Seattle rapid response team has been quietly training, already helping drivers
Oct 25, 2018, 8:42 AM | Updated: 11:29 am
Seattle DOT has five of these trucks to help clear traffic incidents in the city. (KIRO Radio, Chris Sullivan)
(KIRO Radio, Chris Sullivan)
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan promises that the days of over-turned fish trucks shutting down Seattle for hours is over. A beefed-up rapid response team is now on the job.
In fact, Seattle’s new rapid response team has been training, under the radar, for a few years. And team members have already been helping out Seattle drivers in need.
“People are so relieved when they see you show up,” said rapid response team member Marcus Potts. “You pull up. You have your lights on. You have your board going. You get out. You have a nice smile. You have a bright jacket on, and they’re like ‘wow he’s here.'”
The problem
We all remember the great fish truck debacle of 2015, where a truck over-turned on the Alaskan Way Viaduct. It took nearly five hours just to get it back on its wheels and another four hours to get it out of the way. We then found out that the city really had no plan to respond to such a crisis, and when it did, city leaders were more worried about damaging the truck than getting traffic moving.
Then there was Crabpocalypes on the viaduct one year later. That took seven hour to fully open the road.
On Wednesday, the Seattle mayor said the days of allowing accidents and other incidents snarl city traffic for hours — sometimes leaving drivers trapped on the road — are gone.
(Chris Sullivan)
“I can tell you what the policy is today,” she said. “If nobody’s hurt, we’re getting things out of the street.”
Life safety comes first, and next on the list is getting traffic moving again.
“One of the things that we need to do better is clearing traffic problems,” Durkan said. “For every minute that we have a fender-bender stuck in the road, it’s seven minutes of backup. So every minute that we delay our response we have more backup.”
The solution: Rapid Response Team
The mayor’s front line of defense: a handful of city employees and five response team trucks, just like the 75 IRT trucks the state uses. They will push cars out of the way. They will give you gas. They will give you a jump. They will get the roads re-opened.
The city has been running these trucks, quietly, for a few years to get them up to speed for this week’s official launch. They have trained with the Washington Department of Transportation and the state patrol.
For drivers, like Marcus Potts, sometimes they are the first help to find stranded drivers. He told me about finding a stranded driver while rolling to a call in West Seattle recently. It was dark. It was raining, and the car was stalled with no lights.
“I was able to get him some help and get him up and going,” he said.
Potts has worked for the city for about 25 years. He took this job because he enjoys helping people. One of the more unique features of Seattle’s response team is that it uses pink signs to warn drivers of what’s ahead. Pink is not Pott’s first choice, but he said it gets the job done.
“It gets people’s attention,” he chuckled. “They’re a little different from the orange and black signs, but they actually work. People slow down and take a look.”
It turns out that pink is actually the nationally-recognized color for temporary traffic control. It’s to give drivers a heads-up that this is something different, not just a construction closure, but an emergency.
Mayor Durkan believes this crew will be vital in helping the region get through the upcoming years of construction and downtown transformation affectionately known as the period of maximum constraint.
