That’s how much higher temperatures in Seattle were during a heatwave this week compared to what we usually experience this time of year, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). 

The increased frequency, duration, and intensity of heatwaves are indicators of climate change  –  the result of human activities like carbon pollution.

Historically, Seattle’s maritime climate delivered spring weather that was reliably overcast with cool temperatures and rain, earning names like “May Gray” and “June Gloom,” mid-May this year was oddly sunny and alarmingly warm. 

On the heels of back-to-back summer heatwaves, The Urbanist compiled the following explainer to put this unseasonal weather event into context. 

The heat came with a high-pressure system 

In a jet stream, narrow bands of strong wind flow from west to east in an arc-like shape. As air moves down along a curve, it sinks and becomes warmer. 

“We had a really strong ridge of what we call a ridge of high pressure,” said lead forecaster, Trent Davis, with NWS in Seattle. 

“These events tend to lead to heat events because we have more daytime heating from the sun, and that leads to sinking areas and suppresses cloud formations, and so that’s why we have so many days of really sunny skies. The long days perpetuate day after day,” he said. 

The summer-like temperatures began to build last week with three days in the 70s followed by two days in the 80s. Sea-Tac Airport recorded the peak, a record high of 89 degrees, on Sunday. Warm days will persist through Friday. 

Along with the hot temperatures comes the potential for thunderstorms. It’s rare for the Seattle area to get thunder and lightning, because the region’s typically cooler air hinders the moisture needed for storms. Between Monday night and Tuesday morning this week, NWS counted 1,300 lightning strikes. 

“The ridge is breaking down a little bit,” said Davis. “It’s cooler air, in a relative sense, but it’s still pretty warm at the surface. That’s bringing cloud cover and more moisture. It’s leading to some really good instability for fuel for thunderstorms.”

Rain falls swiftly and intensely from these kinds of storms. That’s because the clouds hold the moisture and release heavy rain like a sponge being wrung out. It prompted NWS to issue a flood watch on Monday. 

Davis and his team were particularly concerned about towns in King County like Skykomish, where people now live near land scorched by last year’s Bolt Creek Fire. That wildfire burned so hot, what remains is earth that can’t absorb water. Instead, rain runs off and creates flash flooding.  

Climate change made an early heatwave more likely 

While meteorologists monitor the behavior and conditions of the atmosphere over a short period of time, climatologists measure it for much longer, usually with data collected over 30 years. Even with firm methodologies to identify trends, determining if one weather event is caused by climate change is difficult. 

“It could be happenstance, and it’s an unusual weather event, but one thing that gives me pause though, is it’s a rather long duration, as well as above normal temperatures in the Pacific Northwest,” said Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond. 

Climate Central, a policy-neutral nonprofit, uses a Climate Shift Index to indicate how much climate change has altered the frequency of today’s temperatures. Based on this scale, climate change made Seattle’s excessive heat this May five times more likely compared to spring days decades ago. 

Additionally, Seattle’s historical records show evenings are not cooling off like they used to, and the frequency of evening heatwaves is increasing. It’s reflective of what is happening across the country: Summertime temperatures are arriving earlier and lasting longer. 

“We generally do not get heatwaves this early in the season,” Bond said. “One of the things we are seeing with climate change in general is the lengthening of the window in which heat events can happen. This [heatwave] is an example of that.” 

Unseasonal spring temperatures could affect what happens this summer 

This spring reminds Bond of the dry and warm spring of June 2021 – a year that had a challenging wildfire season and disastrous summer heatwave. 

Wildfire is a natural process for forests and wildland areas, but with climate change they are burning hotter and lasting longer. While wildfire used to be considered an Eastern Washington issue, smokey summers are a new normal in the Seattle metro area. 

“[The heatwave] is definitely something we’re taking seriously,” said Thomas Kyle-Milward, wildfire communications manager for Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR). “Thanks to snowpack, fuels are still in good condition. We aren’t at the stage of deploying resources yet, but we are keeping a really close eye on this because it’s unseasonal temperatures that will accelerate the drying out of fuels.” 

Before the heatwave, DNR also announced that cities in South Puget Sound and eastern King County are considered high risk for fire. Also, the National Interagency Fire Center predicted significant wildland fire potential this summer.

Meteorologists can’t predict this far in advance if Seattle will have another heatwave this summer. Temperature outlooks for June and July could be warm, like earlier this May. Precipitation could also be below normal, according to the Climate Prediction Center. 

Seattle’s built environment makes its people vulnerable 

Seattle is a city that struggles in heatwaves because its infrastructure and built environments were designed for a cooler, temperate climate. The extremely hot days, especially when temperatures don’t drop at night, stresses equipment that is part of essential services like Seattle City’s Lights distribution system. Also, Seattle is among the least air-conditioned metro areas in the U.S. 

For those without cooled homes, residents may be sensitive to heat. It’s especially severe early in the year when people haven’t had time to acclimate after rainy and cold winters. The exposure may trigger illness like heat stroke and exhaustion.  

King County and the City of Seattle responded to this week’s weather, citing a lower heat index compared to recent summer heatwaves. People without shelter are among the most vulnerable to heat, and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority opened day centers with cooling and distributed supplies like water. King County Metro is also allowing people to ride buses as a cooling center. 

While in the thick of summer heatwaves, cooling centers are challenging for some neighborhoods to get to because they are not walkable locations or near public transit. 

This includes people in South Seattle and King County, where some of the most racially and ethnically diverse populations in the region live. Residents in these areas experience the heat and its risks inequitably because of limited greenspace, reduced tree canopies, and greater prevalence of pavement. Hard pavement absorbs more solar radiation than natural land cover. Not only does it increase heat-related illness, but it exacerbates pollution levels.

Since 2021’s deadly heatwave, the City of Seattle and King County made some tactical improvements in their emergency response to better protect people who experience the worst from extreme — and often disproportionate — heat. But as The Urbanist reported last summer, Seattle is decades away from the heat mitigation it needs to keep all residents safe.

The post Climate Change is Influencing Seattle’s Unusual Spring Heatwave  first appeared on The Urbanist.

Just 10 days into this spring, a firefighting team flew in a helicopter over the dome of the Washington state capitol building in Olympia. They were on the way to quickly put out a small wildfire before it had the chance to grow along Highway 101 in the Hood Canal, an area with lush forests and a historically wet climate. 

People who call cities and towns in the South Puget Sound home have watched this landscape drying out over the last few decades. 

“I’ve lived in this state my entire life, other than going away for college or grad school. I’ve never remembered until recent years seeing a weather forecast for smoke,” said Congressman Derek Kilmer, who represents communities in Tacoma and on the Olympic Peninsula. “This really affects people not just in Eastern Washington, but Western Washington as well. Wildfires are devastating and heartbreaking, they are also avoidable.”

Kilmer spoke on Tuesday at the Western Washington launch of a collaborative program called Wildfire Ready Neighbors, which for the last two years has provided people in Eastern Washington with tools to prepare their properties and homes before wildfire season. It offers no-cost consultations to help people take simple steps to remove overgrown excess plants, prune overgrown trees, and other basic lawn-care that will reduce fuel for fire. 

Funded through the 2022 state supplemental budget, Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is expanding the program to Western Washington because the state now considers Pierce County, the second most populous county in Washington, high wildfire-risk in addition to Mason and Thurston. A bill this legislative session is pushing for $12.8 million over two years to further support resiliency efforts. 

Nearly 30% of last year’s wildfires happened on the west of the Cascades Mountain Range. When September brought warm wind and dry air, more than 12,000 acres burned just an hour northwest of Seattle, between Skykomish and Index, prompting evacuations of 400 homes. Not only did it bring unhealthy smoke into the city, it raised concerns of what the future holds for wildland urban interfaces – a term used to describe the intersection of human activity and natural environments.

In cities, wildland fire  most likely threatens infrastructure and homes near parks with urban forests and roadways with large swaths of grass, like Interstate 5. Usually, fires in these places start from trucks dragging chains on pavement or cars parking in dry grass. 

That’s why it’s not just drought and record-hot summers troubling DNR leaders like the Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz, it’s also the sheer density of people in the west. In 2022, all but four of the 377 fires were caused by people. 

“We [in Western Washington] believe it’s a very rural issue. That it can’t happen in an urban or suburban area, and people are really wrong,” Franz said. “Every 300 to 500 years, a million acres burns in King and Pierce County, and we are in the middle of that 300 and 500 years. Obviously, 300 to 500 years ago, there weren’t so many people.” 

Fire is how nature restores itself. It clears out crowded tree canopies and burns away invasive plants. Moist Douglas-fir and western hemlock forests are no exception. 

Before settlers came to Washington, if a lightning strike didn’t naturally cause fire, indigenous people who lived near these landscapes since time immemorial would intentionally set low intensity burns. But since the 20th century, federal and state governments have enforced an ethic of suppression. 

These early 1900 policies have compounded today’s climate-change influenced wildfire crisis. Now forests are stacked like a bonfire, fueling scorching wildfires that burn for weeks. Agencies like DNR are working with municipalities and tribes to bring back proactive fire. For everyday people, they can contribute by evaluating what’s around their home and taking action. 

It’s unlikely that a large wildfire will move into places like Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia. Smaller cities are creating a buffer between the large metro areas and wilderness, but that leaves wildland urban interfaces in South Puget Sound like Orting – where more than 7,000 people who have never lived with fire – exposed. 

Zane Gibson, fire chief with Orting Valley Fire and Rescue, is among the few who have experience with both structural fires and wildland fires. A few years ago, just 10 miles north, wind gusts blew fire into his hometown, destroying four homes. 

“For my entire career, we had talked for forty years about the potential of an east wind event after a dry summer in Bonney Lake, and it came true in 2020,” Gibson said. “At the same time, there was already a firestorm in Eastern Washington, so there wasn’t a lot of resources.” 

The National Interagency Fire Center predicts significant wildland fire potential this summer. It could be as challenging as the taxing wildfire season in 2020, according to Franz. While winter brought ample precipitation, rain and snow slowed down in March and was below average. 

While just a forecast, elected leaders and fire officials are urging high-risk communities in the wildland urban interface to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. 

“The fires are burning hotter and faster, and Western Washington residents aren’t necessarily used to that fire behavior,” Gibson said. “So we’re doing our part to get our community ready.”

The post South Puget Sound Cities Now at High Risk for Wildfire first appeared on The Urbanist.

An ARkStorm is a theorized winter megastorm, a series of Atmospheric Rivers (AR’s) that line up to batter California in a 1-in-1000 (k) year event. Thus Atmospheric River 1,000 or ARkStorm. As we here in Seattle know, those atmospheric rivers can mean business, bringing tropical moisture to the coast as a fire hose. Were they to last 40 days in one of the country’s most productive agricultural areas, the impacts would be disastrous.

Now, does this season’s rain count as an ARkStorm? Meteorologists are not quite ready to make that determination yet. That said, with climate change increasing the frequency of drenching rains in places that are ill prepared, it is useful to to know what extremes may become more common. And it lets us brush up on the meaning of cubit.

The post Sunday Video: SoCal Rain is Deadlier Than Earthquakes first appeared on The Urbanist.

On February 28th, 2001, I was in middle school, in the computer lab. I remember it vividly. Partway through class, our room started violently shaking. It felt like our school had been placed on top of a slab of cafeteria Jell-O, and someone was shaking the tray as hard as they could.

We dove underneath our desks as the building continued shaking, oscillating, back and forth and back and forth, for what seemed like a few minutes, but was actually only 45 seconds. Someone cracked a joke underneath the tables to lighten the mood. Others have told me stories about being in some of the old brick buildings in Seattle’s Pioneer Square, watching the floor beams rock in and out of the wall, hanging on by a thread.

After it stopped, we turned on the television. The magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake had just struck Seattle, causing between $1 billion and $4 billion in damage. Thankfully no one at school was hurt. We lined up outside on the field and were let out early, with lingering uncertainty about a potential larger aftershock that never came.

Nine years later, I sat in Structures class at the University of Washington. The legendary professor Barry Onouye was at the chalkboard giving a lecture on seismic forces. We talked about why buildings collapsed in Haiti after a magnitude 7 quake (a rating of “major” on the Moment Magnitude Scale) had struck the island, leading to devastation and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Now, as architects in Washington State, we integrate seismic structural design and planning into everything we do.

Seattle’s next “big” earthquake will be significant. The city sits in the crosshairs of two perpendicular fault lines: the Cascadia Subduction Zone, along the coast of Washington, Oregon, and Vancouver Island, and the Seattle Fault, which runs directly underneath South Seattle. A third fault line of racial discrimination, segregation, and racially-motivated violence has set the stage to compound the damage.

Thousands of people live, work, eat, and play in buildings “especially dangerous, and prone to collapse in earthquakes” according to the City. Many were constructed using Unreinforced Masonry (URM). Yet, to date, the City has kicked the can down the road on what to do. One day, the City will kick the can off a cliff.

Who falls off the cliff, and who does the kicking, depends largely on the color of your skin and the money in your pockets. In 2020, Seattle’s Office of Emergency Management conducted a simulation of a big quake scenario. They found that, “Black residents were nearly twice as likely to live on a severely damaged block as white residents” in a Seattle Fault quake. In a Cascadia quake, low-income residents were 81% more likely than average to live on a block suffering severe structural damage.

The Mayor’s Office found that “Earthquakes, Seattle’s #1 disaster risk, have inequalities built in.” In essence, the City Government is internally planning for inequitable impacts, and has taken no legislative action to avert these projected impacts. Disparate impacts could be negated through clear policies and investments in building upgrades, education, outreach, and preparation, yet we have seen no action to make any concrete investments or to create legislation where it is needed. Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban emphatically stated that, “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.” Within Seattle, we have some killer buildings, apathetic policy, and decades of racially motivated land-use planning forming perfect crosshairs over South Seattle.

To understand how and why Seattle lawmakers don’t approach this problem with the same sense of urgency they show for junk police surveillance technologies like ShotSpotter, we must introspect into Seattle’s town legacy of de jure segregation and founding principles of white supremacy.

Seattle, since its town founding, has, through the law, explicitly excluded all other racial groups from the city — Indigenous people in 1865, Chinese people in 1882 and 1886, and restrictive covenants and policies including redlining, excluded Black, Asian, and Jewish people throughout the 20th century. Seattle police enforced, under the color of law, “sundown” laws in today’s wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods, such as Magnolia, forcibly removing and detaining Black men. In 1958, Seattle police refused to investigate a cross burning at a Black home in the U-District. To this day, Seattle police are under federal investigation and oversight for explicitly racially biased practices of policing. One SPD officer even told a colleague in 2020, “Well if I wasn’t racist before … I’m getting there now.” A former SPD cop called the City’s Race and Social Justice Initiative a “sickness infecting Seattle since 2005.” The violence and dispossession of minority groups, and specifically Seattle’s Black population, can be seen on a continuum.

Today, the compounding gap in generational wealth accumulation has reduced Seattle’s Black population’s buying power and increased Black homelessness to a rate four times that of their white peers. Evictions in King County also disproportionately target Black residents, “not simply due to lower incomes, but rather, it relates to the legacies of segregation that prevented many households of color from purchasing homes and participating in the building of the middle class through historical policies that subjugated and segregated Persons of Color. The dynamics of persistent urban segregation limits access to better neighborhoods, jobs, and class mobility and is reinforced through discrimination in housing access.”

Our next big earthquake will bring another overlay of violence to the city. Building damage can lead to building collapse. Rental agreements will be voided as buildings are severely damaged, leaving many without housing. Collapsed structures will cause injuries and possibly deaths, all with a predicted disproportionate impact again, to Seattle’s Black community. To understand this violence is to understand it as an extension and continuation of these state-sanctioned de jure segregation policies and state-sanctioned white-supremacist violence.

After the Quake: Disaster Gentrification

As we found with COVID, non-white racial groups suffer the most in a disaster. As we saw in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, Black populations will even be maliciously targeted by white-collar scams that jeopardize economic, social, and housing security. As the City itself is predicting, Black residents will bear the overwhelming brunt of collapsed and damaged structures in the next big earthquake.

Anyone who has studied the history of the United States knows that it is on the ashes and ruins of structures inhabited by Indigenous people — by Black and Brown people — that our city and nation is built today. Seattle City leaders such as Charles Terry were even reported to have led the mobs of violent white supremacists razing and destroying the ancient dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish) village of həʔapus (ha-ah-poos). Terry would then donate the “Metropolitan Tract” to the University of Washington.

In 2021, the Los Angeles PD detonated a massive explosion in the middle of a formerly redlined Black and Brown neighborhood, causing significant displacement. In 1985, Philadelphia police detonated a bomb that destroyed 61 homes in a Black neighborhood, leaving 250 people homeless. Our history is full of whites firebombing and razing Black homes — under the color of law — in mobs or through racially motivated urban planning. 

St. Louis demolished an entire black neighborhood to build the St. Louis Arch, driving displaced residents to Ferguson. New York’s Lincoln Center sits on the ground of a “Slum Clearance” project, which destroyed the vibrant San Juan Hill Puerto Rican neighborhood. Significant evidence suggests that a gentrification effort by Louisville developers led to the murderous raid on Breonna Taylor. After she was killed, the City and developers purchased the house she lived in for $1.

Our collective history of Black buildings razed to the ground by policies and state-sponsored violence shows that structural damage and collapse of Black buildings in Seattle after the next big quake can be understood as a continuation of that destructive structural racism.

Many in Seattle are aware of these trends. A coalition of community groups produced a 2021 report identifying the problem and called it by name: disaster gentrification, a practice where developers capitalize on disaster by buying property from vulnerable low-income residents and selling or renting it to people in a higher income bracket. In the report, the authors outline six concrete actions for policymakers to prevent it. Yet, none of these have been fully adopted by the City Council.

As the City contemplates updates to its Comprehensive Plan, up-zoning within South Seattle could cause property values to be worth millions more, increasing incentives for developers to target tenants and homeowners for predatory development.

After an earthquake, the City may require condemned buildings to be “demolished in a timely manner,” potentially leaving entire blocks of South Seattle as a billion-dollar greenfield development opportunity for the real estate industry, and thousands of Black and Brown families permanently displaced, faced with yet another lever of structural racism to bear against them. 

The Mayor’s Office is well aware of the problem. Seattle deserves action to avert this looming crisis.

The post The Next ‘Big One’ Could Mean Big Displacement for Seattle’s Black Population first appeared on The Urbanist.

Seattle ranks highest among the nation’s cities for risk of exposure to a major disaster. In spite of this, preparedness is an ongoing challenge among residents, with many not understanding all of the threats that exist and the most important preparations to make.

A layer cake of geology nightmares

Most hazards faced by the city of Seattle result from the area’s geology and climate. The blend of conditions – high-density urbanization with high seismic and volcanic activity, steep terrain, and so much rain – means that hazards do not occur alone. An event in one category should be expected to trigger events in others.

The result is what I call a “geology nightmare layer cake.” Imagine a hastily conceived science fair project of mud, gravel, and cut-up sponges on a wobbly table, and then imagine what you would have to do to get something solid to stay put on top while standing in the shower. Two ill-conceived years of engineering geology school had accustomed me to the hidden perilousness of such challenges. More interestingly, it accustomed me to the people who think about them for a living. One professor, a man with an infectiously sunny disposition, would sketch undesirable soil profiles on the chalkboard and explain short-sighted building mistakes via stick-figure orphanages falling into sinkholes. This was a class filled with real photos of people’s cars and homes partially buried in swamps. It was a good class.

Seattle’s layer cake starts with a cracked plate. The seismic risk under the city itself comes from the Seattle Fault Zone, which extends from the Cascades to Whidbey Island, running directly under the city and the Sound. Earthquakes of historic proportions occur a few hundred years apart, but can be wildly destructive in the span of a few minutes’ shaking. Many residents remember the Nisqually quake of 2001, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake which caused 40 seconds of shaking and injured 200 people. Some may also recall the 6.5 magnitude quake of 1965 which killed three people and caused roughly $12 million in damages and closed the state Capitol building in Olympia due to damages.

In spite of the danger, our region owes much to these crustal movements: mountain ranges come from “wrinkling” under the stresses of tectonic pushing and pulling. The dumbfounding transition from high desert to rainforest over the Cascades is owed to our mountains’ rain shadow effect, in which a mountain range acts as a kind of “scraper” for directing atmospheric moisture downwards to one side. 

Atop our broken cake plate is a crumbly mess of dessert. The rock and soil under our pavement is a combination of loose gravel and sand deposited when much of the area was covered in glacial ice, as well as finer layers of mud deposited as the glaciers melted and retreated northward. There are also peat deposits, which form in wetlands when plant matter cannot completely decay and instead turns into a layer resembling a soggy sponge. These conditions make many areas in the city vulnerable to liquefaction. Liquefaction is a process in which wet compacted sediment can turn from solid to quicksand when shaking begins, and back to solid again once it stops, trapping submerged objects, vehicles, and even segments of buildings.

Many neighborhoods immediately surrounding Elliott Bay are also at risk for tsunami inundation after an earthquake. These include the low-lying areas of Magnolia, Interbay, Queen Anne, downtown along Elliott Avenue and Alaskan Way, and areas around Harbor Island. A tsunami generated in the Pacific will likely dissipate in the complex shape of Puget Sound. But a worst-case Seattle Fault earthquake tsunami could cause serious inundation damage because it would come from the Sound itself. Seismologists have determined that such a quake occurred in 900 A.D., and two similar events occurred since humans settled in the region 16,000 years ago.

Tectonic movement can also be triggered by volcanic activity. Fortunately, much of nearby Mount Rainier’s daily volcanic activity is benign. Most do not realize that stereotypical lava and explosion is not the only dangerous volcanic activity. Events can include the venting of dangerous gasses, hot ash, or an especially difficult hazard called pyroclastic flow or lahar.

Lahars are flash floods of hot lava, ash, and debris. If an eruption lacks the pressure to send lava skyward, eruptions can push lahars down the volcano’s slopes of the volcano and through surrounding terrain at upwards of 100 miles an hour. They are nearly solid, capable of erasing any structure and even carving through existing terrain.  Search and rescue attempts are complicated lahar quicksand-like texture, maintained for weeks after the initial event and made likelier in the Cascades by the glacial ice a lahar would melt and incorporate while descending.

Fortunately, Seattle itself is not at risk from these flows, but several towns in the Puyallup River Valley, such as Orting, Puyallup, Sumner and Fife sit atop solidified lahar flows that are only around 500 years old. Such flows travel along river valleys and could reach as far as Tacoma. Concerningly, lahars can also occur without any eruption at all. The deposits of volcanic ash and mud which active volcanoes produce over time can be loosened into sliding by heavy rainfall, earthquakes, or melting glaciers caused by unusually hot weather. The primary issues Seattle itself would face from volcanic activity are poor air quality and ashfall.

The Cake Topper

Now that we have a mushy cake, rigged with explosives and deadly icing, atop a cracked plate, let’s build something on it. Due to constant appearances of 1970s-era date stamps on geologic maps, papers, and research being presented as best-available science, I was reminded that we live in a town chock-full of buildings which predate seismic codes. Really, they predate widespread public understanding of geology as a field altogether. My neighborhood, Lower Queen Anne, is named for such houses; quaint, desirable, and dangerous. Passing by luxuriant, private-dock bearing homes built under the eroded lip of slopes above beaches drives me to make sidelong comments about listening to your geologist.

If, at this point, you find yourself in a similar anxiety-seeking mood, I suggest looking up your home and workplace on Seattle’s list of unreinforced masonry buildings (URM). These are historic brick buildings from before modern seismic improvements were required. A process has been underway since January 2013 to catalog these buildings and codify necessary retrofitting guidelines, but retrofitting is not currently scheduled to become mandatory.

This year, the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections has hired a program manager to begin drafting the retrofit program, and Seattle City Council has proposed a resolution outlining the mayor and council’s “intent to consider strategies to ensure that all unreinforced masonry buildings in Seattle are seismically retrofitted.”

Previous attempts to create such a program have been hampered by concerns about cost, as well as the desire to avoid simply demolishing historic structures. However, a minority of these buildings are already retrofitted. Telltale signs include diagonal steel beams visible in windows, and bolts in exterior walls which are the ends of rods stabilizing interior floors. The city has released retrofit guidelines for owners of detached homes, but property owners are not currently legally obligated to retrofit. Residents can check whether they live or work in a URM using the Seattle Hazard Explorer.

Post-earthquake reality: “worst camping trip of your life”

My fascination about the region’s geology comes from a place of absolute curiosity. But, perhaps my discussion about preparing for digging out of The Big One is a bit morbid. Friends’ looks became wary as they examined my face for signs of paranoia until they had decided the science was sufficient. Some would eventually relax into the common atmosphere of gallows humor; others would simply beg me to stop. Perhaps the second response is more natural.  

For many, the words “disaster preparedness” evoke images of stashes of water and canned food; this contains the implicit assumption that authorities and neighbors are of no use. The reality is that much of the burden of protecting citizens from the initial event falls on city governments to take action – often expensive, invisible and therefore unpopular action – before disaster strikes. Dealing with URM buildings is a perfect example. Though now moving, it has taken a decade and will not be immediately mandatory.

In October, former Seattle Office of Emergency Management Director Eric Holdeman published a short piece on his disaster-focused blog repeating the title message “No One is Coming to Help.” Grim, yes. And honest. Even the best-prepared city government cannot solve every citizen’s post-disaster situation right away.

Facing this lahar of good news, I wished to speak with a city employee to confirm whether my uninspiring impressions from conversations with friends reflected a widespread problem. I contacted Kate Hutton, Communications Coordinator and Strategic Advisor for Seattle’s Office of Emergency Management. She explained how, on a city-wide scale, unassuming things swell to outsize importance in the aftermath of disasters. Supply chain issues become compounded with the closure or damage of ports; visually unharmed buildings cannot be re-entered because of the risk of electrical fire or burst pipes. As we spoke, I was reminded of the reality checks many faced a few months into Covid: panicked people will dogpile onto less-than-stellar solutions, such as stockpiling extreme amounts of food and water and forgetting to ask who is going to watch their kids.

Worse, the stereotypical “prepping” scenario is a nuclear family with a garage of survival equipment. Since it is not accessible to most people in Seattle, many residents decide to do nothing. Hutton also described an “awareness gap,” which is the product of a city with lots of transplants and young people. Many are too young to remember the Nisqually quake of 2001, never practiced stop-drop-and-hold earthquake drills in school, or simply think “it won’t happen while I’m here.” This cultural knowledge can be replaced by what she called a “Hollywood-type awareness,” in which people picture themselves climbing out of lava’s reach, being rescued from highrises by helicopters, or defending against streets swarming with looters.

Hutton described a post-earthquake scenario which is much less adrenaline-fueled. Her words were “the worst camping trip of your life.” People should expect to stay within their immediate neighborhoods sharing food and assistance with neighbors and local businesses, because damaged infrastructure will make getting across or out of the city challenging or even impossible. Fortunately, in spite of media focus on looting, Hutton stated that people are overwhelmingly likely to group together and help after disasters. 

Hutton herself lives in a small apartment and said that it would take an entire “disaster room” to accomplish preparedness on an individual level. Rather, befriending your neighbors and talking to your friends means that you will find an immense pool of physical resources, as well as a team for handling post-disaster struggles. She also explained that if you ask for too much, people will do nothing. If you can store a few gallons of water and boxes of shelf-stable food, do it. But it’s more effective get to know neighbors, gather friends, and discuss who can do what. Is your neighbor a nurse who can help with injuries? Can anyone share camping equipment? What’s the plan for getting people back together if roads are clogged or damaged?

In that way, preparation for Seattle’s looming disasters is not all bad news. Sure, we live on a quivering mess of geology and the movies have us believe we’ll need to shoot our way out. But that is not the reality of emergency situations, and there are very effective ways for urban dwellers to get ready natural disasters. As Hutton emphasizes, in a city full of young singles in one-bedroom apartments, social connections are far more useful than typical “prepping.” Storing fuel, food and water is costly; having a conversation costs nothing. 

For practical information on how you can prepare, the City of Seattle has compiled a list of resources to help you and your loved ones get ready for earthquakes and their aftermath. This includes supply lists, a disaster plan template, and other helpful readiness information.
The City also offers hands-on classes for those who want to gain skills to respond to disasters.

The post Seattle’s Geologic Hazards Can Be Overwhelming, But Preparation Can Start Now  first appeared on The Urbanist.

For two days the conference discussed issues and cooperation across the the Cascadia supernational region. CIC brings together universities, businesses, and governments from British Columbia, Washington and Oregon with the goals of creating opportunity and prosperity across the megaregion. Over the last few years the Innovation Corridor has championed high speed rail and alliances between research groups. 

The Urbanist has followed the work of the Cascadia Innovation Corridor for several years. We’ve reported their reports, cheered some ideas, and questioned others. What’s different this time is that the conference occurred looking up at a pandemic fifth wave and inside the eye of a swirling, climate change-fueled weather event. The deluge from all sides to add gravity to the festivities.

In Person Conferencing!

The 2021 Cascadia Innovation Conference kicked off with some success. This year’s conference included the announcement of a framework between British Columbia’s Premier John Horgan, Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee, and Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown to start developing a governance structure for ultra high speed ground transportation. This is the next step after the idea received favorable business case review and public opinion survey.

The meeting was hosted by Christine Gregoire and Greg D’Avgnion. As the former governor of Washington and the head of the B.C. Business Council respectively, they brought the appropriate heavy hitters. Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, gave the opening keynote. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Grahnolm called in from D.C. as the closing plenary speaker and touted the infrastructure bill President Biden recently signed and its promised climate-focused followup Build Back Better Act. Between them were speakers representing the leaders of first nations, universities, startups talking to regional activists, elected officials, and folks in businesses that rely on a connected border. And a bald weirdo here for the beer.

Highlights of the conversations included: Thomas Davidoff of the University of British Columbia talking about how much money US cities are leaving on the table because they are not allowed to charge exactions for density. Christopher Sands, Director of Canada Institute at the Wilson Center, talked about lessons learned from a year long and erratic border closure. Aria Hahn, CEO of Koonkie, talking about the ways microbes were being tested to prospect for natural resources or devour pollutants. Kim Baird, Chancellor of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and Brian Cladoosby, Swinish Indian Tribal Community, talking honestly about how both countries have failed First Nations, the gaps in reconciliation, and the primacy of education.

Honestly, the joy of just talking with humans in person cannot be overstated. The random serendipity of being sat between a particle physicist and provincial liaison is something that reminds us how much we’ve missed over the last 20 months.

Contrastingly, I’ll now pick on Eric Sparks of Boston Consulting Group who talked about the CIC’s Vision 2050 Plan. Vision 2050 proposes densifying existing downtowns and centers to absorb 2.5 million new Cascadia residents over the next 30 years. But projections see an additional 1 to 1.5 million people arriving. To accommodate them, the plan adds a series of 100,000-person “Hub Cities” to the region. They would be located on underdeveloped land 30 to 50 miles outside of existing urban centers, but arranged along a high speed rail corridor through Cascadia. Sparks actually brought up the “political infeasibility” of converting single family units to multifamily as a justification for these Hub Cities by suggesting it would take bulldozing 325,000 homes to accommodate the expected population. We’re going to call shenanigans because the timeframe he’s looking at is 30 years across a region with 6.7 million housing units. That’s less than a 2% replacement rate. He presented less data, and more a polemic scare tactic against improving zoning.

Cascades, large and larger.

Here is where I’m running into problems digesting this meeting. The conference, the Innovation Corridor, and the participants feature the unlikely marriage between a hearty embrace of technology, deeply progressive reflection on Who We Are in Cascadia, and exceedingly traditional retail politics. It’s a vision of a cooperative future set in a corporate and governance ecosystem that requires selfishness. Equity touted by people who started at COP26 and stopped in six other countries over the last week to get here. It is an embrace of artificial intelligence and data mining that reinforces averages, yet purports to celebrate diversity and intrinsic human value. Telecom and tech companies being asked to disrupt themselves. It is demanding consensus to support an outlier idea. Dissonance on the level of planets bursting into flames.

This was brought into starkest relief by the concurrent natural disaster happening around Vancouver, and it couldn’t be more fitting. Record setting weekend rains collapsed hillsides that were laid bare by record setting fires that followed this summer’s record setting heat. Officials at the meeting gave updates on the emergencies and many attendees were blocked from getting to the conference in the first place.

Emergencies show the weak spot in every connected system. When those weak spots then break, it adds additional stress leading to further systems failing. The rolling failures become an event of their own, called a cascade. It wasn’t the earthquake or the tsunami, but the extended loss of power that resulted in Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. It wasn’t the cheap concrete or the natural gas explosion, but the collapse of the Deepwater Horizon that depressurized the pipe and released millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf. In neither place, however, could the end result have come without the cascading events leading up to them.

Cascadia is seeing cascading failures in natural disasters and daily life. The region’s inability to address congestion and housing puts thousands sleeping unsheltered and millions stuck in their soot spewing cars commuting to homes they still can’t afford. Weaponized property taxes allow jurisdictions to gobble up huge tracts of land by annexation, then to let them lie fallow under single family zoning because the town can’t afford to build sidewalks or run transit. Smug liberal sanctimony allows many to feel that they do plenty just by living here, thank you, so let’s have a reactionary electoral backlash. And then the choking wildfire smoke.

There is no level of response (or outrage, or despair) that adequately meets the current moment. Though combined for hundreds of deaths, this year’s cascading natural catastrophes are possibly the gentlest outcome that could be imagined between heat, fire, and now floods. Horrifyingly, in the future, they are going to mark a good year. Just like 2020 saw a half million deaths due to massive public health incompetence, this is the best it’s going to be for quite a while. And it’s awful and spurs us to try SOMETHING.

Disruption, not disruptive.

So, what if we understand Vision 2050’s Hub Cities as a “do something, anything” option in the face of rolling, perpetual catastrophe? The idea may offer a framework for something better than we got. Their three components — build a lot of housing, connected by fast surface transit, 30-50 miles outside urban cores — hit like 66% on the solution scale. Housing really good. Transit really good. Underdeveloped areas 30-60 miles outside of urban cores are some that flood or catch on fire. So that last part of going outside the existing cities is what we need to break apart. 

There are two ways of understanding the need to be outside of existing centers. Generously, Hub Cities can be described as land speculation. Congress came up with the idea 160 years ago to build railroads. Ebenezer Howard did it again 120 years ago. James Rouse did it poorly 50 years ago. Running infrastructure to a new town and using the development to pay for the extended line is not a new idea. But it’s an indication of the need for land-scale money. Not pennies-a-day operations money, but the scale of funds that can only come from increasingly valuable real estate. Perhaps because it’s not coming from somewhere else.

On the critical side, Hub Cities can be described as sprawling to escape heavy handed local control. We don’t like how long zoning takes, so this land outside your control looks very nice. This also is not a new idea, having been attempted by Industrial Revolution company towns, repeated by jurisdictions like Shoreline in 1995 to avoid annexation by Seattle, and floated most recently in Nevada by crypto companies. It’s also regularly tried inside jurisdictions through Public Development Authorities, to mixed results. 

Understanding these together with acknowledging who sponsors the Cascadia Innovation Corridor helps understand Hub Cities as a tech-world vision of disrupting governance and property taxes. Such an understanding is advanced by the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the three executives this week. It doesn’t talk about high speed rail. It talks about “ultra-high speed ground transportation.” That departure, according to Paula Hammond, of engineering firm WSP and co-chair of the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, was made so as not to “select a winning technology.” That reads as if nonsense vaporware like Hyperloop is still on the table. Cascadia innovation is chasing shiny things in the face of cascading global failure. I want to cheer on the future. This ain’t it. There’s the despair.

I try very hard to end conferences and articles on a slightly optimistic note. It’s really hard this time. Also, I’m a firm believer in Clarke’s First Law, which states, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” I don’t want to be the crotchety geezer yelling at (thickening, choking) clouds shooting down ideas just because they’re new.

The problem is that I’m not hearing really new, innovative ideas from the Cascadia Innovation Corridor. So this distinguished but ridiculous writer is not shooting them down because they’re impossible. I’m shooting them down because they’ve been tried and gave us the disastrous outcomes we are now trying to correct.

So, in lieu of optimism, let me offer a few things that are possible. It is very possible to take the good parts of Hub Cities – housing and transit – and do them immediately and repeatedly close to downtowns. It is very possible to build a train track instead of widen a highway. It is very possible to add extra units to a home. It is very possible open a store next to any house. It is very possible to pay taxes.

And if we do those things, it may be possible to breathe come 2050. 

The post Cascadia Innovation Attempts to Overcome Cascading Climate Dangers first appeared on The Urbanist.

Last winter, Texas’s electrical grid failed spectacularly following an unexpected, deep freeze while this summer’s heat and drought fanned the flames of California wildfires, forcing power cuts across the Golden State. In September, Hurricane Ida knocked out power for more than 1.2 million people across seven states, and the latest Gulf Coast storm left thousands in the dark in Texas. 

In response to the new reality of frequent extreme weather events, we need to address the underlying cause —climate change— as well as find better ways to respond to these crises. By transitioning from fossil fuel-powered transportation to electric vehicles, we can slow down and better prepare for climate change — at the same time.

When power outages strike, essential services like running water, heating and cooling often collapse. Electric vehicles could act as mobile batteries in emergencies to restore power to key homes and businesses.

A fully charged Proterra ZX5 transit bus can store up to 660 kilowatt-hours of power — enough to provide electricity to an average American household for more than 20 days. These “batteries on wheels” have the potential to become a key part of emergency response plans, improving local disaster resiliency. 

Currently, many households are forced to rely on portable gas-powered generators to provide electricity. If used indoors, these generators can cause deadly carbon monoxide poisoning within minutes. Tragically, carbon monoxide poisonings often spike after severe weather events, meaning that lingering power outages can be one of the deadliest parts of a storm or fire. Electric vehicles offer a safer alternative to these portable generators.

For electric vehicles to effectively distribute power, however, electrical infrastructure needs to be designed in a strategic way. Buildings and grids must have the capacity to both send power to and receive power from electric vehicles before the technology can perform this role. 

Beyond disaster relief, electric vehicles will play a crucial role in preventing more disasters from happening in the first place. Numerous studies have shown that replacing fossil-fuel powered vehicles with electric models, even though most of our energy supply is not yet renewable, would result in a dramatic reduction in transportation-based carbon pollution. 

Emissions from millions of fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks are directly contributing to the climate crisis — increasing the risk of weather disasters like hurricanes and wildfires. Electric motors use energy more efficiently than internal combustion engines, and can be powered using renewable solar and wind energy. 

As part of their response to the climate crisis, Congress and President Joe Biden are currently discussing investments to support electric vehicles. The bipartisan infrastructure deal includes $7.5 billion in funding for electric vehicle charging stations across the country, and $2.5 billion for electric school buses. 

That’s a great start, but we need to do more. Congress should provide $25 billion in funding for electric school buses to jumpstart the transition. We also need funding to upgrade other publicly-owned vehicle fleets like transit buses and postal delivery vehicles.

Public electric vehicle fleets can’t come quickly enough. In the short term, we need them the next time disaster strikes to save lives and get back on the road to recovery. Over the long term, transitioning to electric vehicles is necessary to ensure a safer, more livable climate for our planet’s future.

The post Electric Vehicles Could Help Combat Disastrous Power Outages first appeared on The Urbanist.

The engineering and technical experience in flood defences of Rotterdam and The Netherlands could help countries across the globe implement flood prevention strategies to fend off rising sea levels and more frequent, severe flood events brought on from climate change. Bloomberg Quicktake explains how.

The post Midweek Video: How Rotterdam’s Flood Defences Could Help Save Us All first appeared on The Urbanist.

Bloomberg QuickTake looks at how Paradise, California may pursue conversion of forestland and vacant exurban properties destroyed by wildfires into park space to stop future wildfires. Could this be a model for other areas that interface with wildlands and is it sustainable?

The post Sunday Video: The Price of Saving Paradise first appeared on The Urbanist.

An incredible amount of Cascadia is burnt or ablaze. More than three million acres have burned in California, one million acres in Oregon, and 800,000 acres and counting in Washington. To put this in perspective the five million acres up in smoke across the West Coast equate to more forest land than in the entire portfolio of Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR)–Washington has 45.6 million acres of land in all. It would seem unbelievable if we were not breathing the effects on a daily basis and choking on the proof.

Climate change’s terrible effects are upon us much faster than we imagined. Our poor environmental stewardship is increasingly looking like a runaway train and we badly need to build new tracks to avert utter catastrophe. Luckily, solutions exist.

One way we have gotten off track is that Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) tends to speed highway sprawl projects on their way and encourage copious amounts of parking in new buildings rather than encouraging emission-free transportation and sustainable building.

SEPA also does little to prevent rural and suburban development in areas vulnerable to fire. Dense infill housing projects and citywide reforms in Seattle have been challenged and delayed under SEPA. The wheels tend to be greased for sprawl, and squeaky for the walkable sustainable construction we need. To go along with SEPA safe harbors, local jurisdictions must create incentives for sustainable building projects, as Conor Bronsdon outlined.

Likewise, the Growth Management Act (GMA) is not doing enough to curb sprawl and encourage dense walkable city building. The Seattle metropolitan urban growth boundary is quite large and is predominantly single-family zoning therein, undermining the intent of the law. The smallest counties are exempt; medium-sized rural counties tend to implement the law half-heartedly and let sprawl continue. Groups like Futurewise fight to tighten up these county growth plans, but a more carefully crafted law wouldn’t need such constant gardening.

Futurewise is on the case with a campaign called Washington Can’t Wait to amend the GMA to promote walkable urban development and tighten up controls for sprawl and promote climate justice. Thinking it terms of urban planning is important because electrifying cars isn’t going to sufficient on its own. We also need to decrease vehicle miles traveled by moving people more efficiently with transit, biking, rolling, scooting, and walking.

Development encroaching on forest lands creates a multitude of problems. One issue is that it makes it much harder to do prescribed burns or let small forest fires happen to clear out underbrush. With development nearby, authorities douse fires immediately and tend to avoid the hassle of prescribed burns, given the greater risk of that going awry or eliciting complaints.

ProPublica traced the root of the wildfire problem to a century of misguided forest management practices:

“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.”

Another problem is that rampant wildfires are a huge financial hit to insurers, leading them to jack up rates to compensate. Nonetheless, after a fire, homeowners tend to rebuild even if they’re in indefensible locations. Local governments don’t seem intent on blocking them as it angers constituents and decreases their tax base. It could well be the insurers who finally put their foot down in the face of governmental paralysis, as The Daily Podcast of the New York Times discussed last Friday.

Even if authorities convince the public to go along with aggressive prescribed burning, where forests are particularly unhealthy or overgrown, safe prescribed burns will be challenging given the tinder box before us. The scale is also daunting.

That’s why Washington Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz created a 20-year forest health plan that relies on other forms of forest treatment, such at thinning unhealthy forests with sustainable logging techniques. Franz sought to link forest thinning to an economic incentive by promoting mass timber construction to create a market for the small-diameter trees that have to come out of forests to lower wildfire risk. The large trees left behind can anchor the forests as they age–some becoming healthy old growth forests once more.

The 20-year plan dropped in early 2019 and unfortunately Governor Jay Inslee and the Democrat-controlled Washington State Legislature did not move with the urgency needed to implement the plan. It’s a visionary plan that could treat 1.5 million acres by 2033 while creating sustainable and affordable housing and boosting lumber towns in the process. We shouldn’t just approve this plan, we should accelerate it and place even more emphasis on a mass timber building spree.

In 2018, 440,000 acres burned in Washington state and that’s likely to be double this year. When are we going to take this problem seriously and act with all haste?

We have designed powerful climate delay mechanisms into our government and political economy on many levels. But we can act quickly to break our car dependence and put better mechanisms for sustainable city-making–which incidentally also works a lot better without a glut of cars. For cities to thrive into the future, that’s the route we need to go.

The editorial board consists of Natalie Bicknell, Ryan Packer, and Doug Trumm.

The post Cascadia Needs to Change Its Ways to Keep from Burning Up first appeared on The Urbanist.