Bay Area airports expect chaos after next big quake

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http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/stories_news/sjbayports_20010311.htm Published Sunday, March 11, 2001

Bay Area airports expect chaos after next big quake

Experts say that despite preparation, major damage is practically inevitable after a powerful temblor By Aaron Davis SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

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Ten thousand passengers crammed into 50 airliners jetting toward the Bay Area. It's a snapshot of local air traffic that repeats almost every hour of every day.

But what happens when the ground beneath starts to shake?

In a big quake, air traffic controllers would call off arriving planes and dive for safety as control tower windows explode and runways rip apart at their geological seams.

That's what happened in Seattle last month. It's what happened at Bay Area airports during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and what might happen again at any time.

Although tens of millions of airport dollars have gone into disaster planning and earthquake retrofitting since the Bay Area's benchmark '89 shaker, regional airports would still largely be flying by the seat of their pants in the first few hours after a quake.

"If it was a major deal, we'd just wing it," said Kyle Johnson, spokesman for air traffic controllers at Oakland International. "We'd go stand on top of a building somewhere with some radios and a cell phone and land some planes -- assuming the runways are still there."

Throughout the Bay Area, and across the nation, the Seattle quake heightened concerns over earthquake readiness at major airports, especially in terms of transporting the injured, medical supplies and recovery personnel.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association is calling for inspections of all Federal Aviation Administration control towers throughout the quake-prone Western United States after three of the four support beams holding up Seattle-Tacoma International's control tower buckled and almost all its windows shattered during the Feb. 28 temblor.

Over the past decade, passenger terminals at the Bay Area's three major airports have been retrofitted at great cost to improve safety. San Francisco's new international terminal, for instance, was designed to slide nearly 2 feet in any direction to better absorb the shock of a quake.

But major damage to runways and control towers is practically inevitable in a big quake, engineers and aviation officials say:

In Oakland, the next big quake along the Hayward fault brings a 61 percent chance that damage to the airport's runways would close the facility for a month or more, according to a government report. During the Loma Prieta quake, centered 40 miles from the airport, Oakland's main runway suffered cracks up to 3 feet wide. That runway took six months to fix. Oakland's 10-story control tower is almost 40 years old. The structure is shifting, causing windows to crack in the tower every couple of years, Johnson said. The FAA has plans to build a new tower, but funding troubles may delay its construction for another two years.

At San Francisco International, where computer consoles crashed through control tower windows and fell four stories onto the roof of the passenger terminal below during Loma Prieta, a major quake along the San Andreas fault could render its tower useless. The portions of San Francisco's runways built atop bayfill could sink a foot or more during the next big quake, creating a deadly hazard for arriving planes. The airport keeps a fleet of construction vehicles on site to immediately begin leveling its runways after a quake.

In addition, airport disaster coordinators say a quake in the next six months could catch them off guard because they have not yet tested emergency plans at the new international terminal.

At San Jose International, air traffic controllers would be "running around like ants, not knowing where to go," if hit with a big quake, said Rich Burton, spokesman for San Jose controllers. He and FAA officials say the airport has no up-to-date plan for where they would set up a temporary control center after a quake. During the Seattle quake, air traffic controllers were forced to evacuate the tower. Under their emergency plan, they set up a temporary control center at a nearby jet hangar and landed planes using hand-held radios. The FAA has lauded Seattle's earthquake preparedness plans.

Such plans don't exist at San Jose International, according to the airport's chief FAA administrator, Patricia Meza.

"There's not a specified location right now. I'm assuming it would go somewhere with a visibility to the runway," she said during an interview earlier this month. "But it would probably take a few days to get that together."

San Jose has a 1 in 3 chance of surviving a severe quake unscathed in the next 30 years, according to a recent report by the Association of Bay Area Governments. Helping its chances: a control tower that's barely 8 years old and a $64 million runway construction project designed so the landing strip can stretch during a quake.

But in the moments right after a strong quake, all three airports would look the same, said Jeanne Perkins, an earthquake expert who wrote the association's report. Each airport would immediately shut down to assess the damage, and a whole lot of improvising would take place to get the scores of planes heading toward the Bay Area safely on the ground.

So even with the FAA's guidelines and checklists, the first few hours after a disaster would likely be chaotic, no matter how much planning is done.

Locally, the FAA's guidelines call for regional air traffic facilities in Oakland and Fremont to coordinate emergency operations, said Harvey Hartmann, FAA support manager in Fremont. That's complicated by the fact that airlines and pilots have the final say on where they land.

During Loma Prieta, planes with extra fuel were diverted as far away as Seattle and Los Angeles, with most going to closer airports. Some San Francisco-bound flights from abroad landed in Sacramento, but passengers were not permitted to get off the plane because that airport did not have customs and immigration facilities.

It's likely the next big quake to hit the Bay Area will shut down at least one of the three major airports for an extended period of time, Perkins said. But with the thousands of daily flights that enter and exit the region each day, it's not clear how the other two airports would compensate.

"It's the big picture that's a problem rather than each airport," Perkins said. "The airports tend to view themselves as self-contained islands and don't have an integrated plan for how Bay Area aviation would recover if one or more airports sustains long-term damage."

It also remains to be seen how drastically the Bay Area's economy might be affected by a slowdown in air travel after a major quake.

In Seattle, the Boeing Co. is nearly two weeks behind in delivering new planes. In the Bay Area, it wouldn't be new planes, Perkins said, but Silicon Valley's technological products that might be grounded after a quake.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 11, 2001


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