As North Sounder has the latest in what seems like an endless series of mudslide cancellations, an anonymous alert reader sends this in:
This picture was taken back in December (not the current mudslide). It’s one of the few pictures where the news crew panned out to show one of the primary causes of these slides: a shameful history of bad land use regulations So, these folks got their nice view, and got their McMansion site stripped clear of any trees or foliage – and a whole bunch of other people continue to pay for it.
I don’t know if the specific house pictured was built last year, or in 1980, or in 1915, but I think his point stands. There’s no real policy prescription here, except to stop allowing stuff like this without considering the real costs to the thousands of people who use that rail line.
This is a shortsighted piece, in my opinion. Yes, there are landowners who abuse their land, and adjacent users land as well. What about years ago when there were less houses, and still had slides that caused problems for GN?
But as one who rides the train home home everyday to Mukilteo first, then by bus to Coupeville, the inherent geological makeup of this particular part of the sound is just nothin’ but mud for the most part.
Just look at the line north near B’Ham. Lots and lots of rock up there.
Though wanna-be environmentalists would be aghast at modifying the shoreline, streamlining the line between Ballard and Everett could be accomplished by building a right of way further away from the shoreline. Several curves could be outright eliminated. One more possible improvement would be to learn how to run this section as a singletrack route when the slides are bad. This would greatly improve train times.
That said, onto ST handling of disruption of service has been immensely better lately. They’ve learned how to co-ordinate better among train crews and the front office, and the guys and gals helping out on 4th Ave.
Thank you, ST. You are doing a better job, it shows, seriously.
Just assuming that something we know happens elsewhere (and makes sense) isn’t happening here is kind of silly.
Sure, back in the days before development was pushing to the edge of the tracks, we still had slides. But not with this frequency.
It’s well understood that a forest soaks up water much better than a grassy lawn. Development this close to the slope will cause more runoff, and thusly more slides.
We can’t stop the development. The only fix that’s ever gonna get built is artificially shoring up the slope. Moving the tracks to a causeway in the shallows would do the trick, too, but that’s unlikely to ever happen.
Your basis for determining that there were fewer slides in the past?
These layered slopes have a fair amount of very specific geotechnical complexity, and their stability during times of heavy rain are not determined by just what’s directly adjacent, but also by what’s further uphill.
Hike the back country in our wilderness areas and you’ll find dozens, and hundreds, of slides on steep slopes that clearly were not precipitated by nearby human disturbance.
The solutions are many, and any one solution is too simplistic for everywhere.
One could stabilize the hillsides, or correct the uphill drainage, or move the tracks outboard, or move the tracks upward (let the slides run under the tracks – re-establishing the natural processes that used to be at work before the shoreline was armored – at least until the slides start to include construction materials…) for example.
Not one fix, but many.
I do think the line should be moved inland in the long run. Sea level rise is only going to make the problems worse.
The seawall that protects the tracks has done more to disturb natural shoreline processes than residential development.
Good call on the land use issue. I’m sure that house has a swell view, but you shouldn’t be able to create that kind of runoff (giant slope of grass) into a slide-prone zone, especially when there is a strategically vital transportation link at the bottom of said zone.
P-I: State wants federal rail money for prevention
http://www.seattlepi.com/transportation/437155_mudslides15.html
Martin more or less admits that the reader’s argument is fallacious, but includes it anyway, and then doesn’t make any recommendations. And Anthony has no numbers to support his suggestion that slides aren’t any worse today with new development, but Martin and Lack Thereof don’t cite any sources for their suggestions that they have gotten worse either.
This La Nina winter has seen 20% more rain than usual since 1 Oct, and 90% more rain than usual this month. That alone might be enough to explain this being BNSF’s worst slide closure winter since ’96-’97—another La Nina winter with near-record snowfall. Or other factors such as increased development or clearcutting might to blame. I don’t know either way, and this post really says nothing on the issue.
Railroads likely keep track of the number of slide closures (and/or service days lost due to slides) each year, and rain totals for each year can be gotten as well. There might even be records of the “flashiness” of each winter’s rain events, which probably contributes to slide frequency. Has the number of slides increased over the years even after quantity and type of precipitation has been factored in? Are slides worse immediately after new swaths of virgin land are cleared for developments? Are slides more frequent in more developed areas, assuming geography is comparable? This is stuff that can be found out if people actually want to find it.
I agree that developments like the one pictured are almost certainly making things worse. And even if it isn’t, it certainly hasn’t made things better—and if we had better land use regulations, that might not be the case. The argument is definitely there to be made, but this post does a really bad job of doing it. The quality of the discussion needs to be better than this.
It’s no wonder there are so many slides onto the tracks. They were built along the shoreline next to bluffs which are prone to slides naturally. Not only did the tracks and seawall disturb the natural environment, they created a barrier along the coast between Seattle and Everett which makes the shoreline practically inaccessible to the public. Talk about undesirable land uses!
“There’s no real policy prescription here,”
Then here is one, sue the ever living shit out of the homeowner. Lost time, lost wages, whatever. Even if you never get a dollar make an example of him/her and tie up their dollars so that the next person thinks twice. If you do win, use the proceeds to shore up around the property.
My thought exactly. If that house was built above my home and that slide happened, the lawsuit would start the same day. One or two lawsuits to shore up land and the next people will think twice about building there (or at least would do so carefully).
Another issue that needs to be brought up, is that are these people fully within their property lines, or have they stayed onto BNSF property, removing trees, building swimming pools (saw the place with the pool next to the bluff on TV today, the slide happend right under it as a matter of fact!) etc. Without rebuilding the forest, improving dranage, adding slide walls and fences i’m not sure what else you can do, and all will be expensive.
I would be interested to know if anyone had done any preliminary studies on the identified slide areas, to see what it would cost to keep these from causing service interruptions to passenger rail service.
From looking at this project: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/SR522/UW/
(Check out the slideshow.)
It seems no one bats an eye about plunking down $45 Million to create another driveway.
That’s a pretty impressive retaining wall.
Speaking of which, we need to work on getting a Sounder Station included as part of the Point Wells development, if it happens. They’re right that, without anything like that, that two-lane road is going to be ridiculously overloaded. But that Sounder station would serve a whole lot of people and raise the overall Sounder North ridership considerably. Not to mention that it will have to be served with local bus service, which will be a pain because it’s in Snohomish County but can only be accessed from King.
I disagree. It’s a great place for a house. It’s not a good place for train tracks.
I’m no socialist, but having grown up around Long Island, New York, were miles and miles of coast line are public beaches, I’m really surprised at the very few coastal parks there are here around Seattle. Access to the water is really limited and private homes lock up almost all the Sound and Lake Washington coastline.
That said, I read yesterday that the railroad tracks were put there by railroad owners who wanted their passengers to get views at any price. It’s really a stupid route especially for freight trains to get from Seattle to Vancouver and Chicago.
I shudder to think what the maintenance costs are for this route, and also cringe when I think that Washington State is about to waste nearly 1 billion dollars in “High Speed” rail money to repair a terrible route like this.
The rail barons weren’t thinking of views when they built their lines along Puget Sound. They were simply looking for the cheapest route between the points they wanted to serve.
Between Seattle and Vancouver, BC it would cost far more than $1 billion to move the rail line inland. We’re unfortunately stuck with it.
Note that Pt. Defiance bypass will move the passenger routes inland between Tacoma and Olympia away from the slide prone bluffs.
Please re-read your railway and engineering history, folks. In the 19th century, the easiest railway route between any two points was constructed as close to level as possible. Since speed was not the premium it seems to be today, lots of curves were preferable to “up and down” routes. Follow the Great Northern route from St Paul to Seattle and, except for Stevens Pass, it is a gently graded 1700+ mile rail line – easy for the short, slow freights and slightly faster passenger trains of the late 19th Century, and still in use, with some significant modifications (Cascade and Libby tunnels) in a just few places.
You can thank Robert Moses’s obsession with automobiles for the bounty of parks on Long Island. Notice how all the public parks are on the south shore? That land wasn’t being used, and Moses turned it into parks for the rich Manhattanites. Also, much of the parkland is on barrier islands.
Try walking on the beaches on the North Shore and see how long it takes for a rich landowner to call the cops and have you removed.
California doesn’t allow building on its coastline, so there’s waterfront access everywhere. Washington decided to sell off its shorelines, at least on the Sound and lakes. I’m not sure if the ocean coast is the same, it’s too hard to get there without a car.
The railroads were given free land around the tracks which they could sell for a profit. So they laid the tracks in a kind of zigzag to cover the maximum land area rather than going in a straight line.
Waterfront views weren’t valued then like they are today. Not only were there railroads and highways built along the beach, but there were gas refineries on the Kirkland and Edmonds shorelines, and they weren’t sited there to give the workers a fine view.
It’s really unfortunate that the railroad lines in Pugetopolis don’t go where people are going. Sounder North bypasses the bulk of Snohomish County’s population. Sounder South makes a big detour through Auburn rather than going straight from Seattle to Tacoma. The Eastside BNSF doesn’t go through downtown Bellevue, although one could argue that’s Bellevue’s fault. The Burke-Gilman east of UW goes through a lightly-populated marginal area. The Empire Builder goes north to Everett and then east, and the Coast Starlight goes around Point Defiance rather than straight south from Tacoma. In other cities the original railroads go straight from destination to destination, and it’s easy to build commuter rail or metros right on them or next to them. But in Pugetopols the railroads go in all these out-of-the-way, lightly-populated places, so we have to build new rights-of-way to connect the population centers.
The Great Northern, which built the line that is the subject of discussion here, was 100% privately financed and did not benefit from land grants as the NP, CP, UP and others did.
The original proposal for Sounder was to run east from Everett and then down the Woodinville Sub from Snohomish, following the I-405 corridor to Tukwila, but that was shot down as the upgrades required along the line were too costly compared to slotting trains onto the existing BNSF mainline between Seattle & Everett.
Ever driven I-5 from South Seattle to Fife? Know how it makes the long climb up to the plateau at SeaTac, and then the long descent from SR 18 to Fife? That’s why the railroad goes by way of Auburn: It was flat. For the freight operations that built the original lines, the additional operating costs of going up-and-over to achieve an arbitrary straight line were far outweighed by the savings of compromising a little bit of time to go the level route.
The Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad’s line from Tukwila through Bellevue and Snohomish to Sumas was completed in 1891; Bellevue wasn’t incorporated until 1953 and, per Wikipedia, “prior to the opening of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge in 1940, Bellevue was a rural area with little development.” But, yes, go ahead and lay at least partial blame the railroad for not anticipating where the city’s core would grow a century later.
…because there are no other direct rail connections from downtown Seattle to the line over Stevens Pass.
…because the physical connections to accomplish that move efficiently won’t exist until ST’s D-to-M Streets project is completed (not to mention WSDOT’s Point Defiance Bypass project that will upgrade the tracks south of Lakewood to accommodate passenger trains). I say “efficiently” because, if you really wanted to avoid Point Defiance, you could pull trains down the Moon Yard, run the power around, and then head up the old NP mainline… or at least you could have until a portion of those tracks were abandoned to make way for Tacoma Link, which would otherwise have crossed them at grade at Pacific & 17th.
Perhaps because those “other” (unspecified) metropoli were more developed and faced fewer geographical constraints?
“But, yes, go ahead and lay at least partial blame the railroad for not anticipating where the city’s core would grow a century later.”
My phrasing may not have been clear but I meant, it was Bellevue’s fault for not building downtown around the railroad.
“…because there are no other direct rail connections from downtown Seattle to the line over Stevens Pass…. / won’t exist until ST’s D-to-M Streets project is completed (not to mention WSDOT’s Point Defiance Bypass project that will upgrade the tracks south of Lakewood to accommodate passenger trains)”
They don’t exist now, but they could have existed if the lines had originally been built that way.
And yes, I understand that population patterns change and Auburn may have been an important town that couldn’t be missed, and Everett likewise couldn’t be missed when the state’s population was smaller.
Mike, the rail corridors were built primarily as freight railroads and they make sense for that. Like DWHonan said, grade is more important than distance. But it’s also true that it was important to serve industrial sites, including ports. On the Eastside BNSF corridor, it was important to serve the Boeing and Paccar sites in Renton, the light industrial area in Bellevue near 116th NE, and similar areas around Totem Lake and Woodinville. If the railroad lines work well for passengers, it’s almost by accident.
…which would still bypass the bulk of Snohomish County’s population, maybe even more so.
No one seems to have mentioned in any of this discussion that mudslides block the tracks at most a handful of times throughout the year, 99% of which is in the winter. Spending millions upon millions to solve a problem for a small number of riders to prevent a dozen mudslides a year is a pretty poor use of money.
However, that doesn’t mean that Amtrak, Sound Transit and the BNSF should not pursue legal action against land owners who have strayed onto BNSF property, or affected their use of the property. Seems like the litigation potential there could pay for a dining car on the Sounders for use when everyone is stuck :-)
Thank you, DWHonan, for the excellent rebuttal.
There were more than a dozen mudslides just last week:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014539947_anotherslide.html
That’s true–it was a particularly bad week. I don’t recall in sixteen years a time when there have been this many mudslides all at once. All it takes is one slide to stop passenger trains for 48 hours, and during that time more may come down. Using Melonas’s figures, that would be 43 mudslides this week north of Seattle, but it shut down Sounder service for only five days (plus half a day on Friday the 11th–not sure if he is including that in his figures or the article). Even if this happened every year, would it be worth spending the millions?
Just to be clear, because I can see where my comments might be interpreted differently than the way I mean them, I am not saying it’s not a problem, or against solving it either. But there is only a limited amount of money to go around and I think any wise expenditure of public money on transportation should take into account the cost versus how many people it benefits. The simple fact of the matter in this case is that not that many people are affected that often throughout the year by mudslides.
Let’s not also forget that BNSF stands to gain a significant asset on it’s balance sheet if slide mitigation is installed at someone else’s expense. If the BNSF is genuinely concerned about this problem would they be asked to share the cost and spend their money to keep mudslides out of their freight trains’ way. A similar situation occurred when Sound Transit was asked to pay for switch heaters to keep trains moving during cold weather. Problem is Sound Transit pays for them but BNSF gets the benefit for all of it’s own trains.
But there is only a limited amount of money to go around and I think any wise expenditure of public money on transportation should take into account the cost versus how many people it benefits.
So where is the outcry over this project, the UW/Cascadia College entrance? http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/SR522/UW/
We spend an awful lot of time wringing our hands over non-automotive infrastructure expenditures, but strangely silent about projects like this.
I find it interesting from some of the comments that people assume transportation infrastructure is built to connect population centers, as if they evolved in that order.
It’s the other way around.
Transportation infrastructure defines the population centers.
Most old, large established cities are port cities, built on easily accessible, and easily navigable waterways. Gentle flowing rivers and calm bays and lakes made for ease of commerce. The people followed.
When the railroads began their competition with water-borne commerce, the simplest routes were ones already established, but just as important, controlling fuel and equipment expense made ‘water level routes’ the most desirable. Railroad towns not only included the already established port cities, but also the more inland, and convenient towns for either RR equipment maintenance, or things produced away from the immediate shorelines of waterways, farms and mining operations. They still followed as level a route possible.
Pedestrian infrastructure was not really ‘designed’ 100+ years ago. Your horse wasn’t a pet, it was also a means of living. Your ‘work vehicle’, so to speak. Old, pedestrian friendly towns weren’t smart growth, they were just dumb old-growth. They were designed around the other transportation equipment at the time… feet.
All produced their own variation of sprawl.
Since the proliferation of the automobile, the distances covered aren’t limited by either a transportation provider, rail or boat, or by muscle strength, but only by availability of fuel. Hence, more in-fill sprawl.
The current RR ROW is where it is because it was the best place to put it at the time it was built.
In actuality, building the interstates, especially through dense urban environments, was the most expensive and least desirable.
Since we’re no longer getting the influx of Federal road dollars like we were 10 years ago, we’re now seeing what things really cost. The sticker shock of tolls is one example.
The value of this rail line is whatever we think it should be … to the public, but the finance model is exactly opposite the one we used for roadways and waterways.
Railroads own their own infrastructure. Trucking companies and ships do not.
My own wonderful solution
From looking at that picture, I’ve come up with a solution we can all get behind, even Norman!
BNSF Railway can cope with the mudslides in a reasonable manner, they clean them up in a few hours, and they’re running freight past them, albeit a bit slower at first. The problem is all the lawyers that come tumbling down the hills along with the trees and whatnot, taking root besides the tracks.
It’s a liability issue that has them imposing the 48 hour moratorium. And remember, the Wellington Train Disaster still holds the record for the most people killed (~100) in the US. Put a Cascades train, with 257 people on-board, in the Sound, and that becomes a slightly bigger problem.
BNSF doesn’t benefit as much from public investment in retaining walls as much as the uphill property owners do. It is also my understanding that a few of the slides have come down from public properties (county or city owned).
Which gave me this idea:
If we are investing public money, it should be for the public benefit, therefore, where the land is privately owned, create a publicly accessible scenic roadway along the bluff (eminent domain will work nicely).
The public on the train benefits, the public in their cars benefit, the private property owners benefit, since they don’t have to worry about their property disappearing anymore.
And if offending the sensibilities of our rich friends is an issue, having to view all those common folk along with the Sound views, after all, just build the roadway about 16 feet below the edge of their property.
See, problem solved!!
Maybe NOT: