Watch out for falling concrete; our freeways date back to Eisenhower
Jul 24, 2012, 10:17 AM | Updated: 1:22 pm
 “We quite frankly have a system that is getting too old to take the weight and the use that 200,000 cars a day in Puget Sound travel over and we have to replace our system,” says Paula Hammond, the Secretary of the Washington State Department of Transportation. (AP) |
The Secretary of the Washington State Department of
Transportation says she feels for the man who had a chunk of freeway concrete fall
through his windshield, but with a freeway system that
dates back to Eisenhower, she’s not totally surprised.
“This weekend’s unfortunate incident is something that we
are starting to see, broken concrete panels that need to
be replaced,” Hammond tells Ross and Burbank. “We have about 2,000
lane miles of concrete in our system and much of it in the
Puget Sound region was built in the 60’s.”
Hammond says the problem is not coming out of nowhere.
Both Hammond and Dave Ross remember having this same
conversation before.
“I’ve been sounding the horn and it sounds a lot like a
broken record with our Legislature,” says Hammond. “We
quite frankly have a system that is getting too old to
take the weight and the use that 200,000 cars a day in
Puget Sound travel over. We have to replace our system.”
The main obstacle to replacing our aging freeways is the
cost, says Hammond, who estimates the need at about $1
billion.
“We have about $100
million in the next four to six years to address some of
the problems. So right now, we’re in a mode where we’re
working on triage.”
The emphasis a few years back was on new roads, which
Hammond
says is why $16 billion from the gas tax is going mostly
to expansion and widening of freeways.
“Unfortunately, they didn’t or there wasn’t enough money
to go around to take care of the basic preservation of the
system,” says Hammond.
These days, she says people are starting to get the
message and legislators are concerned about maintaining
the existing systems for the future. But in the meantime,
established freeway maintenance
sounds like a sort of patchwork.
“Our maintenance guys, as they go about their daily
business of cleaning gutters and striping and working on
all the other parts of the systems, they’ll watch for
panels that look like they’re having problems and they’ll
go in and do asphalt patches on the concrete,” says
Hammond. “Those don’t last forever, but they’ll do some
things to try and pull them together until a project can
come and replace a panel.”
Hammond says what happened over the weekend is
terrible and people’s safety on the roads is not something
they take lightly.
“We worry about safety every single day and every minute
people are traveling on our roads and we feel a little
helpless right now in the fact that we don’t have the
money to go in and do it right,” says Hammond. “It’s a
time to stop and reflect and say ‘Hey, folks we have a
problem.'”
Listen to Paula Hammond on Ross & Burbank:
By JAMIE GRISWOLD, MyNorthwest.com Editor
