2014/05/28 Council Agenda Packet

• Recognizes difficulty of ensuring long-term implementation and maintenance of best slope management practices by adjacent landowners, and that adjacent landowners may lack resources to implement necessary improvements. • Provides opportunity to implement best -suited mitigation measures, but assumes more responsibility. 7. Develop and maintain an inventory of landslide sites for possible implementation of a public - domain landslide management program: • Develop inventory and a systematic hazard/risk evaluation (rating), which would be subsequently used for project scoping and preliminary cost estimating, prioritization (benefit -cost analysis), programming, design and final construction estimating and plan development. • Use inventory as the basis for project selection, evaluating and justifying project merit, long-term management of the problem and measurement of program success. • Maintain a public -domain inventory of landslides, which provides a basis to relate landslide locations and frequency of occurrence to their associated impacts (e.g., annulments, volume of debris, closure duration and direct costs). Data would be invaluable for implementing a public -domain landslide management system, if deemed appropriate and justifiable. 8. Capital Improvement Projects: • Increase capital investment in landslide mitigation projects. Measurable long-term reduction in landslide -related impacts will require a significant increase in expenditure on capital improvement projects. The time required to significantly reduce landslide -related service interruptions is likely to require one or more decades, depending on the amount of financial resources available, permitting, design, and construction scheduling. Complicating Factors for Landslide Reduction Developing a plan that measurably reduces landslide -related interruptions to passenger rail service within the corridor is complicated by the following: • Large Problem Area — More than 900 landslides have occurred at hundreds of locations within the 26.6-mile-long corridor since 1914. Many of the adjacent unstable slopes are greater than 100 feet high. • Land Ownership — Most of the landslides on private property are outside BNSF's control or responsibility. Many of the landslides are partially due to poor slope management practices conducted by adjacent landowners. • Limited Right -of -Way (ROW) — BNSF has a narrow ROW (about 50 feet upslope of the tracks) available to contain landslide debris or to construct protection structures. Construction of slope stabilization measures generally requires work outside of BNSF's ROW. • Differences in Organizational Priorities/Roles/Responsibilities — Sound Transit, Amtrak, and WSDOT are charged with providing public service, and they do not own and are not directly responsible for track maintenance. BNSF, as a private corporation, is responsible for track maintenance and identifying, prioritizing and funding its own capital p. 22