How Caltrans stopped BART’s dangerous power outage plan

This is a story about a potential disaster that was avoided during last weekend’s power outages and fires. About Caltrans doing the right thing to keep BART from creating a hazard.

If not for the state agency’s last-minute intervention Friday, the Bay Area’s largest commuter rail system would have shut down two lanes of Highway 24 — right in the heart of the pre-announced power outages and, it turned out, 1 ½ miles from a fire that forced evacuations of hundreds of homes on both sides of the freeway.

While BART plans to open new service to the South Bay by year’s end, it’s upgrading the track system for the remainder of the 47-year-old system. For the past two months, with Caltrans’ approval, BART has shut down two eastbound lanes almost every other weekend to stage cranes as part of track replacement around the Lafayette station.

From the onset, the project has been a disaster, another example of BART’s self-absorbed approach that seems oblivious to the effects of the transit agency’s decisions on others.

Nobody doubts the track replacement work needs to be done. But, as previously noted in this column, BART didn’t bother to notify residents about a July test that closed the two lanes for 24 hours, creating a backup that peaked at 32 minutes.

And when the transit agency did launch the full weekend road closures on Aug. 17-18, they only gave five days’ notice, leaving residents little time to adjust their plans to avoid a main highway in and out of Central Contra Costa.

BART has insisted it needed to keep the two lanes closed for the entire weekend each time to get its work done on schedule. But, each time, usually in the afternoons, Caltrans says, it has insisted BART reopen both lanes because of 30-minute traffic backups on Highway 24.

Despite the disruption to its plans, BART had stayed on schedule — and had even canceled one of the weekend closures because the work was going faster than anticipated. Which raises the question of whether this work could have been done with less disruption to residents.

And which brings us to last Friday, when we knew dangerous high winds were expected over the weekend, and PG&E was planning power outages starting Saturday night in the same Central Contra Costa communities that BART would most impact with its lane closures.

BART staff was planning business as usual — closing the two lanes for the entire weekend unless the traffic backups hit the 30-minute threshold. “It’s still the plan to do the track work with lane closures this weekend,” spokesman Chris Filippi texted Friday.

Caltrans was prepared to let them do it. Until I called the state agency.

To me, it seemed irresponsible for Caltrans to allow the closures during the outages, leaving people stranded in their homes without power or air conditioning, or having to fight the backups if they wanted to find cooler areas with electricity.

And, of course, there was the safety issue. The wooded communities along Highway 24 present some of the greatest fire risk in the East Bay. Most of the escape routes lead to the freeway.

Fortunately, Caltrans was persuaded by my argument and ordered BART to end the lane closures at 5 p.m. Saturday, just before the power outages were scheduled to begin. Caltrans said BART could not resume the lane closures until the power outages were over, effectively blocking the transit agency from resuming work for the rest of the weekend.

As expected, the power went off Saturday night. And, then, on Sunday afternoon PG&E equipment malfunctioned near where the two fires broke out on both sides of Highway 24.

Residents were ordered to evacuate from 790 parcels, according to Lafayette officials. Traffic backed up densely on Highway 24 and along Pleasant Hill Road, the feeder thoroughfare from the two neighborhoods to the freeway.

Had lanes on Highway 24 been closed by BART work, that would have pushed more traffic onto feeder roads, exacerbating the congestion. One could debate exactly what the effect would have been. But that misses the point: This is the sort of scenario BART should have anticipated — and fortunately Caltrans eventually did.

As for the BART work that didn’t get done last weekend, the transit agency says it might need one future overnight lane closure to get it done. That’s a small price to pay. BART was lucky that its blindness to the potential for a traffic nightmare didn’t result in disaster.