VOA标准英语2012--US Energy Experts Learn from Japan's Ordeal
时间：2012-03-08 06:39:42
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US Energy Experts Learn from Japan's Ordeal1
Tokyo University earthquake researcher Kenji Satake explored the Japanese quake zone last year, after the initial emergency response had wound down. A year later, speaking at a scientific conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, he recalled the long waits to refill his car's gas tank.
"We needed to wait at least a half hour, sometimes more than an hour to get gas," Satake says. "There was a long line for the gas station."
After the earthquake, two oil
refineries3 caught fire and burned for days. In other places, fuel shortages hindered emergency response teams.
Those collateral effects are very much on the mind of Althea Rizzo, hazards
coordinator4 at Oregon's Emergency Management Office, where planning is under way for a major quake and
tsunami5 as powerful as those last year in Japan.
Rizzo expects the Pacific Northwest to be in similar shape - or even worse -- after the "Big One" hits.
"From the
refinery6 to the gas tank there's all sorts of points along that way that are going to be
prone7 to failure," Rizzo says. "The gasoline that you have in your car is probably going to be the gasoline you'll have for the next two to three months."
Energy lifelines
That's a worst-case
scenario8. Rizzo says the resilience of energy "lifelines" is a keystone to recovery from an earthquake. In the U.S., the majority of such critical
infrastructure9 is
privately10 owned.
For instance, the oil company BP owns refineries. It also operates a 650-kilometer distribution system called the Olympic Pipe Line, which supplies much of the gasoline and jet fuel for western Washington and Oregon.
BP's director of external affairs in the Northwest is Bill Kidd, who is confident the region's oil refineries will survive a major earthquake.
According to Kidd, the BP
pipeline11 is designed to shut down automatically in a megaquake. However, he concedes it would take "a while" for the oil flow to be restored.
"I don't want to be Polyanna-ish [excessively optimistic] about it, but neither do I want to be Doomsday-ish," Kidd says. "We have a lot of people who can weld. We have a lot of material here to be able to fix things."
Power system
Kidd says speedy restoration of fuel supplies after a quake would depend on other damaged structures and services being repaired, such as
collapsed12 bridges,
severed13 roads and, especially, electric power outages.
"I am much more concerned about the high voltage power system throughout the Northwest and then obviously the lower voltages that feed down and get to us and run our pump stations along the line," he says. "There's a huge question whether or not we'll have power to run whatever is left, that's our biggest issue."
The state of Washington has an emergency coordinator, Mark Anderson, specifically assigned to energy
sector16 resilience. He says that, based on past disasters, there's one thing to remember about the
inevitable17 shortages of fuel: people won't need as much of it for a while.
"For example, the same snowstorm/ice storm that takes out supply of fuel also takes the roads out," Anderson says, "people can't drive from place to place."
Getting moving on upgrades
In Oregon, state agencies are
prodding18 energy suppliers to assess their vulnerability to a magnitude 9 earthquake and use that information to get moving on
structural19 or equipment upgrades.
Farther down the Pacific Coast, in California, the nuclear dimensions of the Japanese disaster
loom20 large. Anti-nuclear campaigners are drawing parallels between the ill-fated Fukushima complex and a pair of nuclear power plants on the California coast.
They cite the similar ages of the
reactors21 and their locations facing the ocean on active earthquake faults. The plant operators insist their facilities are safe and that California needs the energy. They say they'll prove their case during upcoming
license22 extension hearings.
But with the memories of Fukushima’s partial meltdown still fresh one year later, opponents are circulating petitions they hope will bring the future of nuclear power in California to a statewide vote later this year.
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