Rattled In Seattle Kobe Disaster, January Temblor Remind Puget Sound Area Of Its Vulnerability To Monstrous Quake

High above the city in a skyscraper, hunched over your desk, you suddenly feel a big truck rumble by your office window. Odd, because the street is 60 floors below.

Your office building begins to sway wildly as an earthquake strikes downtown Seattle.

The nightmare of a monstrous quake striking Seattle is a very real possibility, seismologists say. Just six months ago, Seattle got a preview when a 5.0 magnitude quake rattled the city Jan. 28. Small quakes routinely shake the region. This is, after all, earthquake country.

Preparing Seattle for a severe earthquake has been an uphill battle with pricetags in the millions of dollars.

But the January earthquake, following on the heels of the 7.2 quake that devastated Kobe, Japan, has heightened residents’ awareness of the likelihood of a huge quake in the Puget Sound area, say officials involved in earthquake preparedness.

The good news is that residents can do a lot to protect themselves - as long as they’re not driving down the Alaskan Way Viaduct or working in Seattle’s Public Safety Building when the quake hits.

“The Seattle earthquake brought Kobe home, right here under our feet,” said Kate Griffith of the state Emergency Management Division in the Military Department. “People realized it’s really time to start preparing.”

The wake-up call six months ago apparently got the attention of quite a few Puget Sound residents.

For example, some 80,000 people have requested Red Cross brochures on earthquake preparedness since January. Last year, the Red Cross mailed only about 20,000 brochures.

Requests for Red Cross presentations, classes and information are now slowing down, “but I’m sure the next time there is an event in California or here, it will pick up again,” said Red Cross spokeswoman Terri Giles.

“Residents can do lots of things at little cost to protect themselves,” said Steve Kramer, a University of Washington professor of civil engineering. “Basic stuff - like storing drinking water and matches and canned goods.”

But that’s little comfort to drivers on the Alaskan Way Viaduct - a double-decker freeway along the city’s waterfront - as they imagine being sandwiched between great, bucking slabs of concrete. Or to employees at the Public Safety Building, which scientists warn could collapse in a big earthquake.

“Policy-makers have to weigh the risks of not doing something against the costs of preparation,” said Kramer.

“I am afraid we are heading down the road of waiting for a large earthquake before fixing the problems.”

Local, state and federal agencies have been educating the public on earthquake preparedness - publishing pamphlets and holding classes and workshops - as well as organizing earthquake drills, studying vulnerable areas and developing disaster plans.

But what about the big ticket items?

A recently completed UW study found the Alaskan Way Viaduct would likely collapse in a big shake. About 86,000 cars use the elevated freeway every day.

The cost of retrofitting the freeway is estimated at $300 million, while addressing the waterfront’s soil problems - which would turn to mush if shaken hard enough - could cost as much as $500 million.

And that’s just one roadway.

Engineers warn that Seattle’s Public Safety Building - where 1,200 people work - would collapse in a severe earthquake. The cost of buttressing the building, which also houses the Seattle Municipal Court and the Seattle-King County Health Department, is estimated at $100 million.

A half-million dollar study released this week recommends reinforcing the Kingdome, saying the dome would sway 13 inches on its pilings in an earthquake up to 8.5 magnitude. Whether it would collapse would depend on how long the ground shook.

The engineering firms that conducted the study didn’t estimate a dollar figure.

The cost of adequately preparing the city for The Big One is anybody’s guess, seismologists say.

“But we can get a pretty good idea of the cost of not doing something,” said Bill Steele, coordinator for the University of Washington’s seismology lab. He explained that the repair bill just for Kobe’s port district is $13 billion.

“It’s a lot cheaper to do intelligent work now on a gradual basis than come up with those kind of dollars afterwards,” Steele said.

The state Department of Transportation has identified $250 million worth of high-priority repair projects needed to prevent bridges - not including the Alaskan Way Viaduct - from collapsing in an earthquake.

Although transportation officials have asked for $12.5 million a year for the work, the Legislature has only approved $5 million a year since 1993.

“We are so grossly underfunded in this state for earthquake preparedness,” said Gerry O’Keefe, Gov. Mike Lowry’s budget assistant.

“The Legislature has started to address some of these problems, but we still have a ways to go.”

Over the last couple of months, little earthquakes have been felt near Concrete, Longview, Spokane and Richland, and seismic activity was recorded near Ellensburg, Steele said.

“They put an exclamation point that all parts of the state are really at risk,” he said.

Big quakes have already hit the area this century. In 1949 a quake centered near Olympia registered 7.1, about the size of the quake that hit San Francisco in October 1989. In 1965, a quake measuring 6.5 hit the Seattle-Tacoma area.

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