Emergency training exercise held inside new State Route 99 tunnel

SEATTLE — First, the smoke came into the State Route 99 tunnel, produced by smoke bombs to simulate a vehicle fire during the first major emergency drill in the new tunnel.

A woman playing the part of a driver called on a special fire phone as smoke obscured everything.

The tunnel's emergency ventilation system kicked in, pulling the smoke through vents and out big yellow ventilation stacks.

Thursday's drill scenario was a crash involving 12 vehicles, including three buses.

Responding firefighters treated people playing the injured.

Those who could move on their own were evacuated through a side corridor with its own ventilation.

"The great thing about this tunnel is it is one of the most technologically advanced tunnels that has ever been constructed," Morgan Balogh, of the Washington State Department of Transportation, told reporters on Tuesday.

Public address systems and message boards instruct drivers what to do.

Sensors automatically turn cameras toward a car fire.

During the drill, sprinklers went off with a targeted deluge of water.

For the most part, video feeds to the state's traffic center in Shoreline worked well, but there were glitches.

Some signals took big hits or were lost altogether.

The video connection is critical because, as firefighters said Tuesday, traffic managers must be able to direct them to the best route in.

"Sometimes they're going to come back and they're going to say, 'Go with the flow of traffic.' Other times they're going to say, 'You're not going to be able to make it with the flow of traffic,'" said Battalion Chief Brady O'Brien, with the Seattle Fire Department.

The new tunnel has two levels, one for each direction of traffic.

When it's crammed full of traffic, police can stop cars going the opposite direction and let firefighters enter against traffic, then take a stairway to the other level.

Thursday's drill will be reviewed by all the agencies involved, including the Transportation Security Administration, which works with local agencies on training.

The new tunnel opens to traffic in early February 2019.

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