Is Your Bike the Ultimate Disaster Escape Tool?
Three days ago, the ground started shaking and the worst fears of every Pacific Northwesterner were realized. The “Big One” had struck—a magnitude 9 earthquake caused by shifts in the Cascadia subduction zone—and rescue crews on cargo bikes were poised to save the day.
This was the scene—and the fictional premise—of Portland’s Disaster Relief Trials, an annual disaster drill in the form of a bike race. The competition was conceived by local cyclist Mike Cobb as a fun way of demonstrating how important cargo bikes can be in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Cobb was distressed by the tragic events that followed the Haitian earthquake, and hoped inevitable future catastrophes could be lessened by investing in two-wheeled disaster resilience.
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“The idea is that a cargo bike is an all-disaster tool—especially for post-disaster supply runs and pedal-powered electricity generation,” Cobb says. “A lot of disasters share characteristics like broken communication and transportation infrastructure, and fuel shortages or rationing. But cargo bikes are invulnerable to those interruptions.”
Cobb held the first Disaster Relief Trials in 2012. He modeled the event on both a scavenger hunt and an alleycat race—with 10 checkpoints scattered all over the city, and various obstacles such as water crossings to overcome, as well as heavy loads to ferry from stop to stop. Contestants could compete in multiple categories depending on how much cargo they were willing to take on (20 to 125 pounds) and how far they planned to ride (15 to 30 miles).
After Portland’s inaugural competition, the event spread to Seattle, Eugene, and San Francisco. And in the wake of the New Yorker’s July 2015 article about the inevitability of a destructive earthquake hitting the Northwest, the trials have taken on a new urgency—without losing their spirit of entertainment.
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“The spirit is, ‘We are woefully unprepared in western Oregon,’” Cobb says. “Giving people sobering facts and telling them to do boring stuff like collect materials and put it in a box in case of emergency is not working. But people already love going to races. It has to be fun if it’s going to get traction.”
Cargo bikes have already proven useful in post-disaster situations in Nepal, where locals distributed food and relief by bike after the roads became unuseable, and after Hurricane Sandy, where New York bike shops organized cyclists to deliver supplies to far-reaching parts of the city. Cobb says Portland is in a unique position with regard to cargo bikes because there are already so many of them in use throughout the city—more than 3,000, he estimates, many of which are shared between multiple housemates or family members.
His annual race not only pushes people to think about post-disaster relief strategies but also helps create better bikes and better strategies for the job.
“Competition puts pressure on people to innovate—in technique or equipment,” he says. “It’s just this crucible for creating the best tool for a given task. So that’s one of my primary motivations with starting a disaster resiliency campaign with a competition highlighting the possibilities.”
Want to stage your own Disaster Relief Trials? It’s not just earthquake-vulnerable regions that can benefit from running a few cargo drills: Challenges that emerge in floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and perhaps even zombie apocalypses are part of the disaster trials.
Cobb says he’s working on a shareable race kit for other cities—and his website (disasterrelieftrials.com) is growing into a compendium for how others can run their own event. Everyone involved with Portland’s trials—from race organizers to the amateur radio responders that help make the simulation feel real—is also available for consultation. He hopes the idea spreads, and that eventually cargo bikes become a critical component of disaster resilience. Maybe they’ll even find their way into a few post-apocalypse movies as getaway transport or supply vehicles.
“That’s part of the reason I feel compelled to push this idea,” he says. “Why aren’t bikes in disaster scenarios a given?”
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