Posts about Earthquake

For 150 years, the AFRH has offered veterans a restful retreat amidst a cluster of striking historical buildings. Most well-known nowadays among Soldiers' Home buildings is the once-endangered Lincoln Cottage, a Gothic Revival country house built by banker George W. Riggs (1813-1881) in 1842 and used by President Abraham Lincoln as a summer retreat.

It has been named a national monument, restored, and made into a fascinating museum by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. But the attention given to the Lincoln Cottage seems to have pushed the rest of the Soldiers' Home buildings into undeserved obscurity.

To appreciate the Sherman Building, one has to start at the beginning of the story, with the founding of the Soldiers' Home. As Matthew Pinsker has explained, the institution was a long time coming. There had been talk in Congress as early as the 1820s of establishing a facility to care for disabled veterans who were unable to support themselves, but little came of it.

In the 1840s, Maj. Robert Anderson (1805-1871)—best known as the commander of the besieged Union forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in the opening days of the Civil War—mounted a determined effort to establish a soldiers' retreat. At his urging a bill to create a military asylum to aid such unfortunates was introduced in 1841, and much debate was held on the subject in the early 1840s, but again no asylum was actually established.

The turning point came as a result of the invasion of Mexico City in 1847 by American forces led by Gen. Winfield Scott (1786-1866). True to historical form, the conquering army extracted a tribute ($150,000) from the good people of Mexico City to spare their fine city from being looted and destroyed.

Rather than turning the money over to the War Department, Scott then took the extraordinary step of putting $100,000 of it into a bank account to be reserved for establishing an Army asylum, "subject to the order of Congress." The War Department tried to get the money back but was blocked by Senator Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) of Mississippi—later to become president of the Confederacy—who shepherded a bill through Congress that finally established the asylum in 1851.

The law establishing the military asylum designated two other locations, in Mississippi and Louisiana, but the one in Washington was the only one that lasted. Using the Mexican tribute money, Congress bought the 200-acre country estate of banker Riggs, including his Gothic Revival cottage, and later purchased additional properties, including the adjoining Harewood estate of Riggs' partner, William W. Corcoran (1798-1888), ultimately creating a 500-acre bucolic, wooded reservation. As originally established, the Soldiers' Home welcomed veterans of the regular army with 20 or more years of service as well as disabled veterans with any amount or type of service.

The first inmates of the military asylum lived in the old Riggs cottage beginning in 1852, but clearly more room was needed. The asylum's board authorized construction of a new main hall to accommodate up to 250 residents as well as two other large cottages, all to be clustered around the Riggs cottage near the northwest corner of the huge property. Lt. Barton S. Alexander (1819-1878), an experienced Army engineer who would later have a key role in the Civil War defenses of Washington, was chosen to oversee the construction.

The new main hall would later be named Scott Hall, after Gen. Winfield Scott, and it has remained the centerpiece of the Soldiers' Home until this day. Construction began in 1852 and continued for five years. For its design, Lt. Alexander imitated James Renwick's Smithsonian Institution building, now known as the Smithsonian Castle, a triumph of the "picturesque" mode of architecture promoted by Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852).

Picturesque buildings aimed to use eclectic designs based on historical architectural styles to blend in with their natural settings. The picturesque precedent fit the new Soldiers' Home building perfectly, situated as it was on top of an idyllic wooded hilltop with sublime views of the capital city. Its Romanesque-arched windows, wistfully reminiscent of a medieval abbey nestled in the remote countryside, gave dignity and architectural flair to what could have been a drab government dormitory.

While the Castle was made of red sandstone, Scott Hall used white New York marble. Its construction was overseen by Gilbert Cameron, a master builder and stonemason from New York whom Renwick had  brought to Washington in 1847 to work on the Smithsonian project. As completed in 1857, the building was two stories tall with cast-iron balconies, a large clock tower rising up at its center, and a stately, arched front porch.

Once Scott Hall and the other two new cottages were complete, Soldiers' Home found itself—temporarily—with more than enough room. The commissioners decided to build goodwill by offering to provide accommodations to President Buchanan in the summertime as a retreat from the stifling heat and humidity of downtown Washington. Buchanan stayed in one of the new cottages rather than the original Riggs house, where the Home's superintendent lived.

When the Lincolns arrived, they wanted the Riggs house. One suspects that Mary Todd Lincoln was behind this decision. Abraham Lincoln enjoyed staying at the cottage and was said to have drafted the Emancipation Proclamation there. Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur summered there as well. James and Lucretia Garfield had been planning to spend the summer of 1881 at Soldiers Home, but they never got the chance; Garfield was felled by an assassin's bullet at the Baltimore & Potomac train station on the Mall in July 1881.

As originally built, Scott Hall quickly proved to be too small, and the building was remodeled in 1869 by adding a third floor under a fashionable, Second-Empire style mansard roof. The building was then remodeled again in 1887 after a large annex had been constructed behind it. The resulting structure, completed in 1890, is even more castle-like than before, with crenellated parapets and a truly monumental Richardson-Romanesque clock tower.

At 320 feet, Scott Hall boasts the third highest elevation in Washington, DC. The vast grounds of the Soldiers' Home surrounding it were kept open to the public after it was built, and a network of scenic roads was constructed that made the property a great destination for a Sunday outing, especially before the roads and amenities of Rock Creek Park were developed. As described in Joseph West Moore's Picturesque Washington (1887):

A short distance from Washington, on the Rock Creek road, is the Soldiers' Home, a most beautiful sylvan retreat where the aged and invalid soldiers of the regular army can pass their days in peace and comfort. There are few finer rural estates in the land, and it is often called "the Central Park of Washington," as it is constantly open to the public, and over its five hundred acres of beautifully diversified hill and dale, every one can wander at will, enjoying the charming views and attractive surroundings.

Within the grounds there are seven miles of drives on broad, well-made roads, shaded in summer by gigantic oaks with luxuriant leafage; and there are lakes with swans, long stretches of meadow-lands, handsome arbors perched on hills, whence can be obtained delightful prospects of the country for several miles; ornate villas, statuary, and various adornments. It is, indeed, a pleasant spot, with plentiful means for peaceful enjoyment, and, doubtless, many a "weary pilgrim on life's devious course," as he strolls through these grounds almost envies the superannuated warriors their privilege of residing here.

Soldiers' Home has undergone many changes in the intervening years. Many buildings have been added; much land has been lost. When large new buildings, a dormitory and hospital, were completed in 1954, the Scott Hall name was transferred to the new dormitory, and the historic Scott Hall became the Sherman Building. Safety concerns then led to the closing of the grounds to the public in 1968.

The complex used to include a large and productive dairy farm, worked, in part, by some of the residents. The dairy farm and other land located to the south of the property—40 percent of the Home's acreage—was lost in the 1960s when it was appropriated for development of a large hospital complex that now includes the Washington Hospital Center, Children's National Medical Center, the National Rehabilitation Hospital, and the local Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The land grab also included acreage for the extension of North Capitol Street and Irving Street.

Renamed the Armed Forces Retirement Home in 2001, the now-venerable institution receives no taxpayer money to fund its operations, relying instead on a 50-cent weekly payroll deduction contributed by all active enlisted military personnel. To earn more income, the home developed a master plan, approved in 2008, that calls for development of some of its underutilized property. An early version of the plan was scaled back in response to concerns about density and historic preservation.

Last Tuesday's earthquake only added to the Home's financial challenges. According to Carrie Barton, an historic preservation specialist with EHT Traceries, Inc., a number of carved stone pieces from the Sherman Building's pinnacles and crenellated parapets fell off, either inward through ceilings or outward to the ground. Stone masons were marking and cataloging the pieces for eventual repair.

More seriously, the building's iconic tower was severely compromised. It sustained major cracks and was leaning toward one side. An emergency effort was undertaken on Saturday to stabilize it as Hurricane Irene approached, but engineers were uncertain whether it could be repaired or would need to be entirely rebuilt.

This coming week, engineers expect to develop a plan for how to proceed with the building's restoration. Additional photos of the earthquake damage can be found on the DC Preservation League's Facebook page.

Cross-posted at Streets of Washington.

Roads are a very flexible form of transportation, but are inefficient in their use of space. Each car takes up a lot of room. The New York Subway's 22 tracks carry as many people as at least 167 lanes of car tunnels would.

If people drove evenly throughout the day, the road network would work optimally, but they don't. Buses and trains work better for moving people in a shorter time period to a small number of locations, because they cost more to run but can fit more people in a smaller space.

There are ways to make the road more efficient. More people could occupy each car. That's the logic behind the HOV rules and slugging on I-395 and other roads. Thanks to slugging and high bus volume, 95/395 is one of the most efficient roadways for its size in the nation (but will actually get less efficient with HOT lanes).

Instead of pushing more carpooling, VDOT actually waived the HOV restrictions on its freeways on Tuesday. That doesn't make a lot of sense. It's like they just threw their hands up and said, "Wow, earthquake! Let's just ignore everything we do to make our roads work better!"

If we knew ahead of time that we'd have to evacuate DC in a hurry one day, but didn't know when, we might actually plan for stricter HOV restrictions than usual. Take a few main arteries and make them exclusively HOV-3 or HOV-4 for the evacuation. Ask workers and residents to find "evacuation buddies" who work in the same office or live in the same inner neighborhood. These people would share the car when evacuation time came.

Once those carpools get to suburban residential areas, people will have to get home, but depending on the type of disaster, just getting everyone out might be most critical. The drivers can give rides that one time to their passengers, or they can wait in places like libraries for family members to pick them up.

Buses could also use the HOV roads, allowing them to travel much faster back to commuter lots and make a return trip to pick up even more people.

Not surprisingly, advocates for more roads and sprawl, like the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, immediately jumped on the issue to call for new Potomac River bridges as part of their long attempts to build an Outer Beltway. Such bridges wouldn't actually alleviate existing traffic congestion, but would instead just drive more sprawl development and make the evacuation challenge that much harder.

During the earthquake, Ezra Klein cleverly tweeted, "This earthquake has clear policy implications that back up my previously held political opinions." That's certainly true for NVTA.

I actually learned something from the earthquake that doesn't back up previously-held opinions: we can't count on Metrorail for an emergency. Especially with today's safety concerns, Metro is going to err on the side of limiting its operations in unusual circumstances. That's probably the right move if it's not a matter of life and death. But it means we need to think about evacuations another way.

We also need to think about when evacuations are necessary. Often they're not. One of the best things the federal government can do is not to send everyone home at the exact same time. Instead, the response from OPM seems to be to pull the "everyone go home" handle at any sign of trouble. We know that this causes gridlock.

DDOT Director Terry Bellamy said at a press briefing, "You can never build your way out of an event. I know there was a lot of talk about building more bridges across to Virginia, buidling more bridges into Maryland, but you never know where the event is going to occur," the WBJ reported.

Transportation Planning Board coordinator Ron Kirby told the Post, "Not only can [sending everyone home at once] not be done, we should not try it. ... If you give [people] very good timely information, they are going to make their own decisions in ways, in general, that are going to be better for them and better for the system as a whole."

Kirby also faults Metro for not communicating more; he might not have been on Twitter, because they actually did an excellent job of communicating there. They also sent multiple press releases out over their press list throughout the afternoon and evening. If you were at a train station or on a bus, was communication good or bad there?

The best way of all to get home after a major event like an earthquake? Walk or bike, if you can.

A sequence of great earthquakes occurred in the Mississippi Embayment in 1811 and 1812. They were noticed by people over an area of 2 million square miles, including DC. According to old records, city residents were "badly frightened."

According to USGS, several eastern states and DC felt a March 1828 earthquake. Although no damage occurred, it was reported to be "violent" in DC and Baltimore. John Quincy Adams, the 6th President, penned the following account in his diary just after he felt the shock at the White House:

March 9, 1828. There was this evening the shock of an earthquake, the first which I ever distinctly noticed at the moment when it happened. I was writing in this book, when the table began to shake under my hand and the floor under my feet. The window shutters rattled as if shaken by the wind, and there was a momentary sensation as of the heaving of a ship on the waves. It continued about two minutes, then ceased. It was about eleven at night. I immediately left writing, and went to my bedchamber, where my wife was in bed, much alarmed.

People along the Atlantic Coast from DC to South Carolina felt a moderate shock in August 1861, probably centered in Virginia or North Carolina. Throughout most of the area, it was strong enough to awaken people, and to rattle doors and windows. Residents reported two shocks at five second intervals.

A quake in September 1884 near Columbus, Ohio, was distinctly felt by city workmen on top of the then unfinished Washington Monument, 500 feet above ground. Virginia's strongest quake to date, more popularly known as the Giles County (Virginia) earthquake, DC in May 1897. Near its epicenter near Pearisburg, the quake cracked old brick houses, threw bricks from chimney tops, and opened slight ground fissures.

A moderate April 1918 tremor in the Luray, Virginia, area reportedly broke windows in DC. Earth sounds could be heard over a very large area. The quake also broke windows and badly cracked plaster in the Shenandoah Valley.

A magnitude 7 earthquake in Canada's St. Lawrence River region shook a 2 million square mile area in February 1925. The shock waves were reportedly felt in DC. Another Canadian earthquake, a 6.2 tremor in November 1935, caused minor damage in New York and was felt as south as Washington.

Much of this information comes from the Earthquake Information Bulletin, Volume 2, Number 4, July-August 1971. Thanks to the H-DC list for the suggestions.