Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT)

Available Resources for Emergency Management

Regionwide Disaster (Earthquake, terrorist attack, volcanic eruption, lahars, tsunamis, large scale power failure and weather events such as rain, wind and snow, etc )

In the case of a widespread disaster, the WSDOTTrafficManagementCenter houses both traffic monitoring and radio operations. As such their abilities include:

  • Traffic monitoring cameras to locate problems
  • Access to Highway Advisory Radio System (HARS) and Variable Message signs (VMSs) to get messages out to motorists
  • Communications with Washington State Patrol (WSP), Fire and our Incident Response units
  • ITS infrastructure, cameras, historical data resource for freeway.
  • Communication lines with local media for widespread notification of public
  • Tunnel operations,including the fire suppression systems
  • Express Lane operations (reversal or closure)
  • Ability to coordinate IRT and maintenance crews for traffic control, either widespread or localized.
  • Ease of access to heavy equipment such as trucks, graders, etc.

Localized Disaster (Fire, explosion, bio-terrorism, power failure, weather events,etc.)

  • Ability to close off ramps to a particular location, should there be a need to contain a hazard and keep exposure to a minimum.
  • Ability to reverse the express lanes, if the need arose to move large numbers away from a hazard and not allow others to approach.
  • As above, could communicate messages to media and around the region.
  • Could post messages on HARS and VMSs.

WSDOT’s Limitations

Although our TrafficManagementCenter runs 24/7, in the event of a disaster, we are still limited by the amount of time it would taketo fully staff the center. Travel time to the center, as well time for employees totend to the safety of their families must be considered when setting expectations.

There is no single center for operations of arterials, so this would be quite limiting since in the event of an evacuation, since city streets would be mostly used and there would be little use of the freeways. Evacuation route planning has not been completed. We are working with the City Seattle to deal with the City Streets.

Not all our infrastructure may withstand an earthquake, even a minor one. Through downtown we have retrofitted our structures to a point, but it is not totally complete.

We are limited by the topography of the freeways being isolated between bodies of water.

During ice/snow events, a major limitation of ourcapabilities is that there are others on the road, which slows response times.

Power outages can happen during any type of disaster and can affect all of our resources. Most importantly the operation of the Traffic Management Center (TMC); signal operations; operation of the HARsystem andVMSs, and express lane operations.

  • One such example of wide spread power failure that was a challenge to the WSDOT was the winter storms of Dec. 2006. Power to many signals was out. We procured generators to operate many of the signals, but we also needed 24 hour personnel to man the generators to ensure non stop signal operations.