How to Fix an Earthquake in Four Days

Action

For many people, earthquakes and natural disasters trigger the same response. People rush to make sure their families are safe and their homes are still standing. Immediately after the quake, the majority of DOT&PF workers in Anchorage left to check in on their families and homes before quickly returning to the office to begin working. McCarthy, meanwhile, was walking into Anchorage’s maintenance station. Because the Anchorage DOT&PF office was evacuated due to overwhelming dust caused by ceiling tiles falling in, she stayed in place at the maintenance station for several hours. Ironically, it was an ideal place for her to be during the earthquake, as her placement in the city allowed her to get started on what needed to be done to start restoring order around the area.

“When I was over there, it was all hands on deck,” McCarthy says of the initial reaction. “They called every operator and said, ‘As soon as you know your family and house are safe, we need you in here.’”

DOT&PF has operators who are trained to inspect roads and others who are trained to inspect bridges. McCarthy says that within minutes of the earthquake hitting, those operators were out on the road taking inventory and pictures. Back at the DOT&PF office, however, workers weren’t able to return inside the building until they were given the green light that the dust was no longer a cause for concern. DOT&PF employees were allowed back into the office just after 11 a.m. on the day of the earthquake.

“Once the dust had literally settled, our private sector contractors immediately started calling in and saying, ‘What can we do to help?’” says McCarthy. “We had already anticipated those questions and started asking questions: ‘What equipment do you have available right now? How many people do you have that you can call in, and how quickly can you get to point X?’ We knew where the cracks were in the road system and what contractors were available to go. We literally had a contractor on scene by 11 a.m. that morning, on the Minnesota on-ramp, the one that was made famous by some of the photos that came out.”

Prioritizing

One of the first major decisions DOT&PF was forced to make was whether to apply asphalt or gravel to the roads that were in desperate need of repairs. DOT&PF was hesitant to choose gravel because that would have required its operators to constantly maintain and re-grade them. DOT&PF’s private sector partners, including Agg Pro, immediately started their asphalt plants, which proved to be a game-changer in the recovery process.

“It’s hard to do asphalt in the wintertime,” McCarthy says. “Normally, an asphalt plant takes, on the short side, anywhere from seven days to ten or fourteen days to get it up and running. You have to melt the asphalt oil, and that takes a while, and then you have to make sure the actual material is clear of ice and snow.”

Within days, DOT&PF had asphalt at its disposal. But there were still various cracks and gashes throughout the roadways that required a team effort between DOT&PF and its private sector operators to fill. DOT&PF had between thirty and fifty workers working around the clock for a period of four or five days. Other operators, such as Mass Excavation, sprang into action and helped transport gravel to the areas that needed it the most.

“When we were hauling gravel from our pit facility, the maximum trucks that we could put in there were seventeen because that’s as fast as we could load them,” says Mark Erickson, general manager of Mass Excavation, which hauled an average of 400 to 600 yards of gravel per hour during the peak response time. “That production of 400 to 600 yards an hour is amazing production by most standards. We were building the road all the way back up, basically filling in hole after hole.”

Mass Excavation also played a critical role in hauling the saturated soils that gave way, particularly around Mirror Lake and on Dowling Road. Although he wasn’t making repairs during the 1964 earthquake, Erickson says the similarities between that legendary disaster and the one Anchorage experienced in November were striking.

“It’s the same thing that devastated Anchorage back in 1964,” he says. “You have to have the appropriate soils and water situations, but liquefaction turns the underlying soils into quicksand and won’t support anything. Then the world falls into it. It’s not very often that you get to see the actual liquefaction and the damage it does. It’s really pretty impressive when you get to see the force of nature and how the world can just fall away.”

McCarthy says DOT&PF was taken aback to see how quickly the roads returned to being functional, something she notes wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for the department’s preexisting relationships with partners who were eager to jump in and help out at a moment’s notice.

“We were pleasantly surprised by how quickly we all worked together to get the road system together,” she says. “I don’t think we could’ve done that if we didn’t have good, cooperative relationships with the private sector going into this.”

Planning

Although Anchorage and the surrounding region are much improved from the earthquake’s damage, there’s still more work to be done. A complete reevaluation will have to be conducted this summer, and Anchorage-based DOT&PF workers are encouraging locals to be prepared for even more construction down the line.

“For the general public, things probably started feeling normal on a lot of the roads in that first week after the earthquake,” says Sean Baski, an Anchorage-based design project manager for DOT&PF. “Those roads are paved now, so it might feel like everything is done. It’s not. When you have frozen ground, it holds a lot of things together. You’ve got asphalt and other things that are nice and solid structures, but when something destabilizes underneath it, that asphalt and that frozen layer help bridge over failures. Come this spring, when everything starts thawing out and that big frozen layer isn’t bridging over things, it’s not going to be pretty. Things could start falling apart again. We’re preparing ourselves right now so we can respond to it, but there’s a huge unknown factor for us because we’re not sure what we’re going to have to respond to.”

There is more work to be done, but those who helped with the earthquake relief are also proud as they reflect on all they’ve already accomplished.

“We definitely made a mark on the rest of the nation,” Erickson says. “That’s what I think is really great. It was an overall collective group that came together to demonstrate to the rest of the country that in Alaska, when these things happen, we basically just make sure everything is safe at home and then we get back to work putting the world back together. It took a lot of contractors and engineers and the DOT&PF and the MOA to show what we can do. It was a pretty cool collaboration, and that’s the Alaskan way.”