A Few Ounces of Prevention

Washington State’s last legislature passed a modest (.095 per gallon) gas tax to shore up the state’s crumbling bridges and roads, with funding slated for over 700 projects.

The proponents of I-912 want everyone to think this was a waste of money and they’re asking voters to overturn the legislation. Even before hurricane Katrina provided the country with an object lesson in why we must invest in infrastructure before disaster strikes, I had a hard time believing that I-912 wasn’t just a prank being played on voters.

In 1994, I was living close enough to the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake in California to be rudely awakened by the walls shaking around me at about 4:30 am. Years of weekly school drills kicked in and I was standing startled in a doorway before I was even awake, waiting for the freight train to stop.

In the next county over, there were nearly sixty people who didn’t make it through and thousands who were injured. Many of the deaths were due to cost-cutting construction, and many of the dead lived in the Northridge Meadows apartment buildings. Imagine two identical three-story apartment complexes standing next to each other. Imagine waking up the next morning to discover that one of them had suddenly become a two-story building.

A friend’s mother lived on the second floor of the collapsed building and managed to get out with minor scrapes. The college student living directly below her was taken out in a body bag.

Two sections of freeway and a three-story parking garage also collapsed completely and no one could stop talking about how lucky it was that the tremor happened so early in the morning. Until that day, there hadn’t seemed to be anything wrong with Northridge Meadows Apartments, the parking garage at Cal State Northridge, or the Antelope Valley and Santa Monica Freeway overpasses that came down in heaps.

For a brief while, everyone in Los Angeles County developed an intense interest in building codes and seismic retrofitting. This always happens after a disaster, just as it’s happening now in New Orleans. All those civil engineering arguments finally get translated into English: cash now, or more cash and possibly many lives later. Safety becomes the new hotness.

The Puget Sound doesn’t get hurricanes, but we do get earthquakes, high winds and floods. Roads and bridges all over the state are reaching the end of their useful lives, which is as dangerous as having been built poorly in the first place. Erosion is a serious issue in many counties, undermining roads and increasing the risk of flooding when the silt fills local waterways.

As alarming as it is to wonder whether or not a freeway bridge might pancake in the middle of rush hour some day, a low or no-casualty disaster involving a major road could hurt state and local economies. And then there are the private disasters, the ones that don’t affect enough people to make a big splash in the headlines. Motorists can be needlessly injured all over the state even now because of roads that don’t have the sorts of basic safety improvements funded by the Legislature to lessen the chance of accidents.

In voting no on I-912, Washington voters can make the decision to lessen the pain of the inevitable natural disaster and the steady decay of time. It would be a vote to feel relieved later when our bridges can withstand seismic rumblings and our highways can stick it out through hail and high water.

Also, and this just seems like icing on the cake, the few extra pennies per gallon called for by the state gas tax will go neither to oil company extortionists nor the Saudi government. They’ll be creating jobs in Washington State and a good environment for state businesses. Seems like a good deal to me.