks well of WSDOT’s preparedness in seeking these grants over the past three years.”
A commenter adds that, “The mudslide issue is as much an infrastructure issue as it is a liability issue,” referring to the legal requirement that passenger trains wait 48 hours after a slide. If WSDOT and Amtrak can get that rule amended, then a huge part of the problem is already dealt with.
