SNOHOMISH COUNTY, Wash. — What would you do if you became isolated in your community for weeks, months or years at a time?
It’s what could happen after a major earthquake, which could disrupt our infrastructure, including our transportation grid and communication channels.
“We’d see a lot of bridges collapsing,” said Snohomish County Emergency Management Director Lucia Schmit. “We’d see a lot of overpasses, on ramps and off ramps that would fail. Then, along many of our river ways, we’d see the liquefaction of the soil, which would make it so the roads would not be passable by car.”
That damage could isolate individual neighborhoods indefinitely.
“We as a community need to figure out how to live within those constraints,” Schmit said
It’s an idea that’s not entirely foreign to Willow and Jim Payne, who own Willow & Jim’s Country Cafe in the town of Silvana.
“It floods a lot,” they told KIRO 7. “Pretty much every year.”
Silvana was built on a floodplain, and regular floods are not uncommon.
“All the roads that are closed off, it looks like you’re in a lake,” Willow said. “We just sit here and watch and wait for it to go down.”
At the front of the restaurant, a photo book carries memories of past floods.
“We were here for like two days,” Willow said, pointing to a photograph.
It’s not unlike what could happen during an earthquake, though boundaries could separate communities for a lot longer.
Snohomish County has spent years developing a map of where those boundaries could possibly form, creating a theoretical outline of 58 possible “population islands.”
You can explore the islands here.
“These are if there were to be an earthquake, basically barriers to travel,” said Drew Schwitters, Snohomish County’s Principal Geographic Information Systems Analyst, pointing to points on the map.
“At a very basic level, you can’t get from one island to the next by car,” Schmit said, noting that communities may rely on people with all-terrain vehicles and kayaks to travel.
The data is so detailed, it includes information on how many senior individuals and young children might be isolated on each island, as well as how many people may have no access to a vehicle or have a disability.
“It is incredibly unique, I think,” Schmit said. “It’s required a tremendous amount of investment of time and resources and analytical strength.”
The map could one day serve as a roadmap for first responders and members of the public during an emergency.
“Some of those communities will be fairly unreachable from these services,” Schwitters said.
Snohomish County Public Works is trying to get ahead of the possible impact a major earthquake could have.
“We have 1600 miles of roads and 210 bridges,” said Snohomish County Public Works Director Kelly Snyder.
The county is mitigating the risk across all its infrastructure. County bridges are evaluated every other year.
Losing just one bridge during an earthquake can have consequences.
“The transportation island associated with this particular bridge serves about 32,000 people,” Snyder said of the Larson Bridge, which runs across the South Slough of the Stillaguamish River. “On the other side of this road, is a business, and that business is a concrete business, and it is going to be able to deliver the things that are going to help rebuild communities.”
The Larson Bridge is slated for seismic retrofit work. Construction is expected to begin in the next few years.
Several other bridges need seismic improvements too.
The Pilchuck Creek Bridge, which carries traffic over Pilchuck Creek on Old 99 N, is set for replacement beginning in 2027. The county received a grant from the state for the project. The bridge was built in 1933.
“It can take somewhere between four and six years for us to get through a design, permitting and construction process,” Snyder said.
Costs can be astronomical too, and securing funding doesn’t happen overnight. A major earthquake, however, could hit at any time.
“How do you think ahead to even begin to fathom the workload that it could put on your department?” KIRO 7′s Madeline Ottilie asked Snyder.
“It wasn’t that long ago, just about 10 years, when this county had the Oso event,” she said. “Everyone had come together to make sure that that community was cared for. We will figure out ways to get and reconnect communities. Generally, there’s never just one way.”
It’s hard to guarantee anyone will ever be fully ready for a major earthquake, but the Payne’s are a good example of what tight knit communities are capable of when people have to come together.
“I think we would be the immediate hub for people,” Willow said.
“We have a restaurant here. We have a meat shop. There’s boats,” Jim said. “You can’t flood every year and not develop some kind of resilience.”
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