It seems quite plausible that a severe earthquake would cripple Portland's many bridges. All were designed and built before the 1980's and while I doubt that the newer ones would fail altogether, the net effect of serious damage to spans left standing should not be underestimated. The collapse of just one piece of roadway ont he SF Bay bridge effectively made that bridge unusable. As integral as our bridges are to almost every facet of our city's day-to-day life, their loss would represent a disruption every bit as profound as losing electricity and telecommunication.
Given this importance, their disruption should be as brief as possible. To that end I would suggest:
1. Having engineers in Portland with the right qualifications be well versed in the construction of our ciy's bridges, and pre-armed with the plans and tools to rapidly triage the many spans and identify unsafe conditions AND spans that can be brought back to full or limited use.
2. Identify citizens and companies with larger watercraft at various points along the riverfront and form an emergency water-taxi brigade to allow cross river traffic in the event that all bridges are rendered unpassable.
3. Having plans in place with the closest combat engineer unit to Portland, to rapidly move floating bridge(s) into Portland to replace or augment offline spans in the short term. Sites where bank access would allow this should be identified in advance.
4. Bring together local civil engineers (from above), construction firms, and appropriate heavy industry (Gunderson, Esco etc) to form a pool of the knowledge, manpower, and materials to quickly effect whatever repairs are possible to put bridges back into service.
That's it, in a nutshell. I would hate for our city to be effectively bisected for weeks after a disaster . . . awhen we may well have the talent right here to at least begin to put things right again.
re: How would you improve Portland?
It seems quite plausible that a severe earthquake would cripple Portland's many bridges. All were designed and built before the 1980's and while I doubt that the newer ones would fail altogether, the net effect of serious damage to spans left standing should not be underestimated. The collapse of just one piece of roadway ont he SF Bay bridge effectively made that bridge unusable. As integral as our bridges are to almost every facet of our city's day-to-day life, their loss would represent a disruption every bit as profound as losing electricity and telecommunication.
Given this importance, their disruption should be as brief as possible. To that end I would suggest:
1. Having engineers in Portland with the right qualifications be well versed in the construction of our ciy's bridges, and pre-armed with the plans and tools to rapidly triage the many spans and identify unsafe conditions AND spans that can be brought back to full or limited use.
2. Identify citizens and companies with larger watercraft at various points along the riverfront and form an emergency water-taxi brigade to allow cross river traffic in the event that all bridges are rendered unpassable.
3. Having plans in place with the closest combat engineer unit to Portland, to rapidly move floating bridge(s) into Portland to replace or augment offline spans in the short term. Sites where bank access would allow this should be identified in advance.
4. Bring together local civil engineers (from above), construction firms, and appropriate heavy industry (Gunderson, Esco etc) to form a pool of the knowledge, manpower, and materials to quickly effect whatever repairs are possible to put bridges back into service.
That's it, in a nutshell. I would hate for our city to be effectively bisected for weeks after a disaster . . . awhen we may well have the talent right here to at least begin to put things right again.